THE STREAK IS SUCH AN INADEQUATE DESCRIPTION FOR something that began 2,127 games, 29 different double-play partners and 13 1/4 years ago. If you pitch 59 consecutive shutout innings or hit in 56 straight games, you are on a streak. But if you play so long that 3,695 other major leaguers have gone on the disabled list since the last time you spent an entire game on the bench, so continuously that more than 50 million fans have seen nobody but you start the game at your position, you are not on a streak. You are on a river, a long, meandering river like, say, the Susquehanna, which begins its 444-mile journey in Cooperstown, New York, the purported cradle of baseball. From there the Sus quehanna finds its way to Oneonta, the home of 1950 National League mvp Jim Kon stanty; dips down into Pennsylvania before recrossing the border near Bing hamton, where Wee Willie Keeler and Whitey Ford cut their professional teeth; winds back down south toward Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where Joe McCarthy managed his first team; meets up with the West Branch, which flows past Williams port, the birthplace of Little League Baseball, and Lewisburg, home of Chris ty Mathewson's alma mater, Bucknell University; bisects Harrisburg, where Hall of Fame pitcher Vic Willis got his start; rushes past York, which once knew Brooks Robinson as a second baseman; crosses the border into Maryland and--at long last--enters the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace, which happens to be the birthplace of Calvin Edwin Ripken Jr.
Unless something unforeseen or unthinkable happens, Cal Ripken, the 35-year-old shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles, will play in his 2,131st straight game on Sept. 6, against the California Angels in Oriole Park at Camden Yards. That will break the record set by Lou Gehrig, the first baseman for the New York Yankees from 1925 until 1939. The "Streak," as it has come to be called, officially began on May 30, 1982, when Orioles manager Earl Weaver started Ripken at third base, which was then his position, against the Toronto Blue Jays. The previous day, Weaver had rested the 21-year-old rookie in the second game of a doubleheader.
Unofficially, the Streak probably began in the late '60s in the basement of the Ripken household, by then in Aberdeen, Maryland. Says Vi Ripken, the matriarch of the Ripken clan (daughter Ellen, sons Cal Jr., Fred and Billy): "I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard 'Just one more game, Mom.' The kids would be playing Ping-Pong in the basement, and it was always a struggle to get them to come upstairs for dinner, and even more of a struggle to get them to go to bed. Nobody liked to end the night on a loss, especially Junior. 'Just one more game, Mom.'"