Lou Gehrig.

“Baseball is the best.”

That phrase was championed by writer, researcher and statistician Sarah Langs and has subsequently reverberated around the baseball world. Langs’ passion and love for the sport is apparent and shines through in her work as she continues to make an impact and help the game in so many ways while also battling ALS.

Langs grew up in Manhattan and was raised by two baseball-loving parents, surrounding her with the game from an early age. She quickly became fully immersed into the sport, and explained to Zach Buchanan of The Athletic that she would beg to stay up and watch Baseball Tonight on ESPN.

Langs attended the University of Chicago and interned at SNY before ultimately landing a job with ESPN as a researcher, where her zeal, knowledge and attitude quickly caught the attention of her colleagues.

“That’s what always stuck out about Sarah for me,” Yankees manager and former ESPN colleague Aaron Boone was quoted as saying by Andrew Marchand of the New York Post. “She loves what she does.”

“She’s special, she’s special,” Mets’ manager and former ESPN colleague Buck Showalter said ahead of Friday’s game according to Laura Albanese. “She was sharp and way before people came out with all the printouts, she was the printout…She was brilliant and she still is…She’s very humble but she shouldn’t have been because she was ahead or all of us.”

Langs has also worked with MLB Network and MLB.com while making her mark on baseball in a multitude of different ways, including being a part of the first all-female broadcast team in July of 2021.

Langs revealed last October that she was diagnosed with ALS. Otherwise known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, ALS is a nervous system disease that targets nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Despite more attention and focus being placed towards the understanding and research of the disease, there is no known cure yet.

Langs has not let her diagnosis discourage her, and she continues to fight to a positive outlook and courage.

“If Lou ever had the chance to meet Sarah, I think he would be proud of both her courage and her grace,” stated Mandy Bell, one of Sarah’s close friends and the Cleveland Guardians beat writer for MLB.com. “I know I am.”

“She’s impacting the disease, just as you’d think Sarah would,” Showalter said. “She’s trying to make an impact every day that she’s with us. And she is.”

Langs, who grew up a Mets’ fan, was honored by the team on Lou Gehrig Day at Citi Field on Friday night, where she was presented with a $10,000 check for Project ALS by owner Alex Cohen. Langs and members of her family sported shirts with the phrase “Baseball is the best” on front, which were manufactured by RotoWear with proceeds going towards Project ALS. 

Langs, in tandem with Project ALS, started a fundraiser called #FistBumps4ALS that is aimed at raising awareness and donations through the use of the hashtag in social media posts. The cause has raised over $64,000 dollars as of Saturday morning while Langs’ peers and colleagues across baseball participated, with the Arizona Diamondbacks pledging $25,000 in support as well.

Another initiative through which awareness is being raised A Langs Star. Project ALS partnered with Creative Cottage to create an illuminated star that can be purchased for $50.00 with all proceeds going towards finding a cure for ALS. Each broadcast booth hung up A Langs Star on Friday night to support the cause and spread the message.

The New York Yankees recently announced that they will be honoring Langs during HOPE Week as an honoree on Tuesday, July 4, which is on the anniversary of Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech.

“Langs and other women from the ALS community will be honored in a pregame ceremony, which will include a video of Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech being read by Yankees players, Sarah and other women of the ALS community,” the Yankees stated. “Sarah and her fellow honorees will also take the field with the team prior to first pitch and be guests of the Yankees for their 1:05 p.m. game vs. Baltimore.”

Langs has not only made a difference in her field and in the sport of baseball as a whole but also in the fight against ALS, and she is a true inspiration to us all.

The post Revisiting Sarah Langs Being Honored At Citi Field On Lou Gehrig Day appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Babe Ruth has been dead for over seventy years, but he’s been haunting Jane Leavy’s mind for over two decades.

Leavy, the New York Times best-selling author whose works include heavily researched biographies on Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, had been planning to write a then-novel on the most celebrated and, by most standards, greatest Major League Baseball player of all-time back in 1995.

Due to the voluminous works that were written on Ruth, Leavy felt it necessary to go the fictional route in order to better “inhabit the caricature that he had become,” as she says. She did not want to recycle the same information that had appeared in endless pages dedicated to Ruth in years past.

Sidetracked with her aforementioned works on Koufax and Mantle, Leavy returned to her Ruth project in 2011, when she met with his daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who is now 102-years-old. It was during a sit-down with Julia that her initial idea of writing a novel shifted.

Julia informed Leavy that Ruth’s father, George Sr., and mother, Kate, were separated, information that was not privy in previous works on Ruth.

While Leavy didn’t have the opportunity to speak with former contemporaries of Ruth, as other notable writers had, what she did have was the digitization of archived resources at her disposal. It was through a simple Google search that she further researched Julia’s claim of Ruth’s parents being separated. What she found was that not only were they separated, but George Sr. had filed for divorce from his wife after he found her in a compromising position with his bartender at the saloon he owned in Baltimore.

With reams of information at her fingertips – literally – Leavy was able to compile a profusion of information pertaining to Ruth’s childhood, which up until this point was filled with many myths and just plain falsities.

This amounted to her penning a six-hundred-plus-page biography titled “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created.” In it, Leavy dispels several decades-long myths, including the real reason Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for boys at the age of seven.

The book revolves around Ruth and Lou Gehrig’s 1927 barnstorming tour, after a season in which Ruth hit 60 home runs – a total that would not be exceeded until Roger Maris in 1961 – and Gehrig fresh off his first M.V.P. season. The book traces the superstars’ tour in fantastic detail while eschewing every career highlight. Instead, Leavy focuses on how Ruth transcended the game not only on the field but off it.

With the help of Christy Walsh, who pioneered the sports agent role, Ruth became a cultural phenomenon who made appearances in films, advertisements, and ghostwritten columns. With help from Walsh, Ruth ultimately became the model for the modern celebrity athlete.

Beyond the adulation Ruth was constantly met with was a man who needed the spotlight and people who loved him around. Being brought up in St. Mary’s, where they were overcrowded with young boys, Ruth knew and was used to being around large crowds, and felt at his best in those situations.

Understanding that notion, what the book does a superb job of is retracing young Ruth’s childhood in detailed form, to illustrate what made Little George – as his parents called him – into the Big Fella.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Leavy in late December, where we discussed how long she had thought about writing a book on Ruth, who Christy Walsh was and how important he was in Ruth’s life and debunking some decades-long myths.

MMO: How long had you been thinking of writing a book on Babe Ruth, and what was the process like?

Leavy: It was basically a nightmare. I’ve been thinking about it probably since 1995. That was when I took my then-seven-year-old son to the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore. At that point, the trip was for me to introduce him to the Babe, but also for me to research into what I thought would be a novel about Babe Ruth.

I somehow got sidetracked doing Sandy Koufax, and then Mickey Mantle. When they were done, where do you go? Where do you go after Koufax? You go to Mantle. Where do you go after Mantle? You go to Babe Ruth. And don’t ask me where I go next because I have no clue. [Laughs.]

MMO: I read in an interview you gave with another outlet that you took a full year just to read all the biographies already written about Ruth for your research.

Leavy: Yeah, I had to persuade myself before I could persuade anybody else that there was a new way to tell the story about Babe Ruth and a new story to tell. After [Abraham] Lincoln, Muhammad Ali and a couple of other people, he is one of the most written-about guys of the twentieth century.

He [Ruth] was written about repeatedly, and repeatedly well, starting with Bob Creamer in 1974. I had to be sure that there was something that I could add to what they had already done. I was very skeptical that I would find new material about him; my friends will tell you I was a bore for months!

There was nobody who was presently alive who I wanted to speak to who I could speak to because most of them are dead. I was able to get to some family members and to some elderly gentlemen who had seen him play. I knew that I wouldn’t have access to the teammates, opponents, managers, general managers, and Yankee officials that some of the other biographers had been able to speak with.

The only place that I was going to find stuff that was new was in archives. Those archives weren’t available in 1974, not in any way that you could easily access. As it turned out, there was plenty for me to write that was new.

Just as I didn’t have access to the living voices, Bob et al. didn’t have access to the voices that emerge out of legal documents that I was able to find at the Maryland State Archives and to newspaper articles. While they would’ve been in microfilm, you would’ve had to spend your whole life going through reams of tape in order to find what I could find with a click of the mouse.

Player’s Tribune

MMO:  I loved what you wrote in the introduction of your book about how Cal Ripken Jr. wanted to hold Ruth’s bowling ball at the Hall of Fame, so he could stick his fingers in the holes to see how wide his hand and spread were. Can you talk about that story a little bit, including what you found out about the diameter of his thumb?

Leavy: In June 2014, as a celebration of the 100^th anniversary of Ruth’s debut in the major leagues for the Boston Red Sox, the Hall of Fame opened a new Babe Ruth exhibit, which was the first new one in thirty years. I made sure to be there, and I was remembering what I had seen of him when I was a child and remembering his big red locker from Yankee Stadium standing sort of by itself, like a totem. Its doors were flung open so you could see the stenciled white letters “Ruth,” and the number three.

I get to this redone thing, which was upstairs on the second floor, and museums have changed a lot in the way they present things. It’s in a dim room with black ceilings, and Tom Shieber, the curator who is a very good friend and helped me a lot, had organized it sort of like a scrapbook if you were walking through his life.

By the time you get to the locker, it’s sort of subsumed in dark museum cabinetry, and it’s filled up with a bat of his, a picture of him sitting by the locker on his last visit to Yankee Stadium, silver loving cup that had been given to him, and all sorts of stuff. It’s become sort of an exhibit case more than an object.

While I’m standing there looking at it, I’m feeling claustrophobic on his behalf because I’m thinking, This is not big enough for the Babe. This is too dark for the Babe. He needs green grass; he needs wide expanses to gallop after fly balls.

As I’m trying to make myself stay there, Cal Ripken Jr. – who I covered as a young reporter for The Washington Post – in fact, I covered him in his rookie year, comes over to me and says, “Come here, I’ve got to show you something!”

He dragged me over to, I think, the last display cabinet where they had Babe Ruth’s blue and black paisley custom drilled bowling ball. After Babe retired in June 1935 and baseball couldn’t find anything or any place for him in the game, he spent a lot of time bowling, mainly by himself. And so this is the ball that he had used, and Cal says to me, in that very Cal way of his, “Gee, I wish I could stick my fingers in Babe’s ball.” [Laughs.]

I looked at him like, ‘Oh, come on, Cal. You realize what you just said?’

He really wanted to feel the spread of his hand. As silly as the initial statement sounded, what he was saying was, Here’s a great athlete of the late twentieth century, trying to get a grip and literally feel what was the greatness of Babe Ruth. He wanted to do that by feeling how large his hands were because he can’t get a tactile feel for the Babe any other way. So I said, ‘No problem, Cal. We can do that. I know there’s another ball downstairs.’

I went off to get Tom Shieber, and we were all set to go downstairs, but by that time, Cal had disappeared. What I did was, I got a bowling ball expert from Oneonta to come in with his bowling ball measuring tools, and he measured the distances between the thumb hole and the middle finger, the thumb hole and the pointer finger, which were ample; four inches, and the other one was about a quarter-inch shy of that.

The guy figured that the spread of his hand must’ve been about ten inches, which is plenty big but not overwhelming for big guys today. What blew him away was the diameter of the thumb hole. He measured that Babe Ruth’s knuckle on his left hand would’ve been exactly 1 3/32 inches wide; that’s approximately the size of an unshelled walnut.

If you want to know what made Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth, why he could equally handle a 54-ounce bat and make a baseball dance from the pitcher’s mound, that’s the reason.

MMO: That anecdote very early on stuck with me, especially in relation to how he could handle such a big bat for his career.

Leavy: You know what’s funny? When I started writing about Sandy Koufax back when, people would say to me, “Have you shook his hand?”

I said, ‘No, not yet.’

Well, then I did, and I’m not a big person, but my hand splayed out and sits in the palm of his hand. When he shook my hand, it reached all the way up past my elbow.

They were trying to say to me very much the same thing about Ruth. Look at what he was physiologically able to do in the way he held a ball and could make it do what he wanted to at his behest.

MMO: One of the myths you debunk in the book was the fact that young George was not an orphan or an incorrigible. Can you touch on what you found out about why he was sent to St. Mary’s?

Leavy: We live in such a different time than the one he grew up in. Today, if you have family woes and a tough growing-up story, somebody pitches it to an online magazine or a cable show, and you get sympathy votes for that. In Babe Ruth’s era, when he was coming up, this was nothing to brag about and nothing to talk about.

In the absence of fact, two colliding myths grew up. One was, why did he get sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School? Why did he spend his childhood there?

Many people assumed, and some still do, that he was an orphan because people thought St. Mary’s was an orphanage. It was not. It was a reform school that also took in some orphans, some wayward boys, and some incorrigibles, which was a legal term for boys who were sent by the courts because they had gotten in trouble with the law.

The other myth about Babe was that he was one of those incorrigibles, that he had been a roustabout kid, running amok on the waterfront of Baltimore, and that his parents had gotten a friendly justice to send him to St. Mary’s. And this is where those documents and archives we were speaking about turn up.

I went to interview Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julie -who’s still alive at age 102 – back in 2011, that’s when I started working on this. And she said to me, out of absolutely nowhere from nothing I was smart enough to ask, “Well, you know, George Sr. [Babe’s father] and his mother Katie were separated.”

I did a double-take and said, ‘No, I didn’t know that!’ And Babe Ruth certainly never said that in the thousands of interviews.

All I had to do was go to my computer and type in George Herman Ruth Sr. v. Katie Ruth, adding the legal versus, and guess what pops up? What pops up in the archives is the entire case file for not a separation, but a divorce. The reason Babe Ruth was sent to St. Mary’s was that his parent’s marriage was stormy, tempestuous and fraught with loss after loss after loss of children. By the time Babe Ruth was seven and was sent to St. Mary’s, he had seen the deaths of four siblings; two from malnutrition that I found in death certificates in the archives.

In March 1906, George Sr. found his wife in a compromising position with the bartender at George’s saloon, and he threw her out. Had she and the bartender arrested and immediately filed for divorce, which was granted two months later in May 1906. She never came back to the family home, as far as I could tell, except to pick up her clothing and the depositions in the divorce are ugly and tawdry and sad beyond belief. Once that marriage was completely dissolved, George Sr. didn’t have any time or interest in raising his son.

MMO: While your book is on Babe Ruth, another huge component of Ruth’s adult life, and who you write extensively about, is Christy Walsh. Talk about the role Walsh played in Ruth’s growing fame.

Leavy: Christy Walsh was, in fact, the model for Jerry Maguire. And while he didn’t stick out his hand and say, “Show me the money,” that’s basically what he was doing. He was the first guy to do that for a baseball player in a very systematic way.

Their relationship started in February 1921. Everybody wanted a piece of the Babe, and Christy was out of work and was fired from yet another job. [He] found out where he was staying, climbed up a fire escape, and found a window to Ruth’s hotel room open; this is according to Christy’s nephew, Richard. [He] climbed through the window, slapped him on the butt, and said, “I want to represent you.”

This resulted in a one-year deal to allow Walsh to syndicate ghostwritten byline columns under Ruth’s name. Ghostwritten columns, at that point, before radio and before pre-game shows and before reporters went down to get locker-room quotes routinely, those were the ways that a player allegedly could speak to his fans. Everybody sort of knew that they weren’t really true or real, but it didn’t really matter; people ate them up.

By the middle of the twenties, Christy Walsh – who was trained as a lawyer but never practiced – had legal rights to manage all of his money and basically saved him from himself, because absent Christy Walsh, he [Ruth] would’ve spent every cent that he had and ended up in the poor house.

MMO: Talk a bit about the relationship between Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Leavy: The book, as you know, recreates their 1927 barnstorming tour. I wanted to let readers feel what it was like to be Babe Ruth at the absolute apex of his fame. To feel what it was like to be around him. I specifically chose not to do the conventional biographical beginning, middle, end, because I had figured that had been done pretty well already.

In 1927, Lou Gehrig is what my grandmother would’ve called a pisher; he was a young guy, he was 24 and had won the Most Valuable Player Award because Babe Ruth wasn’t allowed to win it a second time; he had won it in ’23. And he was in awe of Ruth.

What comes across in the articles I was able to access through the Library of Congress and newspapers dot com and all those local stories was it was such a big deal that they came through their town. The local writers wrote the byplay between them and what the relationship was like between them. It was at that point affectionate, and it was maybe brotherly. Christy Walsh used that to promote Ruth as the wise elder, which was kind of hilarious in retrospect.

Gehrig had never been west of St. Louis, and in Ogden, Utah, where they changed trains on the route to California on this barnstorming tour, they went for a ride through the canyon. Gehrig was so naive that he was disappointed that there were no cowboys and Indians, and he said something like, “Well, it sure was an education to go around with the Babe.” [Laughs.] I bet it was!

I think the relationship was good then and not exactly equal; that would change later, will become fraught later. But at this point and time, it was quite a good relationship.

MMO: The inside cover of your book features a picture of hundreds of boys trying to cram themselves in to take a picture with Ruth after an exhibition game in 1925. Ruth looks completely unfazed, in fact, he’s smiling and looks to be genuinely enjoying the attention.

After reading your book and piecing his life together, I came away thinking that Ruth enjoyed the spotlight and adoration so much because of his tragic upbringing. Losing at least four siblings and still being placed in a reform school and having a feeling of being unwanted, did you get the sense that Ruth was at his best when he was around others?

Leavy: Yes. One thing that Julia told me, I asked her what he said about St. Mary’s, and she said, “He only said one thing ever. That he never felt full.” Which I think is a statement of actual hunger, because the Xaverian brothers had a lot of boys they had to care for, and not that much money, and they had meat once a week, and guess what? It was hot dogs. Is it any wonder that he’d gorge himself on them later?

Those kids lived head to toe in long rows of metal cots that were separated just wide enough apart that they could get down and say their prayers at night. There was nothing personal to distinguish one child’s bed or place from another. They slept together, bathed together, went through puberty together and they played baseball together.

And what Babe Ruth learned at St. Mary’s – in addition to how to make a shirt collar or how to throw a baseball and how to hit one – was how to be public. That’s what was comfortable for him. That’s where he felt most at home in his skin. What he couldn’t do, and what was so hard for him, his second wife Claire would say later, was being alone.

At the end of his career in June 1935, when baseball could find no useful place for him in the entire game and the institution that he had made and thought of as a family turned their back on him, it was a replication of the abandonment in his childhood, and I think it was excruciating for him.

MMO: After you compiled all your research and finished the book, did your perception of Ruth change for the better or worse?

Leavy: What I wanted to do when I was first going to write a novel, I wanted to write a novel because I wanted to inhabit the caricature that he had become. I thought there was no other way to do it other than fictionally. I was wrong as it turned out. I couldn’t understand or anticipate what history and the digital revolution was going to give me, so I was able to do it with actual fact instead of with gut reaction.

I came to admire him even more than I did when I started out because his parents abandoned him. Imagine how he felt; he was seven-years-old and they had lost four children and there were only two left. They may have lost six, but I could only find documentation for four, and they still didn’t want him. That’s got to feel pretty awful, and he was left at St. Mary’s to make a self and to make a life, and he did it. That it was flawed, that he didn’t know how to be a parent or a husband when he came out of St. Mary’s is hardly surprising, and he’s certainly not the only major leaguer about whom you could say that.

And he did change over time, and he was quite frustrated as I read in a 1963 story by a young guy named Jhan Robbins, who had visited him as a high school reporter in the Yankee locker room in 1934. Jhan had asked about not being asked to be the Yankees manager, which was, of course, the talk of all the tabloids and all the papers in New York. And Ruth went nuts on him! “That’s what’s wrong with all of you newspaper guys,” to a fourteen-year-old kid. “You never give a guy a chance to change. Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I always give you things to write about? Can’t you see that I’ve changed? Sure, I ran around in my time, but I’m different now.”

Babe Ruth learned the lesson that so many celebrities have learned since. Since he was the model for celebrity, which is if you create a persona – and he certainly colluded in the creation of the persona of the guy that ate too much, drank too much, stayed out late too much – you’re going to get trapped in it. And it’s going to be very hard for people to accept that you’re not necessarily that person anymore if you were that person ever.

MMO: Thanks very much for your time today, Jane. The book was a terrific read and I wish you all the best with it.

Leavy: Thanks so very much.

Follow Jane Leavy on Twitter, @janeleavy1

Visit Jane’s website here.

You can purchase “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” here.

The post MMO Exclusive: Jane Leavy, Author of “The Big Fella” appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

If one were to look up the word ‘consistency’ in the English dictionary, rather than reading the brief text that defines the word, a simple picture would better suffice.

In Major League Baseball, it doesn’t take long to envision the player that encompasses this word. This individual exemplified what it meant to be consistent on a day-to-day basis: showing up for each game prepared, ready to lead and putting the team ahead of any personal woes or injuries.

The nagging aches and ailments of a baseball season can be daunting, in which your body is your temple and you hope to preserve as much physical and mental strength in order to withstand the rigors that come with being a professional athlete.

Fans judge players by how often they stay on the field and produce, for their production value is aligned with their ability to remain relatively healthy throughout the course of a season. Managers look to keep their players fresh, providing off days and doing everything to ensure they maximize as much health and vitality as possible.

For Cal Ripken Jr., the model of consistency, sitting out a game was simply not an option.

Ripken, 57, was far too valuable to sit, as he established himself as a consummate player on both sides of the ball. Gifted with power and size, a keen plate discipline and a tremendous defensive acumen, Ripken revolutionized the shortstop position at a time when it was regularly filled by smaller-statured, defensive-minded players.

According to Baseball-Reference, Ripken is the only player to post 1,000 or more extra-base hits while compiling a defensive WAR (dWAR) of 30.0 or greater for his career. A true testament to the power and defensive capabilities Ripken displayed throughout his twenty-one year major league career.

On May 30, 1982, Ripken appeared in the Orioles’ lineup, playing third and batting eighth. Nobody could’ve imagined that he wouldn’t take a day off until September 20, 1998, an incredible streak of 2,632 consecutive games played.

For that accomplishment, Ripken’s name will forever be synonymous with that of Hall of Fame first baseman Lou Gehrig. It was Gehrig who established the previous all-time mark of 2,130 consecutive games played in 1939, a record many historians thought would never be broken.

Fifty-six years later, on September 6, 1995, Ripken surpassed that mark, playing in his 2,131 consecutive games. What transpired in the bottom half of the fifth inning was a celebration even Ripken could not have envisioned, as the game came to a halt as the sellout crowd that included Bill Clinton, Joe DiMaggio and his father, Cal Sr., stood in honor of what’s considered baseball’s greatest milestone.

Iron Horse, meet the Iron Man.

Ripken played all twenty-one seasons with Baltimore, appearing in nineteen All-Star Games (third-most all-time), winning two A.L. MVP Awards (1983, 1991), Rookie of the Year honors (1982), eight Silver Sluggers, and one World Series championship in 1983.

He is one of just eleven players to amass 3,000 or more hits and 400 or more home runs for his career, a list that includes Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, and one of Ripken’s closest friends: Eddie Murray.

Ripken was enshrined in the hallowed halls of Cooperstown in 2007, receiving 98.5 percent of the vote, which is the fifth-highest percentage behind only Mariano Rivera, Ken Griffey Jr., Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan.

His character, integrity and passion for the game will never be lost on fans, as the streak came at a time when fans were rightfully irate over the strike in 1994. Ripken understood the importance of what his accomplishment meant in bridging the gap between ballplayer and fan and took it upon himself to be a beacon of hope to draw the fans back to the game.

The countless hours he spent interacting with fans and acting as an ambassador for the sport will never be forgotten, as Ripken’s legacy is forever embedded in baseball history.

I had the privilege of speaking with Ripken in late March, where we discussed his latest partnership with Roy Rogers Restaurants, whether he views himself as a trailblazer for the taller, stronger shortstops that have debuted in the league and his thoughts on his consecutive games streak.

MMO: Who were some of your favorite players growing up?

Ripken: Brooks Robinson was the key guy. I grew up here in Baltimore, and not only was he a great player and a clutch guy, but he was really exciting. Like most kids around the area, everyone wanted to play third like Brooks and come through in the clutch like Brooksie. He was my guy.

The Orioles as a team were really good and they had many stars on it, but Brooksie was my main guy.

MMO: You wrote in your 1998 book, The Only Way I Know, that you pitched during your youth and that scouts were viewing drafting you as a pitcher. Do you feel that you could’ve had a successful career as a major league pitcher?

Ripken: Well, you never know. I think the Orioles might’ve been the only team that was interested in me playing as a regular player, but even then the Orioles had issues within their organization, and a lot of people said I should pitch.

I remember my dad playing a diplomatic role in that decision because he was a lifelong minor leaguer that developed players. He would say, “When we had a player we were unsure about, we’d start him as a regular player, and you can always go back to pitching. But if you start him pitching, it didn’t work that well in reverse.”

I think Dad was setting it up for me to actually have an opinion of my own, and I remember Hank Peters [former Orioles GM] asked me, “What do you want to do?”

I said, ‘Well, pitchers get to play one out of every five days, so I want to play every day.’

I had really good stuff, and I struck a lot of people out. I had a good fastball, good command of my breaking ball and had a good changeup. So I don’t know.

It was funny, when I played catch with Mike Boddicker when we got drafted and we were just throwing different pitches, he laughed and said, “Damn, you’ve got better stuff than I’ve got!” (Laughs).

But who knows? You never know if you could’ve done it or not, but sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I had a chance to be a pitcher.

MMO: You write in the book about how you kept detailed notes while playing in Bluefield [former Orioles minor league team] on all the pitchers and their sequences. You write that no one else was doing this and you kept doing so until the Orioles coaching staff started including them in their info they prepared for the media years later. Was that something you learned to do from your father, and how beneficial was that for your development early on?

Ripken: Yeah, my dad. I guess it was all part of figuring things out and I was very analytical. My dad suggested that when you face these pitchers, and as you move up, you might face them many more times in future years. It wasn’t easy to remember so you’d take time to write their name down and put the sequences in, which started to get you to understand how things worked.

When they threw certain pitches, it started to create patterns, and that became a real important part of my hitting, as until you get to two strikes, you wanted to look for a pitch that you wanted to hit, the type of pitch and the area that you wanted to hit it in. That was the early start to that and I might still have those little books around somewhere.

MMO: July 1, 1982, was the date you walked into the clubhouse and saw your name penciled in at short. What were your initial reactions to the move, and did Earl Weaver say anything to convince you on the switch mid-season?

Ripken: You know, no. It’s funny, my dad and Lenn Sakata gave me sort of a heads-up on the day of that I was moving to short. It wasn’t one of those call me into the office and say we’re thinking about doing this [type of thing]. I did go into the clubhouse and took a glance at the lineup, just to make sure I was in there. Instead of having a five next to my name, there was a six.

My initial feeling was Earl [Weaver] had just made a mistake and wrote it down wrong. Then Lenn Sakata came up to me and said, “You’re playing short.” And then my dad said, “Yeah, you’re going to play short.”

I was a little fearful, and then Earl called me into the office and said, “Look, I don’t want you to try and do anything fancy. If the ball is hit to you, I want you to catch it, get a good grip on the ball, and make a good throw to first base. And if the guy beats it out, he’s only on first.” (Laughs)

It was his way of saying don’t try to make it more complicated than it is.

I had played short in the minor leagues for the first year and a half and went to instructional league as a shortstop, then halfway through the A-ball season, I played third. Going back there I had a more advanced understanding of the speed of the game and it was easier going back, but I didn’t know that at the time.

MMO: Players like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez have been quoted saying that you paved the way for bigger, taller shortstops. What is your view on that subject and do you view yourself as a type of trailblazer for the wave of taller shortstops we’ve seen come up and succeed at that position?

Ripken: I don’t look at myself as a trailblazer necessarily. But I think the success that I had at the position – being a taller person – might’ve changed the mindset because the mindset was pretty firm. They were looking for defense, they were looking for these smaller guys up the middle that could cover ground.

To me, it’s the basketball analogy; I was a big basketball fan. If you think of Magic Johnson running the point at his height, all of a sudden that made people turn their head and go, man, if he can do that he can pass to the post, he can see over the guy’s guarding him, he can do a number of things.

I think my success at shortstop might have changed some mindsets a little bit. I think Derek or Alex both would’ve come in and paved their own way. I do think maybe the mindset was changed a little bit and at least you were considered staying at a position like shortstop a little longer and seeing how they develop.

MMO: Throughout your career, you had many different batting stances and starting points to get your timing down with your swing, including one of my favorites, the violin. I’ve heard you in the past talk about getting the right feel, is that why you altered your stances throughout your career?

Ripken: I did hit on feel and there are certain fundamental mechanics that I did no matter what stance I had. You end up loading and taking the bat back and coming through all at once, but there are different starting positions. When I played sometimes I couldn’t make it work and in BP it didn’t feel right.

I would make adjustments and if I made an adjustment and all of a sudden something clicked just because I changed my starting position, then I would play that out a little bit. I wasn’t afraid to do that, but I think in the end, if you’re making an analysis or you’re analyzing my swing, people looked at the starting position and said, “Wow, that’s different.”

If you looked at the point of contact or when the pitcher was releasing the ball, you would see that the position that I got myself in is very similar to all the other ones. It was just the way I hit, and sometimes I needed a new starting point to give me a click in my natural way of hitting.

Photo by Karl Merton Ferron/Baltimore Sun

MMO: On September 6, 1995, you broke a record many thought would never fall, surpassing Lou Gehrig for the most consecutive games played, with 2,131. Watching you receive a standing ovation for 10 minutes, fans chanting “We want Cal,” and your teammates pushing you out to take a victory lap, can you talk about some of the emotions you were going through at that moment, and what the fans meant to you then?

Ripken: I never set out to break Lou Gehrig’s record; it wasn’t a lifetime goal of mine. It seemed like I wanted to play, and I wanted to play every day and it felt like that was your job to come to the ballpark and play. Once the streak became the streak and it started to get attention when it was around 1,000 games, once it became the streak, I had to try really hard not to think about playing for the sake of the streak.

You just want to keep your approach the same way as it was all the way through. The only thing different is when I got into the last year, it became feasible to everyone else that it could be done, and maybe even to myself that I always looked at it from season by season standpoint.

I never saw it as a finish line, and then all of a sudden, when they’ve got celebrations set up for the tying and the breaking of the record, all of a sudden there was a finish line. That started to put a little pressure on you, like you had to get there for some reason.

Once the 2,130 game was played – the tying game – there was a relief on my shoulders that okay, tomorrow’s going to happen. Then once you got into that game, you’re able to enjoy it and play the game. It did have its toll on the expectation of getting to that finish line. I was trying to give more to the fans, I was trying to give more to the media, there was more attention all the way around. Going down the stretch, your adrenaline carries you so far, but it was pretty exhausting.

The emotions were there to lead up to it, and once it unfolded, there’s nobody that could’ve choreographed what was to take place after that. It unfolded in a very normal and natural sort of way that was very heartfelt. I remember I was feeling that I was holding up the game in the middle when it became official, and my thought was, Thank you very much, thank you very much, but let’s go back and play the game. I’ll celebrate it once the game is over.

Then that turned into the lap around the ballpark, and then I was thinking, Okay, make a lap around the ballpark, and it’ll be the impetus to start the game again. But once I started shaking people’s hands and seeing them face-to-face and eye-to-eye, it took the celebration to another level. It made it more intimate, more personal, and very quickly I couldn’t care less whether the game was continued or not.

When people ask me what’s your best moment in baseball, people assume it’s that one. I quickly say I caught the last out of the World Series [1983], and there’s no other feeling like that, period. Not even close.

From a personal standpoint, a human standpoint, having that experience of 2,131 and the lap around the ballpark was probably the best human personal moment on the field. It was really special in so many ways. Hundreds of ways.

Player’s Tribune

MMO: Many say that your streak helped save baseball after the 1994 strike, and bring fans back. What are your thoughts on that notion?

Ripken: I know that the strike came up pretty quickly and then all of a sudden the season was over and the World Series was cancelled. There were a lot of people that were really upset with the game of baseball. I remember in the first day of spring training we got an early indication of the attention that the streak would [get].

When we came back and there was a shortened spring training, we had to really go quickly. You had a sense that people were looking for something to attach themselves to that might make them feel like you’re turning back the clock, like you’re going back to when baseball was a game instead of a business, I guess.

I think people could relate to the streak and relate to the hard work ethic that they possessed in their own lives. I think one of the beautiful things about the streak for me and the celebration was having all the people share their streaks with me. I haven’t missed a day of work in thirty-one years, and why it was important for them to show up. Attendance records at high school, and people were using it that way, and I think that they genuinely related to it as a value. They were able to look inside baseball and see the things that they really wanted to see from it.

I think I was helpful in that regard, it just seemed like it was the right thing at the right time.

MMO: I read that when you decided to end the streak at 2,632 in 1998, your replacement, Ryan Minor, thought it was a rookie prank and didn’t want to go out and take the field. Was that true? And how did you go about deciding that September 20th was the day you were going to sit out?

Ripken: (Laughs) Yeah, he was hesitant to go out there because he thought it was some sort of joke. I had to convince him and say, ‘No, Ryan, it’s real. I’m taking off.’ He was just a little delayed in starting.

I waited until ten minutes before the game started to tell the manager. I had decided earlier in the season that if we were to fall out of the playoff run then I was going to end the streak, and my original idea was to do it the last day of the season. To do it almost as a statement that I could’ve played all of them if I wanted to. (Laughs)

Then it turned out that I started to think about it and September 20^th was the last home game of the season, and we were ending on the road. Everybody had a special feeling about it, and I remembered how everyone related to it in 1995, so it was important to make it a positive thing and not run the risk that it would be a negative thing.

I ended it at home and told the manager, and everybody responded really positively, and it turned out really good. The reason I told them ten minutes before the game was I didn’t want to have it interrupt and affect the team before the game started. It was sort of a way to react to it after the fact as opposed to reacting to it before the game started. I wanted it to unfold more naturally as opposed to forced.

Photo by Sports Illustrated

MMO: One of the lasting memories I have of you was from your final All-Star Game appearance in 2001 at Safeco Field. Two big moments for you were when Alex Rodriguez pushed you towards shortstop for that half-inning in the first, and your home run off Chan Ho Park in the third. Can you talk about both of those moments and what they meant for you?

Ripken: I was excited to be back at the All-Star Game. I had decided to retire earlier on in June. I had come off a shortened spring training because I had broken a rib about ten days before spring training started and didn’t have a complete spring. We were going into a rebuilding mode again and I didn’t get cranking too well. Then all of a sudden, I started swinging the bat better, and I was voted into the All-Star Game as a third baseman.

I was happy to have a chance to do it one more time, and when we went out onto the field Alex came on over to me and said, “Why don’t you go play shortstop for an inning?”

I wanted to tell him where to go and I said, ‘I’m not doing that.’

I realized we were wired, we had a microphone on, and then he pointed and said, “Look at Joe Torre in the dugout.” Joe was pointing me over, and then I felt like I was the only one that didn’t know I was going to go play shortstop for an inning.

I didn’t want to be embarrassed or go over there, so finally, when I went over, I remember yelling at Roger Clemens, ‘Looks like you’re going to have to strike out the side now.’ He kind of laughed back, but as I played shortstop, I was thinking, It would be okay if I didn’t get a play in this inning and have that be over. And then after the first out, I’m thinking, Well, this feels pretty good, maybe I could get a play. Then I started rooting for one, and by the time they had two outs, I was hoping a ball would be hit to me.

It was a wonderful tribute and it was Alex’s idea. It turned out to be really heartfelt that I had success for all of those years at shortstop, and he was giving me a tribute by pushing me back over there.

The Chan Ho Park homer was I came to bat – I think in the third inning – and I think I led off the third inning because Edgar Martinez was hitting in front of me and he struck out in the second. Randy Johnson had the first two innings and Randy was out of the game, and I thought that was a pretty good thing because in the twilight, Randy’s one of the harder ones to pick up. They brought in Chan Ho Park and I’m going, That’s better than Randy.

I remember looking at the backdrop and you couldn’t see anything. I think I told [Mike] Piazza, ‘Wow, this is way worse than I thought.’ I wanted to hit a ball early in the count and he threw a fastball on the first pitch and I put a nice easy swing on it and connected and it went out of the ballpark.

I think I said my excitement level was much higher than normal, it felt like I was flying around the bases, I was running really fast. It felt like I was fast for the first time in my life and came around and was able to shake hands in the dugout.

It was a really cool moment to be able to deliver in your last All-Star Game like that.

MMO: Your father, Cal Sr., was an instrumental figure in your life, and was a tried and true baseball man. What was the biggest piece of advice he imparted on you, and what was getting the chance to have him as a manager in the late eighties like for you?

Ripken: Dad was a baseball encyclopedia, and many players and coaches that were around the game wrote almost the specialty books on how to play. I had access to that whole library. Dad would shape me on how to respect the game and how to play the game and how to go about it.

I try to keep thinking what’s the advice that resonated the most with me, and when I was in the minor leagues, he said, “It’s important for you to remember and know that you belong where you are.” And what he was trying to tell me, I think, was to have confidence in yourself, that you’ve earned your way there. Now, you might look around and see other players in different levels of development but measure yourself against everyone else, and then know you belong.

I try to give that advice to my son as he’s gone away and he realized that’s something you have to experience yourself and try to understand. Once you do start to look around and you have the confidence to say, “I can compete, I can play here.” That’s when your development really starts, I think.

MMO: You’ve recently partnered with Roy Rogers Restaurants for their 50th anniversary. Can you talk about your relationship with them?

Ripken: Yeah, it’s interesting. There have been endorsements throughout the years that I’ve been very careful [with] because it has to make sense for me. So I’ve made decisions on that basis. Roy Rogers takes me back to when I was a kid and how I enjoyed a roast beef sandwich, in particular.

It’s also philanthropically such a good match, we’re trying to do good by kids and raising money for the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation in honor of Dad. This is a mechanism to help raise funds as well. I think the alignment of being the spokesperson for Roy Rogers was speaking my language for their product but also speaking my language for trying to help kids. It’s just one of those that come along and you go, This is a good match.

We’re looking forward to doing right by kids and getting good attention for Roy Rogers.

MMO: Thank you so much for your time today, Mr. Ripken. It was truly an honor to speak with you and talk about your legendary career.

Ripken: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Visit Ripken’s foundation, the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation, here.

Visit the Roy Rogers Restaurants website, here.

The post MMO Exclusive: The Iron Man, Cal Ripken Jr. appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

For the third time this year New York Mets outfielder Curtis Granderson has received accolades for his work off the field. This time as the recipient of the Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award from MLB Player’s Association. He had previously won the Roberto Clemente Award and the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award.

Miller, who passed away in 2012, was the executive director for the MLBPA’s from 1966-1982. Miller negotiated the MLBPA’s first collective bargaining agreement with team owners in 1968. He was instrumental in getting major league players more rights and improving players salaries. The award in his name is given to the player that best “inspires others to higher levels of achievement by their on-field performances and contributions to their communities”.

Granderson becomes the first Met player to win the award since it started in 1997. This is the second time that Granderson has been given the award, having won in 2009 when he was a member of the Detroit Tigers.

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Congratulations to Ichiro Suzuki, who slapped a single tonight for the 4,000th hit of his incredible career, split between Japan and the major leagues.

Suzuki got his historic hit off Toronto’s R.A. Dickey. Ironically, his milestone single was his 2,722nd hit in the major leagues which also moved him ahead of Yankee legend Lou Gehrig on the All Time list.

He tipped his cap and bowed as the fans at Yankee Stadium gave him a standing ovation and his teammates rushed out to the field to hug and congratulate him.

In a classy move, the Yankee Stadium scoreboard then displayed a message from his former teammate with the Seattle Mariners, Ken Griffey Jr..

Ichiro burst onto the scene in 2001, when at 27 he was selected as the AL Rookie of the Year and MVP after signing with the Mariners. He batted .350 that season with 242 hits and 56 stolen bases. It was the beginning of a record-breaking streak of 10 straight seasons of at least 206 hits including setting the single season record for hits in in 2004 with 262 base-knocks, topping George Sisler‘s long held mark of 257 set in 1920.

Congratulations to the 10-time All Star… One of the most remarkable hitters I’ve ever seen…

The post Congratulations To Ichiro On Reaching 4,000 Career Hits appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Here’s a look at David Wright’s All Star Game batting practice jersey… It complete with the “C” as one of the official captains for the Home Run Derby.

These are the jerseys that they will be wearing for the Home Run Derby and are different from the actual All Star Game jerseys that do not feature the skyline.

Both Wright and Robinson Cano of the New York Yankees will don the “C” as captains of their respective Home Run Derby squads.

As we reported on Sunday, David Wright has overtaken San Francisco’s Pablo Sandoval for the voting lead at third base in the latest update. The Mets third baseman was trailing by more than 100,000 votes as recently as ten days ago and has now taken a 128,831 vote lead. There are only six days remaining to vote.

Cast Your All Star Vote For Wright Here!

Joey, Iggy and Ed Leyro were all on hand Wednesday, as the Mets unveiled their All Star Game Menu at the Caesar’s Club in Citi Field.

They did a superb culinary roundup of all the world class delights which features a centuries old recipe for their All Star Meatball Sub. The meatballs are made using a combination of prime beef, milk natured veal and pork cheeks, and is then smothered in a delicious Sicilian tomato sauce with melted authentic buffalo milk mozzarella imported from Italy. A topping of deep-fried sweet basil completes this decadent delight.

Go to Studious Metsimus for all the tasty and delectable details…

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I wrote last week Matt Harvey could pitch against Stephen Strasburg in the first game of the Washington series, and depending on possible postponements it could still pan out that way.

The Mets will have the back end of their rotation in the first three games of the Colorado series, with Dillon Gee, Aaron Laffey and Jeremy starting in the Coors Field bandbox. Who doesn’t believe the bullpen will get a lot of work?

Jon Niese is scheduled to start Thursday afternoon, where the temperatures could be in the teens.

It’s hard to hit in the cold, but might be more difficult to pitch as the ball is difficult to grip and the pitchers’ command is usually off.

In looking at the Rockies series, there are several things in addition to the Mets’ bullpen we should be curious in seeing:

* There’s the sizzling John Buck, who needed yesterday’s day off. Buck is the first player in history with 19 RBI in his first ten games with a new team. Buck is also one of four players with 19 RBI in his team’s first ten games, joining Lou Gehrig (1927 Yankees), Manny Ramirez (1999 Indians) and Chris Davis (this year’s Orioles).

Buck’s streak of homers in four straight games was snapped, but his six homers is more than Mets catchers hit last year (five).

* Marlon Byrd went deep yesterday to give the Mets a franchise-record 11 straight games with a homer to start a season. It’s the longest since the Rays homered in 12 straight in 2007.

* Whether Jordany Valdespin hits leadoff tonight. Despite their winning record, the Mets have not found a consistent leadoff hitter among the four they have used. Like him or not, Valdespin does generate a buzz.

* How long will Ike Davis’ slump last? He’s hitting .128 with a .244 on-base and .205 slugging percentage.  Coors Field was built to end slumps. Of all Davis’ poor numbers, 12 strikeouts and just five hits might be the most stunning.

* Will Daniel Murphy continue to sizzle? He’s hitting .381 with hits in seven of his last eight games. Murphy has 16 hits, with eight going for extra bases. He has a .413 on-base percentage and .690 slugging percentage.

* Will David Wright get his first homer? Coors Field has always been kind to Wright. He is a lifetime .385 hitter with a .461 on-base percentage, eight homers and 33 RBI in 29 games in the Rocky Mountains. In comparison, he has 14 homers and 35 RBI in 74 games at Turner Field, and seven homers and 41 RBI in 58 games at the Marlins’ old park.

The Mets return home Friday to start a three-game series with the suddenly vulnerable Nationals this weekend.

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One of the things that analysts and fans evaluate in a professional athlete is their physical and mental toughness. This is also important to an athlete because their reputation for being on the field on a regular basis also contributes to their legacy. Teams are still interested in Javier Vasquez every time he hits the free agent market because he consistently eats up innings; it has been documented that he can’t pitch in the “big game,” but teams love it when they have a pitcher that they can depend on every fifth day.

Cal Ripken Jr. is the ultimate iron man; obviously, most baseball fans are well aware of his long journey to break Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak of 2,130. As you will see in a moment, Ripken and Gehrig are in a league all by themselves when talking about the all-time list of consecutive games played. The top-ten streaks of all time are:

1. Cal Ripken, Jr.: 2,632 games
2. Lou Gehrig: 2,130
3. Everett Scott: 1,307
4. Steve Garvey: 1,207
5. Miguel Tejada: 1,152
6. Billy Williams: 1,117
7. Joe Sewell: 1,103
8. Stan Musial: 895
9. Eddie Yost: 829
10. Gus Suhr: 822

It’s pretty plain to see that the top two on this list are head and shoulders above the rest on this list. Pete Rose had two different streaks in the top-15 (745 and 678 games) before Miguel Tejada knocked him off a few years ago; however, if you add both of those streaks together, Rose doesn’t even come within 1,000 games of Ripken. His 16-year run of playing every game for the Orioles was unbelievable, considering his Hall of Fame career, which includes: .276 batting average, 431 home runs, 1,695 RBI, and 3,184 career hits, while transforming the position of short stop into what it has become today.

When Baltimore won a World Title in 1983, Ripken also became the first player in Major League history to play in every game possible that season (regular season, league championship series, and World Series). Will this record be broken? Not a chance; I think it’s safe to assume that this record will stand the test of time. The longest active streak of consecutive games played is held by the Dodgers’ Matt Kemp, who currently stands at 365 consecutive games played. To approach Cal’s record, Kemp would have to play in every game for the next 14 years. I mean, that could happen, but let’s just say that I’ll believe it when I see it.

The post A Look At “Unbreakable” Records: Cal Ripken’s 2,632 Consecutive Games Played. appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

October 26th, 1940:

Tigers’ slugging left fielder Hank Greenberg (.340, 41, 150) is named the American League’s Most Valuable Player with Indian hurler Bob Feller (27-11- 2.61) finishing second. Having won the award in 1935 as a first baseman, ‘Hammerin’ Hank’ becomes the first player to win another MVP playing a different position.

Like most avid baseball fans, I’m familiar with who Hank Greenberg is and that he played the majority of his career for the Detroit Tigers, but if you ask me any specifics about his career, I would have been able to tell you absolutely nothing. Researching Greenberg’s career was interesting because when he was playing, he was a beast.

The Bronx native made his MLB debut in September of 1930 and played his final game in September of 1947, yet he only played 12 seasons in the league. He only appeared for Detroit once in 1930, and then didn’t see any action with the club again until 1933, when he hit .301 with 12 home runs and 87 RBI. He, like most other baseball superstars at that time, didn’t play between 1941 and 1945 because he was serving in the military for WWII. However, for missing so many years of his prime, his career statistics are still quite impressive: .313 average, 331 home runs, 1,275 RBI, and an on-base percentage of .412.

The 1956 Hall of Fame inductee found himself leading several offensive categories on numerous occasions. He led the league in home runs, extra base hits, and RBI four times. He was included in MVP talks on seven different occasions, which just so happens to be 58% of his entire career.  He won the award twice, in 1935 and 1940, and was named to the All-Star team four times, all consecutively.

I don’t know about anyone else, but reading all of this was quite surprising to me because I have never heard anyone talk about him at length before. What didn’t help was that he was over shadowed by other superstars in that time period, players like Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Williams. Fair enough. However, now we saw just how much of an offensive force Greenberg was for Detroit and why he is held in such high regard by the Tiger faithful.

The post This Day In MLB History… appeared first on Metsmerized Online.

Frick was baseball’s third commissioner, but is most remembered as the one responsible for ordering an asterisk to be placed next to Roger Maris’ single season home run record.

In 1970, he was elected to the Hall of Fame himself, and even had an award named after him which is given annually to one of baseball’s revered broadcasters. Mets broadcasters Lindsey Nelson (1988) and Bob Murphy (1994) have both won the Ford C. Frick Award.

Anyway, in 1973 Frick published a list of ten baseball feats that he felt would never be broken. They are as follows:

1. Cy Young’s pitching record of 511 games won during his lifetime career.
2. Charles Radburn’s record of sixty pitching victories in a single season.
3. Kid Nichols’ feat of winning thirty or more games per season for seven consecutive seasons.
4. Walter Johnson’s lifetime record of 3,508 strikeouts.
5. Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive games.
6. Lou Gehrig’s record of 13 consecutive 100+ RBI seasons.
7. Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 lifetime hits.
8. Joe DiMaggio’s record of hitting safely in fifty-six consecutive games.
9. Babe Ruth’s lifetime record of 2,056 bases on balls.
10. Don Larsen’s perfect World Series game.

That’s quite a list, but hardly one that has stood the test of time. Lets break it down.

# 1, 2, 3 – The first three records will most likely never be shattered so Young, Radburn and Nichols can all rest at ease. However, you would think that the former commissioner would have had his facts straight before going public with his list as I found two big errors while researching. Old Hoss Radburn had 59 wins in that record setting season, not 60. Also, Nichols did have seven 30-win seasons, but they were not consecutive as he only had a woeful 26 wins in 1895.

# 4 – Eight pitchers would go on to zoom past Walter Johnson’s unbreakable strikeout record including Tom Seaver, Randy Johnson, and the Hall of Fame’s newest member, Bert Blyleven. However, the new king of strikeouts notched his first of 5,714 K’s as a member of the New York Mets, Nolan Ryan.

# 5, 6 – Lou Gehrig already had one record fall and the other is on the verge of being broken too. Cal Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive games played blew Gehrig’s streak right out of the water, but the RBI streak is perilously close to crashing down as well. Alex Rodriguez just tied Gehrig’s RBI streak with his 13th consecutive 100+ RBI season in 2010. Albert Pujols is also not too far behind as he completed his tenth consecutive 100+ RBI season. We’ll have to check back next season, but my money is on Alex Rodriguez and Prince Albert both getting it done.

# 7 – Did I just segue into this one with a gambling reference? Shame on me… Pete Rose may not be in the Hall of Fame, but nobody can dispute he is baseball’s all-time hit king with 4,256 base-knocks. Step aside Ty.

# 8 – Joe DiMaggio’s 56 consecutive game hitting streak continues to look very safe, heck, even Willie Keeler’s 45 game streak in the National League has lasted over 100 years. This one may truly be unbreakable.

# 9 – Oh boy, this one isn’t even close, as Barry Bond’s 2,558 career walks bested Babe Ruth’s mark by more than 500 bases on balls.

# 10 – This Don Larsen perfecto is kind of funny because it’s not really a record, but more of a remarkable and incredible achievement. It might be tough to match this gem, but Doc Halladay did recently show that it is distinctly possible. 

So of the ten unbreakable records, four have already been broken, and one is well on it’s way to being broken. Frick is batting .500 and in this game that’s still Hall of Fame worthy.

Unfortunately, poor Ford Frick never lived long enough to see any of his ten unbreakable records fall as he passed away in April of 1978.  

I hope you enjoyed the post and thanks for reading.

I’ll leave you all with this little tidbit as some of you fume over the Jeff Bagwell snub. Even the great Joe DiMaggio had to wait until his third year on the ballot before he was finally elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955. Imagine if they had Twitter back then?

My thanks to Baseball Almanac which was a tremendous resource in creating this post.

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