MVN - Most Valuable Network

Cal Get’s 3rd Highest Vote Total EVER!

Update: IT’S OFFICIAL!!! Cal Ripken Jr. will become a Hall of Famer in the 2007 class with 98.5% of the vote! That’s the 3rd highest vote total of all time! (In other news, it’s confirmed that 1.5% of the baseball writers in America are stupid.) 

It’s not a regular event lately that we get to talk about great Oriole news. But when a good story comes along, it arrives with a vengeance! Today is the big day for former Orioles shortstop and general fan favorite Cal Ripken! (Well, it’s the day that they announce that the real big day is official anyway)

The story began is 1981 when a rookie call up from the Rochester Red Wings made his major league debut. The following year Cal earned Rookie of the Year honors and begin the now infamous streak. Often forgotten in the lure of 2,131 and then eventually 2,632 by the time it was all said and done, is the 8,243 consecutive innings that Cal played during the early part of the more famous games streak.

In 1983 Cal found himself at the center of the Orioles last World Series appearance when he made a defensive play at Veterans’ Stadium in Philadelphia that ended the series and left the Birds as World Champions. In that series Ripken became the first player in history to play in all his team’s regular season games, all the playoff games, and every World Series game.

In 1998 the streak ended, at Cal’s request. Rumor has it that the Orioles are still paying Cal checks for the unused vacation and sick days he accumulated in the previous 17 years.

Cal Ripken was the American League Most Valuable Player in 1983 and again in 1991. He was the All Star game Most Valuable Player in 1991 and again in 2001, when in his final appearance in an All Star game he hit a home run that brought about the most dramatic trot around the bases since Kirk Gibson limped around the path at Dodger Stadium in 1988.

Finally in 2001 the illustrious career if the Iron Man came to a close when Brady Anderson struck out to end the game with Cal on deck. And that was the end of Cal’s career in the major leagues. The ERA of Cal Ripken was over.

But that wasn’t the end of the legend.Just a few short years later Cal started his own minor league baseball franchise in his home town of Aberdeen. Still going strong, Cal runs his aptly named Ironbirds in the New York - Penn League with Oriole prospects fresh off the entry draft. And in another chapter of his father’s legacy Cal runs Ripken Baseball, a little league camp that teaches kids both the fundamentals of the game and good sportsmanship.

What will the future hold for Cal Ripken? Well most of us hope that it will hold a bid toward heading up a new ownership group for the Orioles. But that’s a dream we’ll keep wishing on for a while. Today though, in non fantasy news, Cal Ripken will be officially announced as having been voted into the 2007 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame!

As I’m righting this on Monday evening I’m not yet aware of who the self righteous moron reporters are who will inevitably have failed to vote Cal into the Hall for the sole reason that Babe Ruth didn’t get a unanimous vote when his turn came due.  How that has any relevance today I’m still not sure, but some jerks go out of their way every year to make a big deal out of this. Today will be no exception.

So if you wish to discuss the lunacy of those morons, or the awesomeness of Cal’s amazing career, the comments section is open and waiting for your use!

 Update now that news is coming out: Paul Ladewski, a moron in Chicago who writes for a podunk rag that no one ever heard of called the Daily Southtown, went out of his way to make sure that Cal wouldn’t be the guy to finally get 100% of the vote. But  Paul Ladewski is stupid and only trying to make a national name for himself with the insane accusation that any player who played between 1993 and 2004 was a steroid user and shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. But as dumb as this guy is, he didn’t vote against Cal. He left his ballot blank. I have decided that this shouldn’t count as a ‘no’ vote.  A blank ballot is not a submission.

Unfortunately the Hall of Fame doesn’t see it that way and they do count a blank as a no. But even with the stupidity of guys like Ladewski, Cal Ripken Jr. recieved 98.5% of the vote, 3rd highest all time. Only Tom Seaver (98.84%) and Nolan Ryan (98.74%) recieved higher vote totals in Hall of Fame History.

So congratulations to Cal Ripken, Jr.! He can now put HOF ‘07 after he name when he signs autographs!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 8:01 am and is filed under Oriole Magic!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.