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Childhood lives, and old heroes just fade away

When I was six, I knew everything about baseball. I knew who held all the records in all the categories, and I knew who they passed to get there. I had a Baseball Encyclopedia that held all the statistics for all the players of all time. I read that thing like a comic strip.

So when my friend told me proudly, "Cal Ripken has 1,000 home runs," I told her that was ridiculous. She was eight. She should have known better. Hank Aaron had the most home runs, I explained, and he only had 755. (Except for that guy in Japan who had even more, and then there was Josh Gibson, the Negro leagues hitter who had even more than that – but I wasn't going to get into that. She wouldn't understand. She was only eight.)

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So that friend was never a reliable source when it came to baseball. But I had another best friend, and he knew as much as I did. (Not only that, but he could stand at the door to my house and clear the road that ran by my front lawn with one swing of the bat. A prodigious 100-foot, downhill blast.)

Whenever he came over to my house to spend the night, we would spend the first three hours watching Orioles games. (He only came over on those nights when the games were on regular TV. The rest of the time, I went to his house. He had cable – his parents were better than mine.)

At any given time, each of us would have five or six different favorite players. They'd change from year to year, and the two of us rarely shared the same heroes. Except for one. We always loved Cal Ripken.

I can't tell you why. The guy hadn't hit over .282 since the two of us were old enough to remember, and the situation didn't exactly improve as our analytical minds sharpened. The Orioles started the year 0-21 when we were eight, and Cal batted .264 that season. He hadn't hit 1,000 home runs; he was never going to. We were eight, we should have known better.

Instead, we just trumped up something else positive about him, so we could cheer about that. "He's the greatest shortstop of all time! It doesn't matter where they hit it, he's already standing there! Ozzie Smith is terrible!"

The two of us didn't have a monopoly on justifying Cal Ripken's greatness, though. It seems that everyone – the press, the fans, his teammates, even people I don't like (i.e., Yankees fans) – has his or her own collection of reasons why Cal Ripken is one of baseball's greats.

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He's kind; he's unassuming; he signs autographs.

He's big; he hits for power; he redefined the shortstop position.

He's dedicated; he gives 100%; he's tough.

Who knows if all of these things are true? Maybe some of them are true, maybe even most of them, but Cal is far from perfect.

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And yet, when Cal Ripken plays his last game at the end of this season, I'll miss him as much as everyone else.

From the days when I stayed up five hours past my bed time to listen to the Orioles play the Athletics on the clock/radio on my window sill (1430 WNAV – "Hear the thrill, Baseball. Feel the thrill, Orioles") until this moment, a month into my senior year in college in Princeton, New Jersey, as I'm putting the finishing touches on this column, Cal Ripken has been a constant. Every day, I wake up and check the box scores, hoping that I'll see "HR – Ripken (17)," so that I can smile to myself, Cal hit a homer last night.

I started to write this column on August 21. It was Cal's 41st birthday, and he was playing a team called the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

We have cable now. I have a hard time watching a whole baseball game without changing the channel to watch garbage on E!. I don't have a clock/radio. I don't have a bed time. I can't remember the last time I talked to my friend.

The Orioles lost to the Devil Rays, 8-4, but the score certainly isn't what I remember.

In the fifth inning, Cal rested the bat on his shoulder in another of his unlimited new stances. The Devil Ray pitcher whipped a fastball over the inside part of the plate. Cal waited until it seemed like it was too late before he swung the head of the bat around through the hitting zone.

Cal drilled a single to left. I saw it.

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