Want the Real Deal? Go See Cal

Shed no tears for major league baseball as its television ratings plummet like a dying quail over second base and its turnstile counts strain to break into the fifth digit. Baseball is getting what it deserves. When you don't care enough not to cancel the World Series, how can you expect the people to care about Milwaukee-Kansas City as the last days of May swirl down the drain pipe?

Suddenly, all the old gripes about baseball have been amplified and fleshed out into brow-furrowing debates that find their way onto national magazine covers and TV talk shows.

Is the game too boring?

Are the games too slow?

Has the game's arteries hardened?

The game needs a PR magician, but short of that, it needs a savior.

Short of that, it will have to make do with Cal Ripken, who is authoring the brightest story of this dreary baseball season by simply doing what the fans wanted all along and what was ripped away from them last August.

Ripken plays ball.

That's it. He shows up for work every day, puts in an honest nine innings, plays the game the way it ought to be played--the way it used to be played.

Without interruption.

Ripken's consecutive-games streak is now nearing a crossroad that has seemed inevitable since the late 1980s: Lou Gehrig's record of 2,130 games played in succession. Before Ripken, Gehrig's mark was regarded as the Holy Grail of the sport, as unassailable as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. But now, Ripken's 2,130th is only weeks away--Sept. 6, against the Angels, is the due date--and has become just another calendar number to plan for, like Easter or the Fourth of the July.

Sept. 6, 1995.

Labor Day.

Ripken's streak has been with us for so long that it has become routine, part of the game itself. The national anthem, the seventh-inning stretch and Ripken's streak. If the Baltimore Orioles are playing tonight, Ripken's playing tonight. There are legions of teen-agers in black-and-orange Oriole caps today who have never known it any other way.

It is a big deal, yet it is no big deal. As Ripken put it the other day at Anaheim Stadium, "I don't look at this as chasing a home run record or a consecutive-game hitting streak. Those things are all performance-related . . . Basically, I show up and play every day.