El Cardquistador

I’ll be honest: I was never a big Cal Ripken Jr. fan. Growing up, I was more interested in the Tigers and the Mets, the players I followed day in and day out. By the time the 1994 strike hit, my attention to baseball had already started fading. So when Ripken’s streak was happening, I didn’t treat it as a big deal.

In fact, I kind of brushed it off. My assumption was that the whole thing was padded — maybe he stayed in the lineup with a token at-bat here and there, or managers slipped him into a game just to keep the streak alive.

But recently I dug into the numbers, and I have to admit: I was wrong.

Ripken didn’t just show up. For the first 904 games of the streak, he played every single inning — that’s 8,264 innings in a row. On average, that comes out to more than nine innings per game, because some of those contests went to extras. He wasn’t ducking out early or checking in for a cameo; he was grinding through full games nearly every single night.

Even after that innings streak ended, Ripken still played nearly complete games throughout his run of 2,632 consecutive games. The streak wasn’t built on technicalities. It was built on durability, consistency, and a stubborn refusal to take a day off.

Looking back now, thirty years after he broke Lou Gehrig’s record, I see the streak differently. It’s not just a quirk of history or a bloated stat. It’s a reminder of what it means to truly show up — not just appear, but be there, fully, when the game is on.

And whether or not you were ever a Ripken fan, that’s pretty impressive.