It’s a Different Game for Ripken

Cal Ripken has dealt with, played through and laughed off all sorts of pain. Not this kind. This kind is something else. He can handle herniated discs, sprained knees, badly sprained ankles and other physical pains. This pain hurts to the core.

Ripken’s father died of lung cancer on March 25, and the pain is written all across the son’s face. If there were a disabled list for his kind of pain, perhaps he would even consider it.

“Personally, this is one of the most challenging moments of my life,” Ripken said Tuesday.

Before he granted his interview Tuesday, Ripken wanted to know the subject. Someone threw a softball question out there. No interest.

Then someone asked about the Orioles’ team struggles. He batted that one back, too, saying it was a question for the manager.

Finally, someone wondered about his emotional state. The interview was on. Ripken wanted to talk.

“Reality is reality,” he said. “We all go through things in our lives, no matter what you do. We all deal with them in slightly different ways. The best thing you can do is try to deal with them directly and up front and try to go about what we normally do. No one says it’s easy. But you can’t run away from it. I’m not the kind of person to try to run away from it.

“I’m just going to try to meet it directly and deal with it. There are always issues in one’s life. This isn’t the easiest time for me. But you take it for what it is and move on.”

Ripken doesn’t say the specific words to signify what happened. Doesn’t have to. The words are written on his face, too.

Ripken’s best friend on the Orioles, Brady Anderson, said, “You want to put yourself in baseball mode, where all your motivation and all your concentration is going toward baseball, and that is hard to do with distractions, even normal everyday distractions.”

There were times Ripken appeared superhuman, and some still believe he is. Even Anderson, an Oriole most of the last 10 years of Ripken’s unfathom-able streak, couldn’t believe Ripken’s toughness in 1997. That was the year Ripken kept playing despite a herniated disc in his lower back that made it difficult for him to bend over. According to Anderson, Ripken said at the time: “I can put up with this pain another month. Two months, I don’t know.” The Streak was two years beyond Lou Gehrig at that point. Yet Ripken played on.

The timing makes it all worse now. His father’s death came during a time when people, rightly, are questioning how much longer he can keep playing. How much he has left. Ripken, 38, was among the least productive regular third basemen in the American League last year, gathering only 61 RBI in his 161 games, and he showed few signs of regaining his hitting touch this spring before he left for home in Aberdeen, Md., to be with his father.

The baseball people say his absence was a setback because it threw him off his spring rhythm. Once he returned, he was bothered by back pain severe enough to force his removal from the season opener and keep him sidelined for two more games. He’s at a point now where even he doesn’t know what he can believe in. He was 10-for-50 in spring training, and 2-for-11 entering Tuesday night’s game against the Yankees at the Stadium. He keeps switching batting stances, looking for the unknown spark.

Ripken hears the whispers about his future. “You can’t control the talk; you can’t control the speculation,” Ripken said. “You deal with the real issues of being able to go out and compete. You compete under scrutiny right out in front of everybody else. You’re being judged every single minute in the box, every single minute on the field.

“The answer to the question ultimately lies with yourself and lies with people picking the team. If they feel you have value to the team, that’s a decision the club makes. If you feel you’re competitive, that’s a decision you make. Those are real issues. The speculating and analyzing, everyone’s entitled to do that. But it doesn’t change anything.”

The Orioles hold a $6.3-million option on Ripken for next season. Or they could opt to buy him out for $2 million and try to bid him the smoothest farewell possible, under the circumstances.

Understandably, they don’t want to talk about it now. “It’s very premature for that kind of talk,” Orioles general manager Frank Wren said. “We’re one week into the season. Cal has made no indication to me that this is his last season. And from a club standpoint, we’ve given no indication of that, either. He’s going through a very difficult period for him.”

Things have become uncertain for him, and that’s got to be a strange feeling for a man who played 2,632 straight games. That is the most remarkable record in sports. Now, all he knows is that he can’t be sure of anything anymore.

“There’s a lot of different things happening to me lately that I haven’t had experience for or I’m not prepared for,” Ripken said. “There are a lot of uncertainties.”

Ripken might be the only person on this Earth for whom that is a revelation.