Baseball · 1995 · Baltimore, USA
2,131
A Baltimore Orioles shortstop passes a 56-year-old consecutive-games record that everyone had filed under unbreakable, in a season baseball badly needed.
2,131
Consecutive games
2,130 (Lou Gehrig, 1939)
Previous record
2,632 games
Streak's eventual length
Lou Gehrig had played 2,130 consecutive games across 14 seasons, a streak ended only by the illness that eventually killed him, and it had stood since 1939 as one of the records nobody expected to see touched. Cal Ripken Jr. had been closing on it quietly for years at Baltimore, playing through the sort of minor injuries that sit most players down, without ever publicly chasing the number.
On 6 September 1995 at Camden Yards he played his 2,131st consecutive game, the record falling formally in the middle of the fifth inning once the game became official. The crowd stopped play with a standing ovation that ran for more than twenty minutes, and Ripken was eventually pushed out to take a reluctant lap of the ballpark's edge, shaking hands as he went.
A players' strike had cancelled the 1994 World Series barely a year earlier and left the sport's standing with its audience in poor repair. A record built on nothing more complicated than showing up turned out to be the thing that mended it. Ripken took the streak to 2,632 games before ending it himself in 1998.
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