Labor Day is often regarded as a day of rest throughout the United States but on this day, fifteen years ago, two men were honored and remembered for not missing a single day at the office in over thirteen years respectively.
On September 6, 1995, millions of baseball fans, nationally and internationally, tuned in to watch Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr. eclipse the seemingly unbreakable record of New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig for consecutive games played, which stood at 2,130 for 56 years.
And when the game against the California Angels became official after the top half of the fifth inning, everyone in attendance at Camden Yards, including President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, the Angels’ ball club and the umpires, erupted in a standing ovation that lasted more than twenty minutes.
During the ovation, Ripken did a victory lap around the stadium’s warning track to shake hands and give high-fives to the fans; a course of action the two-time American League MVP had to be persuaded to take by his teammates.
“Bobby Bonilla and Rafael Palmeiro pushed me out of the dugout and said, ‘Hey, if you don’t do a lap around this thing, we’ll never get the game started’, Ripken said after the game. “I thought it was a ridiculous sort of thing, but as I started to do it, the celebration of 50,000 started to be very one-on-one and very personal. I started seeing people I knew. Those were the people that had been around the ballpark all those years, and it was really a wonderful human experience.”
Ripken, a 19-time All-Star selection and 2007 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, would end the streak on his own terms at 2,632 games against, coincidentally enough, the New York Yankees on September 20, 1998; and, realizing the streak was coming to an end, the Camden Yards faithful, his teammates and the visiting Yankees gave Ripken an ovation after the game’s first out was recorded.
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- Category: MLB
- Tags: cal ripken jr, Lou Gehrig, steroids
