Taken from the 4/4/13 episode of the Baseball Tonight podcast.
It’s my
favorite Cal Ripken story. It was in the couple of weeks after he broke Lou
Gehrig’s record. It had been such an emotional summer for him, he expended so
much energy. They had those two phenomenal nights in Baltimore in which he ties
the record and breaks it. And right after that, probably not surprisingly, he
went into this unbelievable slump. Stopped hitting. This was an Orioles team in
1995 that wasn’t going anywhere, they weren’t playing in the playoffs. They play
a day game in Detroit and he goes hitless again. We go down to the visitors’
clubhouse, we talk to the players, go back up to the press box in old Tiger
Stadium. I’m sitting there writing and I look down on the field – this is like
5 o’clock in the afternoon, after the stadium had emptied out – and who’s
coming out of the dugout? Here comes Cal Ripken with a tee and a bucket of
baseballs. He places the tee on home plate and one by one he places baseballs
on the tee. And he’s hitting into the open field of Tiger Stadium all by
himself. It’s clear he’s bothered by his slump, he’s working through a slump. I
mean, this is the most powerful guy in baseball at that time, he had nothing
more to prove, certainly there in the last days of that season, and he’s so
bothered by his slump that he’s going out hitting off a tee in Tiger Stadium.
And then when he finished that bucket of balls he went around by himself,
picked up all the balls, and went back to home plate. That’s why Cal Ripken was
so great.
