BILLY RIPKEN, ONE OF A KIND : Playing Big League Baseball for Your Father, Alongside Your Brother, Is Ultimate Job

Just suppose, somebody suggests to Billy Ripken, you could have any job in the world, do anything at all. What would you do?

“Play baseball,” Ripken says without hesitation.

Fine, but what if you weren’t playing baseball?

“Then I’d be trying to find a way to play baseball.”

No, something other than playing baseball?

Ripken smiles. This one is easy. “Coach baseball.”

Moving right along, Billy, if you could go anywhere, anywhere at all, where would it be?

“To the clubhouse.”

Not Europe, not Asia?

Neither. “To the clubhouse.”

Which clubhouse?

“One in the big leagues,” Ripken says confidently.

Pardon me, but that doesn’t sound like having wide horizons.

Ripken grins. Au contraire, Hoss. “As long as you’re in a big league clubhouse,” he explains, “you’ve got a chance to go on a big league field. If you can go on a big league field, then you’ve got real wide horizons. That’s why they call it the big leagues. You can’t go any higher.”

Going on, which he has a tendency to do, Ripken says, “If there was a higher league, there’d only be two people in it--Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs. The highest minors is Three-A, so the majors is Four-A, and those guys would be in Five-A. But there’s no Five-A.” Shaking his head in wonder, Ripken says, “You know the really amazing thing is that I’m in the same league with Mattingly and Boggs.”

Well, that’s reality, Billy. What about fantasy? Any unfulfilled fantasies?

“No, this is it,” Ripken says as pure as rainwater. “I’m playing out my fantasy every day I come to the ball yard.”

Billy Ripken. Baseball Like It Oughta Be. No snarling. No sulking. No whining about being stuck somewhere where the fans don’t appreciate me, the media is out to get me, and I’m only making a lousy $2 million a year. Not Billy The Kid. Everybody loves him, and he loves everybody. “People assume I’m nuts. They like that.” Loud? “I’d be run out of a library, that’s for sure. You know they voted me senior class clown at Aberdeen High in 1982.” Enthusiastic? “Bring it with me wherever I go.” Effervescent? “I took a psychological test a few years ago, and it showed I was extremely extroverted. They didn’t need to call Harvard on that. I could have told them.”

Just the other day Ripken was standing on the top step of the dugout pounding fives and screaming individual congratulations to each and every Oriole after they’d beaten the Yankees in an exhibition game. An exhibition game! Yankees fans looked at him like he was the crazy cousin a family keeps locked in the closet. Ripken swears that once in the minors, on a bet, he kept silent for 45 consecutive minutes, but nobody believes he could do it again. “Him not talk?” reserve catcher Carl Nichols asks incredulously. “I give him two seconds--just long enough to swallow.”

What Billy Ripken brought to the Baltimore Orioles last season can be measured statistically: After losing the first game he played, they won the next 11. With him in the lineup they were 28-29; without him, 39-66. But more significant was the current he sent through a comatose clubhouse.

Even if the snarlers, the sphinxes and the sourpuss pensioners didn’t change their hardened ways, at least they recognized that this audacious, vibrant kid brought something they could use. Scott McGregor said the irrepressible Ripken was the first rookie to make such an impact in the clubhouse since Rich Dauer came up in 1976: “A lot of people have enthusiasm,” McGregor said. “But his presence made a difference.”

Not even that downcast, mangy dog of a team discouraged Ripken. In his world, anything is possible. He may know the Orioles can’t win them all, but he thinks they can win each one. And why shouldn’t he feel like that? After the season he had, who’s to say what’s impossible? “It was the best I ever played,” Ripken said. “Everything I hit fell in. Even I couldn’t believe it.”

His fielding alone demands the Orioles make a place for him, but his hitting was stupefying. What indication was there that Ripken would bat .308 in 58 games, considering his lifetime minor league average was .247 in 504 games since 1982? “Unexplainable,” he admits, shrugging. “Years in the minors hitting .220, scratching my head, not sure I could play, saying to myself: Maybe it’s not going to happen. Then I go the big leagues where the pitching’s better than I’ve ever seen, and I keep getting hits.” The numbers are so bizarrely curved it’s enough to make a person think he was born to play in the majors. And grinning one of those mad Jack Nicholson grins, Ripken says, “Maybe I was.”

What could be better then, than to be here in Florida as Billy Ripken, playing big league baseball for your father and alongside your brother? What more could you want than to have a big league clubhouse to cavort in and fans to perform for? What else could they do for you than give you a month in the sun to get ready and the guarantee that all the teams, even the ones without pitching, are tied at 0-0 when the season starts? Last Sunday, against the Yankees, Ripken slid headfirst to get an infield hit, doubled, walked, scored twice, didn’t make an error and left after six innings with the Orioles ahead, 4-2. What could be more fun than that? And on top of all that, he’s getting paid to do it. Billy Ripken just has to laugh. “It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?”