Ripken - Full Disclosure
Full Disclosure:
In a round about way, I worked for Cal Ripken one summer.
As some listeners may know, I took a year off from NPR in 2000 to do radio play by play for the Aberdeen Arsenal, a team in the independent Atlantic League that was half owned by Ripken Baseball (the other half owner was Maryland Baseball).
Aberdeen, Maryland is an unlovely city in Harford County, squeezed between the rail lines of the Northeast Corridor and I-95. Farther east lies the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, which cut the town off from the Chesapeake Bay. While parts of the residential areas are very nice indeed, much of downtown consists of the kinds of facilities familiar to any town adjacent to an army base. And the Ripken Museum.
Cal Ripken Sr., a fixture with the Baltimore Orioles as a coach and later as manager made his home in Aberdeen, about 30 miles or so north of Memorial Stadium, which was then the team's home park. His widow and his sons still live in the area, and the Arsenal baseball team was supposed to be the keystone of a baseball complex to include Ripken Stadium and a series of small fields modeled on famous major league parks. By 2000, the youth division of the Babe Ruth League had already been renamed for Cal Ripken, and, to honor their dad, Cal, Jr. and Bill planned to make Aberdeen a youth baseball mecca, like Williamsport, Pa. (the home of the Little League World Series).
As those who read my book Play by Play, Baseball, Radio and Life in the Last Chance League will remember, things did not work out for the Aberdeen Arsenal and the team folded after just one season. But the Ripken family persisted. They purchased a team in the New York-Penn League (short season A) which they renamed the Aberdeen Ironbirds and completed the baseball complex. If you drive along I-95, there's now an exit for Ripken Stadium, and you can get a glimpse of the ballpark just west of the interstate.
It's lovely.
I can't stand it. That was supposed to be MY ballpark. Instead of a career in play by play, I had to settle for a return to NPR.
I'm only half-joking about that - I loved baseball, and I honestly don't know what I would have done if I'd had to choose between the booth at Ripken Stadium and TOTN.
PS: I never met Cal Ripken, Jr. because he was busy playing for the Orioles that summer. I did get to know his brother Bill a bit; he held the title as General Manager of the Arsenal but spent most of his time on other business of Ripken Baseball. He attended many home games, though, and, as we both preferred the roof of the trailer that served as the press box at Thomas Run Park, he sat in for an inning or so on a few of my broadcasts. And for one game, he filled in as the field manager when Darrell Evans attended the All Star game in Atlanta.
6:43 AM ET | 04-16-2007 | permalink
