Former Baltimore Orioles "Iron man" Cal Ripken Jr. said Friday that his 74-year-old mother is doing well after being abducted by a gunman last week, but he thinks the kidnapping was premeditated.
Boston police say they've apprehended a Red Sox employee who absconded earlier with the costume of the team's beloved mascot, Wally the Green Monster.
updated: Thu Jul 26 2012 18:17:00
Baseball player Cal Ripken's mother was found safe this morning but police say her suspected kidnapper is "dangerous."
Police released two photos Thursday of a man they suspect abducted the mother of Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr. from her Aberdeen, Maryland, home before she was found nearly 24 hours later tied up in the back seat of her car.
The man who abducted the mother of Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr. from her Maryland home restrained her and appeared to have used her credit cards, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.
He's brash, bold and has the skills to back it up. 19-year-old phenom Bryce Harper is less than a month into his baseball career with the Washington Nationals, and he's already making his presence felt in the nation's capital. With high-profile magazine covers and international baseball experience already on his resume, the Nationals are looking to Harper to be one of their building blocks as they try to put Washington baseball on the map.
NEW YORK -- The first time Barry Larkin met his childhood idol, longtime Reds shortstop Davey Concepcion, he made a bad impression. Or, rather, Dave Parker made it for him.
Baseball insiders are all but certain that well-respected executive Andy MacPhail will leave his post as president and general manager of the Orioles. MacPhail's expected departure is the latest in a string of blows covering more than a decade for the storied franchise gone south. But the real question now is the interesting one: Will anyone of stature take such a job?
The Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are being held this weekend in Cooperstown, a village in upstate New York known for its picturesque beauty, small-town charm and as the greatest arena for disagreement in sports.
The idea that a hitter's swing will be ruined by participating in the home run derby is a myth but that doesn't mean it has never happened.
It wasn't very long ago that Derek Jeter, who collected his 3,000th career hit Saturday, was considered to have a chance at bigger game -- 4,000 hits, or even 4,257, breaking Pete Rose's all-time mark. At the end of the 2009 season, Jeter had 2,747 knocks and had turned 35 midway through the campaign. He was coming off one of his best offensive seasons, batting .334, roping 18 homers, stealing 30 bases and posting a career-best strikeout-to-walk ratio. Through the same age at the end of the 1976 season, Rose had 2,762 hits. It would take significant longevity and a lot of luck, but Jeter had positioned himself as the first player to have a reasonable shot at the all-time hits record since Rose set it a quarter-century ago.
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Stories about shortstops in the SI Vault
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Baltimore Orioles stories in the SI Vault
The biggest problem with the January 1, 2011, cable launch of Oprah Winfrey Network is timing -- not that starting with the New Year was a bad idea, or that rolling out new series and sneak previews on a piecemeal basis was a bad way to go.
What do you do about a 36-year-old beloved franchise icon with fading defensive skills but enormous brand value? Why, of course, you give him a 15 percent raise to make sure the team benefits from his legacy. That's exactly what the Baltimore Orioles did for Cal Ripken Jr. on Opening Day 1997, a sort of global view of the player that stands in stark contrast to how the Yankees are valuing Derek Jeter at the same age.
I was a fanatic about Sports Illustrated as a kid. That was the sports bible. You always looked forward to what was on the cover, who was in it, and especially the pictures were great.
It took him awhile, but on Wednesday afternoon, Alex Rodriguez became just the seventh man in baseball history to hit 600 home runs. A-Rod is the youngest to reach the mark by a year and a half, and the first non-outfielder to accomplish the feat. The milestone home run came with a 2-0 count and one man on base against Blue Jays righty Shaun Marcum in the bottom of the first inning of a scoreless game. Here is a breakdown of all 600 of his home runs as well as a look at how Rodriguez stacks up against the other members of the 600 club.
BALTIMORE -- As perhaps the most revered Baltimore Oriole in history, Cal Ripken Jr. remembers well what it took to get there. But before he was a Baltimore icon, before he was an Iron Man, even before he was an established big leaguer, Ripken was a 21-year-old rookie mired in a horrific slump and unsure of how to get out of it.
The signing of catcher Joe Mauer by the Minnesota Twins to a contract extension was, despite all the media hang-wringing that he would go all Kevin Garnett and take East Coast, big-market money, a virtual lock ever since May 21, 2006. On that day, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, signed into law a bill that assured public funding for a new ballpark for the Twins. Mauer, a local kid whose grandparents watch him play every home game, wanted Minnesota and Minnesota wanted Mauer. All the marriage needed was money, and the Hennepin County taxpayers provided the dowry.
TBS baseball analyst and Topps spokesman Cal Ripken Jr. spoke to SI.com about the upcoming season and the state of his former team, the rigors of spring training and the downside to being on a baseball card.
It hurts me to write about the Orioles.
NEW YORK (SI.com) -- In what has already been a banner year for Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop can add another honor: Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year award. Jeter was chosen as the magazine's 56th honoree (the Dec. 7 issue will hit newsstands on Wednesday) and becomes the first Yankee to be named SI's Sportsman.
OK, I have this idea based on Albert Pujols winning his third MVP in five years... it starts with this: I think Pujols at age 29 is a Hall of Famer right now. To me, it's done. True, you have to play 10 years in the big leagues to be eligible for the Hall, and Pujols has only played nine, so technically he is not yet eligible. But my point is not that old "he retires tomorrow" argument. No, my point is that in my eyes that no matter what he does on the field from this point on, the rest of his career, he has already locked up Hall of Fame status.
Fill in answers as in a crossword -- except the answers are numbers. For rows or columns with multiple clues, enter answers consecutively. The sum will equal the red total at the end of each row/column
What does the perfect power hitter look like? Does he have Babe Ruth's legs, Hank Aaron's wrists, Mickey Mantle's arms or Ted Williams' mind? Does the perfect strikeout artist have Greg Maddux's brain, Walter Johnson's fastball, Sandy Koufax's curve or Pedro Martinez's changeup? Does the slickest-fielding shortstop have Ozzie Smith's legs, Cal Ripken's build or Shawon Dunston's arm?
If you've ever had a boss you thought was a jerk, this one's for you.
Over the course of my 15-year career, I have lived the dream. My dream. I've covered all four major sports; attended multiple World Series and All-Star Games; surfed with Barry Zito, traveled in a pickup truck with Jet and Cord McCord; watched Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken and Frank Thomas take BP; engaged in late-in-their-life interviews with Minnesota Fats and Walter Payton. Should I never leave my home again, I'll do so knowing I've experienced the ultimate pleasures of sportswriting.
Jeff Kent perpetually wore the kind of grave face that made you expect the next thing out of his mouth would be, "License and registration, please." He was, in fact, the son of a cop. "Hence," he said upon his retirement last week, "the mustache."
Baseball writing cowboy Tracy Ringolsby brought up an interesting point at the winter meetings about why Rickey Henderson should get 100 percent of the Hall of Fame vote. Henderson, of course, will not get 100 percent of the vote because NOBODY gets 100 percent of the vote*. It's one of those bizarre quirks of the baseball writers' voting, bizarre because at some point there were some among the baseball writers who started to take PRIDE in the quirk, started feeling gratified by the fact that Willie Mays and Babe Ruth and Mike Schmidt and Tom Seaver and Stan Musial and Hank Aaron did not get every vote. I guess they thought (think) of themselves as guardians of the gate.
From free concerts to fresh blue crabs, summertime in the Washington area can be a lot of fun.
This summer is a little less hectic for Cal Ripken. The Hall of Famer -- he was inducted last August with Tony Gwynn -- will be part of TBS' coverage on July 6th's (2 p.m. ET) MLB All-Star Game Selection Show. SI.com checked in with the TBS analyst this week to get his take on the first half of the season, his first-half MVPs, Josh Hamilton and Chase Utley.
The news star credited his success to his father – and was devoted to his son
In a way, the 2008 Hall of Fame ballot sent out last month by the Baseball Writers' Association of America was another Dear John letter to a pretty special, and largely vanishing, breed of player.
On the morning after the nightmare, and three weeks before the wildfires would close in on him like the devil's breath, Trevor Hoffman awoke to the sound of children's laughter. The lilt in the voices of his three boys -- Brody, 11, Quinn, 10, and Wyatt, 8 -- felt soothing but like a balm over burns, which is to say that the sweetness only masked the pain.
Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd, criticized for years in his adopted hometown, isn't wasting time with any "I-told-you-sos.'' Instead, he is doling out only "thank yous.''
The Chicago Tribune requested a change in personnel (MEMO TO TBS: BRING ON BARKLEY). The New York Daily News suggested a new acronym (TBS: TOTALLY BLAND SNOOZFEST). The reviews from the Los Angeles Times (FRANKLY, TBS WHIFFS BY USING THOMAS) and New York Times (AN ERROR-PLAGUED GAME, BUT FROM THE BROADCAST BOOTH) were equally telling.
Early in the evening, just about suppertime on the first leg of a lifelong-overdue Cooperstown pilgrimage, the voice is pure country. It's the voice of baseball in America. No, not Vin Scully, silly. It's the small-town Virginia radio voice of Cliff Dunn.
Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn combined to play 5,441 regular season major-league games, none of which involved the two of them playing against one another. Their lives and baseball careers ran parallel tracks all the way to Cooperstown. Born three months apart in 1960, they each played their entire careers with one team -- their hometown team -- before those careers ended one day apart in 2001, only to begin new careers in amateur baseball and ultimately to be honored on the same day this summer, July 29, with induction together into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Excerpted from CHANGE UP: An Oral History of 8 Key Events That Shaped Baseball, to be published by Rodale Books in March 2008. � 2007 by Larry Burke and Peter Thomas Fornatale with Jim Baker. Permission granted by Rodale Inc.
The abundance of good-hitting shortstops is one of the most compelling storylines in baseball, but it's not exactly new.
Thank you for mentioning Earl Webb's doubles record -- 67 in 1931. It seems to go unnoticed compared to baseball's other long-standing records (Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak being the biggest). I've been following it this year, and there are three candidates with a decent chance: Magglio Ordonez (35), Chase Utley (34) and Dan Uggla (32). Think any of them will break it? -- Josh, Newark, Del.
Cal Ripken Jr. will always be known for his consecutive games played streak, but it may surprise many people that just two years into his big-league career, he already was planning for life after baseball.
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter has an idea that seems to make sense, especially after a trying first week in baseball in which the Indians had seven games either snowed out or relocated to a different time zone, stars such as Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Victor Martinez were hurt trying to play baseball in football weather, and fans, when they bothered to show up at all, sat through miserable conditions to watch something that did not pass for major league-quality baseball.
Before Cooperstown honors Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken later this year, the Hall of Fame duo will be suiting up for another team.
Cal Ripken, who displayed remarkable drive during his Hall of Fame baseball career, will drive the pace car at next month's Daytona 500.
The real story of last week's National Baseball Hall of Fame voting is not that Mark McGwire only got 128 votes -- it's that Dante Bichette received three. I didn't realize that the Bichettes were voting this year.
Last year the Baseball Hall of Fame engraved 88 words onto the plaque summarizing the career of relief pitcher Bruce Sutter. That's about a dozen more words than were used -- combined -- on the plaques of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and Babe Ruth, all members of the Hall's inaugural 1936 class.
One beautiful spring training day in the mid-90s I asked Cal Ripken why baseball players were not getting the kind of national endorsement deals and warmth afforded NBA players. Ripken looked off into the blue sky for a moment, looked back at me and said, "That's an interesting question. Let me think about it and I'll get back to you with an answer. Are you going to be here tomorrow?"
Wandering past one of the display racks in the children's section of a major bookstore chain Saturday morning, I saw a youth paperback with Ken Griffey, Jr., Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire on the cover.
Issue date: September 11, 1995
Some young sports players are being pushed harder than ever to make the play, make the team, and in some cases, strive to make the pros. What did today's Major League players do to get where they are and what advice can they offer to those who are just starting to feel the pressure?
Once a year, baseball-card collectors gather for the granddaddy of all sports collectible conventions - the National Sports Collectors Convention.
Brooks Kieschnick is the only baseball player of the last half-century to both pitch and play a position on a regular basis.
The walls of Graham Bensinger's bedroom are plastered with pictures of famous sports stars -- a layout shared by tens of thousands of other teenage males across the United States.
In 1995, baseball "Iron Man" Cal Ripken Jr. slammed through legend Lou Gehrig's "unbreakable record" of 2,130 consecutive games played.
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Andy Borowitz is crazy. By choice.
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