Ripken Puts an End to Streak on His Terms

What many agree is one of baseball’s three or four most remarkable achievements went into the record book one year ago today.

To break Cal Ripken’s consecutive games played streak of 2,632, a player must make the lineup every game for 17 seasons. But then, how many major league careers even last 17 seasons?

When Ripken, 38, decided to end the streak that began May 30, 1982, it shoved even Mark McGwire down on page one of sports. McGwire, hours earlier, hit his 65th home run of the season.

Then Ripken, just before a Yankee-Oriole game at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, approached his manager, Ray Miller.

“The time was right,” Ripken told him, to end the streak.

It was the Orioles’ final 1998 home game and Ripken was laboring in an 0-for-12 slump, hitting .273. Also, he said afterward, he had become uncomfortable with media attention on his streak instead of his team.

The Yankees’ Lou Gehrig had held the previous record, 2,130 games, for 56 years before Ripken broke it Sept. 6, 1995.

And the Yankees of 1998 paid tribute to Ripken, coming onto the top step of their dugout after the game’s first out--when it was clear Ripken was taking the day off--and applauding him.

Ripken came out of the dugout, tipped his cap to the Yankees and cheering crowd, and later watched part of the game from the Baltimore bullpen.

Ripken’s record of 2,632 was put in proper perspective when it was pointed out that on the day Ripken sat down, the second-longest active streak was Albert Belle’s 327 games.

Also on this date: In 1913, in one of golf’s great upsets, a 20-year-old amateur from Brookline, Mass., Francis Ouimet, won the U.S. Open championship in a playoff, beating English pros Harry Vardon and Edward Ray. . . . In 1968, Mickey Mantle hit his 536th and final home run in a 4-3 Yankee loss to Boston at Yankee Stadium. . . . In 1973, in a result that should have surprised no one, 29-year-old Billie Jean King defeated 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in arguably the 20th century’s most over-hyped sports event--an exhibition tennis match at the Astrodome.