Ripken knows what LeBron went through

Across the final years, as time ran out on his Orioles life, Cal Ripken Jr. sometimes gazed across diamonds watching players on teams more victorious and wondered if maybe by being Cal Ripken Jr. he had trapped himself into losing. And the moments of longing came – even if for fleeting seconds.

What if he had become a Yankee?

What if he had become a Brave?

"There was some small side of me that looked at Derek Jeter(notes) in the World Series every other year or you look at Chipper Jones(notes) playing in World Series, for us our teams in Baltimore missed the playoffs many years until 1996," Ripken said. "You wonder how exciting it would have been. … "

Ripken played 21 seasons in Baltimore.
(Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

His voice trailed off. Ripken was on the phone from California where on Monday he will be the face of the State Farm Home Run Derby and its Go To Bat program mainly because he is still the face of baseball; the one who forever did the right thing, who never took another team's money, who believed being a Baltimore hero on the Baltimore Orioles was a good and honorable thing no matter how awful those Baltimore Orioles teams became.

For this he is considered all that is pure in a sports world where local bonds mean nothing, where the glow of being a legend in the place where you learned to walk lasts as long as the first glimpse of freedom and the chance to shine brighter somewhere else. And it is why whenever baseball has needed an icon these last 20 years, he is the one they call. The game's John Wayne. Humble. Unbreakable. Loyal.

So even as he let himself wonder what he could have been elsewhere, he quickly jolted himself from the thought.

"There are no guarantees (in going to another team)," he said. "Looking back on it, I learned so much staying in Baltimore. I don't regret staying. When you have a chance to play at home in front of your kids, that's something few people get to have.

He is, of course, one of the few men alive who could understand the torment that must have run through LeBron James the past two weeks. Like James, who grew up in Akron, Ohio and played his first seven NBA seasons in Cleveland, Ripken was raised in Aberdeen, Maryland, less than an hour north of Baltimore. He always dreamed of becoming an Oriole, especially with his father, Cal Sr. a minor league manager for the team. But it wasn't until he had climbed through the farm system and arrived in the Orioles' clubhouse that he understood just what it meant. All the players around him were from other places. When the season ended, they left. Ripken got to stay. It was his town, his home, his people.

But home came with its own burden. There was the pressure to be good, to prove he belonged. Even as he won the MVP award and the World Series three years into his major league career, Ripken said he was haunted by the fear he could not live up to the expectations of those he had seen for years. Then when the Orioles tumbled and bad teams kept lining up around him, the fingers of blame came his way. He was family. And it's always easy to criticize family.

Playing at home was never simple.

So there is a part of Ripken that gets exactly what James did in walking away from Cleveland for the chance to win big in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Unlike Ripken, James didn't allow himself to be trapped by a hometown's vision for him. He gets his own life. His freedom.

The spectacle of James' departure troubled Ripken.
(Steve Mitchell/US Presswire)

As a basketball fan, Ripken grasped James' departure. The great announcement live on television disturbed him, such public declarations were never his style. But then he realized the money was going to charity, the Boys and Girls Club which, ironically, is the very event benefited by the Home Run Derby that he hopes will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in that, Ripken found a way to admire James. LeBron had found a new way to raise money. And isn't that what they do as legends? Raise money?

"That's a creative way to bring some attention to the cause," Ripken said.

But there was something else, too. James got to make his own decision. By rejecting the most sacred thing, his relationship with his home, he got to be free.

Ripken had that chance himself. For a time he was certain he was going to go. It happened in 1988, the season the Orioles started 0-21. Six games into the year the team fired Cal Sr. as manager as if the wretched team could be his fault. Then the losses kept coming. Cal Jr. was a free agent at year's end. For the first time, he asked around the league, inquiring what it was like in other cities. He imagined himself in Toronto. Dave Winfield and Don Mattingly approached him one day and urged him to sign with the Yankees.

He was sure he would leave.

Then at midseason the Orioles offered him $6.3 million over the next three years to remain. It was a lot of money at the time. But more than that, he saw responsibility. His duty.

He stayed home.

Years later it would be the choice that set him up for life, buying him a legacy, making him Cal Ripken Jr., a trademark for anything good in baseball.

But what if, like LeBron, he had left? What if he fled Baltimore the way James forsook Cleveland?

The thing is, he never would. He was always destined to be Maryland's Cal Ripken. And doing so made him bigger than hoisting three Yankees World Series trophies possibly could. When he broke the sport's consecutive games played record, he did so at home.

It was a moment even George Steinbrenner could never have bought.