Cal Ripken’s day at the brawl park
One of the nastiest brawls – if not the nastiest brawl – in Baltimore Orioles history takes place 31 years ago today and nearly costs Cal Ripken Jr. his eventual, record-setting streak for consecutive games played.
The 20-minute fight between the Orioles and Seattle Mariners starts with two outs in the seventh inning as Baltimore starter Mike Mussina drills Bill Hasselman in the left shoulder with a pitch in a game the Orioles already are leading 5-1.
Would have been 5-0 if not for Hasselman’s home run in the fifth inning to deep left-center before a Sunday afternoon crowd of 46,296 at Camden Yards.
Two innings later, Mussina throws his errant fastball, Hasselman charges the mound, dugouts and bullpens empty, and the game takes a pause as players pile onto each other near the pitcher’s mound.
Among those near the bottom of the pile is Ripken, who is playing his 1,790th straight game – just 340 shy of the record of 2,130 set by Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig form 1925-39.
Number 1,791 almost never happens for Ripken as he sprains a knee during the melee.
He finishes the game only to watch the joint swell and then swell some more.
“I tried to stop the whole Seattle Mariners bench from piling on and that didn’t work out too good.” Ripken later tells MLB Network.
“I found myself on my back pretty quickly in the bottom looking up. That’s not a good place to be in the brawl. People were throwing punches. When I tried to stop the whole team from coming over, I sprained my knee.”
Of course, Ripken being Ripken – and that would be baseball’s undisputed “Iron Man” – he continues the streak the next night, starting as usual at shortstop and going 1-for-2 with two walks in a 3-2 victory over the Oakland Athletics in front of an even larger crowd of 44,838 at Camden Yards.
“It was the closest I’ve come to not playing,” Ripken says of waiting for the swelling in his knee to subside before the game against Oakland.
No worries, though, as Ripken keeps on playing until he finally sits out a night toward the end of the 1998 season after his streak, which starts in 1982, reaches 2,632 games.