Ripken To The Rescue Baseball Needs Cal After Painful Year

Baseball didn’t need Lou Gehrig.

Great as he was, the game was doing just fine and would have continued to flourish without the Iron Horse and his streak. Fact is, no one fully realized or appreciated its magnitude at the time.

But baseball needs Cal Ripken Jr. Desperately.

The game is sicker than it has ever been; it has squandered its hallowed status, it has fallen from grace, and so the Iron Bird and his streak could not have come along at a better time.

That’s a lot to dump on one set of shoulders, isn’t it? Save the game all by yourself and your shining example? Calm the anger, soothe the hurt, atone for the betrayal, bring the people flocking back … make everything like it was before, Cal. Please.

Can one man, no matter how decent and upright and selfless and indefatigable, undo all the terrible damage brought about by avaricious, arrogant, short-sighted owners and by avaricious, arrogant, self-absorbed players?

No, that is probably too much even for Iron Bird.

But for a few golden days now, he has managed to wrap the game in the sort of gauzy twilight enchantment that once enveloped it.

He has made us care about baseball again.

What is endearing and what will endure beyond 2,131, astonishing as it is, will be what Cal Ripken Jr. has come to symbolize. More, the point in time in which he has come along.

He is baseball’s redemption, if not its salvation.

He is everything the game is supposed to be, everything we yearn for it to be, but, alas, is not.

So what we celebrate now is a reaffirmation.

At a time when the game is played by self-trumpeting egomaniacal boors wearing sausage skin pants and sneers, by vain, overpaid malingerers without the slightest sense of history or obligation, now a standard for persistence and simple hard work has been set by a man who, ironically, conjures up visions of what the game was like when Lou Gehrig played it, when modest men in baggy flannels humbly tipped their caps as they crossed home plate and ducked their heads in embarrassment when their names were chanted.

Of course it was never quite that pure; they were every bit as flawed as the rest of us, and Iron Bird himself is not without blemish or fault.

But this is his greatest gift: No matter how passionately you may have sworn off baseball, he has made you look again, made you let yourself think there is still hope for the game.

Oh, they don’t all have to be Cal Ripkens, the pompous and pampered peacocks who play it. But they could take some cues from him.

When others have closed in on records, they have succumbed to the unimaginable pressures.

Roger Maris turned surly while he closed in on Ruth and 61.

Rickey Henderson stole the base that passed Lou Brock, ripped it from its mooring, held it aloft, and then in a burst of immodesty so typical today, brayed: “Today, I am the greatest of all time.” Yes, Rickey, but let someone else say it.

But no such unseemly petulance has come from Iron Bird.

The Streak was passed Wednesday night, and he did it with the same approach that has marked the last 14 years of simply showing up, as certain as sunrise. This is a people’s record.

This isn’t about singular skills or being 7 feet. No, this is about dedication and sacrifice and nothing more glamorous than simple hard work.

It’s one thing that we can all do, isn’t it? Keep on keepin’ on.

So what Iron Bird brings to baseball is a sense of humanity.

At a time when the game has never been more starved for it.

He restoreth, if only for a moment, our faith.