Cal Ripken Jr. joins WTOP on 30th anniversary of record 2,131st consecutive game

That I’m older. I’m 35, that happened, now I’m 65.

No, in some ways, these memories just come flooding through you. I mean, Bobby Bo and Raffy pushing me down the line; me catching my dad’s eye up in the box one of the times that I came out for a curtain call; my kids throwing out the first pitch, showing them that I had a T-shirt on that they gave me — a lot of really cool things.

We played really well. I really enjoyed the fact that we weren’t just celebrating showing up and playing the game, it was still about winning the game and excellence in which you play. I played well, and we won. We won that series. So a lot to be proud of.

Well, I didn’t want to think about it when you’re doing it. Granted, now that you’re out of the game, and you’ve had time to sit down and analyze what happened and how it happened, it does seem a whole lot bigger accomplishment now than it did when I was doing it. That’s why I say that if I can do it, certainly someone else can.

It has to be a certain set of circumstances. It’s over a long period of time. There’s a little bit of luck involved in doing it, but there’s a lot of desire to play, and I think physically, the athlete probably can do it now. Mentally is probably the challenge of, when you get nicked up a little bit, can you still compete? Can you still play? Do you feel that you can give something to the team? And I always felt like I could.

And I laughed internally a lot of times, when some people think that I had total control over whether I played or the streak, and I was thinking, well, the managers created this thing called the streak. They kept writing my name in the lineup. I just kept performing. Granted, at some point, maybe it became too big for the manager, but certainly it was created by the managers wanting me to play.

Maybe I would think about what my dad’s advice always was: You approach the game a certain way. You show up ready to play and that’s the best thing you can do for your team, is that they can count on you. You try to meet the challenge of the day, and then when all that’s over, you absorb whatever learning is from that, and you go on to the next day. So it is truly taking it one game at a time.

I remember dad saying, we can’t replay yesterday’s game. So take some education, probably some wisdom from what happened yesterday. And you can’t play tomorrow’s game until it gets here. So you might as well play this game today. And I think that single minded approach allowed the games to add up.

And after the record was broken, the 2,131 games, I didn’t want to change that approach. I thought it was the right approach, and so it just happened to go on another 500 games. So I thought you would bring more tribute to the authenticity of wanting to play every day if you just continue that same approach.

Oh, my God, that’s a complicated question. Joe D was at that game, 2,131, and I thought it was the coolest thing that there was a link between Lou Gehrig and me. I often wondered, if you ever had a chance to have a conversation with Lou, what would you ask him? And I was thinking, I’d want to know that he approached the game the same way I did, that it wasn’t about a streak.

I know there were a couple of times where he continued the streak by just playing an inning or doing something like that on an injury, but I think for the most part, he played the game because they wanted to be out there, and he was in the middle of the lineup, and the team counted on him to be there. And that’s how I think about it.

As far as the fame and all that kind of stuff, that drew a lot of attention, and I think a lot of fans relate to the concepts of persevering and getting yourself back up and showing up after things aren’t going so well. I’ve had a lot of people relate their streaks to me in their own lives, and I think that’s a really cool thing.

I always try to keep things in perspective. I always try to involve the fans in the game. Try to bridge the being in the stands to the field. And 2,131, after the strike, was an opportunity to kind of say, I’m sorry, I know the business side showed itself, but baseball is a great game. Let’s all get back together again. The popularity, I don’t know all those things. I just tried to do what I thought was right.

Rumor has it that Bobby Bo and Raffy are there, so I suspect, redo the lap without the lap, and a lot of people coming back for it. There’s some little surprises that the Orioles have in store to enhance the celebration. I’m looking forward to it.

I mean, it’s the Dodgers, and the Orioles have a nice, young team, and I’m looking forward to the actual game itself, and that creates its own environment, its own atmosphere. It’ll be a little bit like a playoff atmosphere, or a combination of playoffs and an opening day, and the festivities will be pretty cool. I think it’ll touch a few emotions that happened 30 years ago.

I know I’ve been thinking about my mom and dad a lot more lately, and so they always seem to come up when you reflect on the good things in your life. I’ve got to be prepared, in case the emotion comes over me, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m not someone that really liked anniversaries or looking back when I move forward. But at this age, you kind of realize that you look back on them, and it’s not the moment itself, it’s the people that you did it with.