An article in the Today section July 3 on the Cal Ripken !B Baseball School in Emmitsburg incorrectly identified the baseball coach at Mount St. Mary's College. His name is Scott Thomson.
The Sun regrets the errors.
EMMITSBURG -- It's 8: 20 in the morning when Cal Ripken Sr. wades into the mass of young ballplayers jacked up on waffles and cereal and dreams of smacking one out of Camden Yards in the bottom of the ninth someday.
He's wearing a white polo shirt and blue sweat pants, and he looks tanned and fit as he smiles and signs a few autographs.
On his left hand is the heavy gold ring of the Orioles 1983 World Championship team. In his right hand is a sheaf of papers and the first Lucky Strike of the day; at 62 and old school all the way, this is not the sort of man who browses through quit-smoking literature in the doctor's waiting room.
It's the first full day of the Cal Ripken Baseball School, nestled here among the soaring stone buildings of Mount St. Mary's College, and the man who runs the show is ready to go to work.
The restless kids awaiting roll call don't know it, but once there was a near-sacred canon of baseball instruction known as the Oriole Way.
If you played in the organization, you were taught the correct way to field a ground ball, the right way to push off the pitching rubber, how to hit the cut-off man.
Then if you stepped on the diamond in an orange and black uniform and did it any other way, someone would take your head off.
Very often, that someone was Rip Senior, who played and coached and managed in the organization for 36 years and had a voice that sounded like the bucket of a backhoe scraping a boulder.
They don't teach the Oriole Way much anymore; a look at the standings finds the O's dropping as if they're tied to an anvil. But one place they do teach it is here at the Ripken Baseball School, a two-week summer camp for kids 8 to 18 now in its 15th year of operation.
This kind of intense, hands-on instruction doesn't come cheap: overnight campers pay $450 for the five-day session that ends today, day campers pay $350.
But there are 174 ballplayers here, some from as far away as Canada, Florida and California. And the majority seem serious about the game, and serious about improving.
"Basically, we're getting the All-Star players, the good players, the players interested in going on and playing in high school and college," Ripken says.
At the Ripken School, campers and instructors alike quote his sayings the way the Chinese once quoted from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
There are 9 million little things in the game of baseball. If you do them right, you don't have to worry about the big things.
Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
After roll call, with the noise level approaching that of a honky-tonk at midnight, the campers and their instructors head off, and so does Cal Ripken.
He climbs into his sea-green Chevy 4x4 with Vi Ripken, his wife of 40 years, and heads for the manicured fields on the other side of Route 140, where it's clear he feels right at home.
On the fields
By 9, the sun is beginning to peek through the low, overhanging clouds. Each of the six fields bustles with activity.
One group of campers works on fielding, another on pitching, another on catching. Yet another group gathers on a hillock and listens to Wayne Risor, the head baseball coach at Shepherd College in West Virginia, who brings the passion of a revivalist preacher to his seminar on hitting.
"You want to be gripping that bat like it's a baby bird!" Risor, an intense, blocky man, intones. "If you squeeze it too hard, you suffocate it! Squeeze it too loose and it'll fly away!"
Ripken drifts over to one of the red-clay diamonds where Stanley Fitzwater is teaching base-running, specifically, breaking from home plate to go to first base.
Fitzwater, a varsity baseball coach at a West Virginia high school, is a dynamic instructor in his own right, with a baritone that seems to carry like a loudspeaker.
"We run through the bag!" Fitzwater says. "We don't want to slow down as we hit the bag!"
Ripken jumps into the discussion.
"We're trying to beat out a ball hit to the infield! Al Bumbry was the best in baseball at this," he says, referring to the former
Orioles outfielder. From the looks on some of the young faces, however, he might as well be speaking about Boris Yeltsin.
"Bumbry wouldn't stop until he ran into the outfield grass! Now watch me hit that bag and see where I run to."
The campers seem riveted by the sight of this Oriole sage running the bases with them. One of the boys is Michael Broache, 13, from Owings Mills, here at the Ripken School for the sixth year.
A likable, immensely precocious young man, he met Senior in spring training in 1992, Ripken's last year as the Orioles third base coach.
One night Michael was sitting in the dining room at the St. Petersburg Hilton in Florida, discoursing on the up-and-down fortunes of then-closer Gregg Olson with his parents.
Unbeknownst to him, Senior was sitting at a nearby table, marveling at the kid's knowledge. Finally, Ripken came over and introduced himself.
"You sound like you know the game," he said to Michael, and the next day the kid received a personal tour of the O's camp and was introduced to several players.
In the span of about, oh, 10 seconds, Michael became Cal Ripken's biggest fan. If the O's coach was running a cult back then, the kid would have joined on the spot.
Now, all these years later, Michael Broache watches Cal Ripken painstakingly demonstrate how to hit the bag at first, and the kid thinks he's in heaven.
"If you can't learn from Cal Ripken," he says, "who can you learn from?"
Where's Junior?
One question lies simmering below the surface here. The kids want to know if the other Cal Ripken, the guy who plays some third base for the Orioles, might make an appearance.
The answer is no. First of all, the Orioles are enjoying a rare off day in this free-fall of a season, and Ripken senior was reluctant to ask his All-Star son to drive up from the Baltimore suburbs.
The other thing is this: Every public appearance by the future Hall of Famer these days is an event. If people hereabouts get a whiff that the Ironman's coming, the cars will start rolling in as if a UFO has touched down.
L All order, all learning, all life as we know it, will cease.
Junior came up two years ago and spoke to the campers, gave each an autographed baseball and picture. But despite his absence, his aura is everywhere. Dozens of campers wear No. 8 Oriole jerseys, others use Cal Ripken Jr. gloves.
Even the instructors get caught up in the connection between Ripken senior and his son. One begins telling a visitor that Cal Jr. used to bounce 500 balls off his garage every evening in order to practice taking ground balls.
Listening nearby, Vi Ripken smiles and says softly: "That, um, might be a slight exaggeration."
This year's phenom
Every camp has a phenom. And Kurtis Clinton, hitting rockets in the batting cage during afternoon drills, is the talk of this camp.
Kurtis is 17, a third baseman from Morgantown, W.Va. He's a chiseled 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds, with Hollywood good looks. When he smiles, which is often, it's as if someone stepped to the side of his face and flipped a light switch.
He was named to the All-State teams his sophomore and junior years in high school. Now starting his senior year, schools like Clemson and Old Dominion are lining up to throw an education at him.
His future lies before him like a glittering six-lane highway.
"Oh, yeah, he's a very good baseball player," Scott Sampson says, his eyes never leaving Kurtis and his quick, powerful batting stroke. "He can play Division I ball."
Sampson, 29, the head baseball coach at Mount St. Mary's, knows talent. He played four years at Old Dominion and was drafted by the Yankees in the 9th round.
This is Kurtis' second week at the Ripken school. He's a fast-track prospect: plays on a good American Legion team, attends prestigious baseball camps in Virginia and Florida as well.
On winter mornings, he and his dad, Bruce Clinton, arrive at West Virginia University at dawn, where the kid proceeds to take 600 swings and an hour of grounders.
He also just went through the pressure-cooker of a one-day tryout at Camden Yards to make the Oriolelanders, perhaps the premier schoolboy fall team on the East Coast.
"Man, there was a lot of talent there!" he says. "The pitching was up a notch."
Up a notch!? Yeah, you could say that. One kid was throwing 93 miles per hour consistently. Another was hitting 88 during warm-ups. The ball would sound like a shotgun blast as it popped into the catcher's mitt.
Stepping into the batter's box against that kind of pitching, your first thought is: Please, God, no neurosurgery for me today.
"But it was great!" says Kurtis, the 100-watt smile lighting up. "I got to play where Cal stands!"
Now Kurtis is looking at playing Division I ball and permitting himself to dream of making The Show, the major leagues.
But that's all it is right now, a dream.
Look what happened to Scott Sampson. Sampson dove for a ball in center field playing A-League ball for the Yankees in Oneonta, N.Y., and pinched his shoulder. The next morning, he couldn't lift his arms high enough to shampoo his head.
In the time it takes to snap your fingers, his career was over.
"I'd say there are probably a dozen kids [in both weeks of the camp] who have a chance to play pro baseball," Sampson says && now. "And of the 400 kids that have come through here the past two weeks, there were maybe one or two who could make it to the major leagues."
The afternoon drills are over and Cal Ripken is making his way back to the Chevy 4x4 when a voice cries: "Mr. Ripken!"
The kid's name is Brian Owens. He's 15 and lives in Forest Hill in Harford County. He wants to talk catching.
It has been a long day under a searing hot sun, and after dinner, there will be two more hours of games to oversee.
But Cal Ripken smiles and for the next 15 minutes, the old catcher shows the young catcher how to pop out of the crouch and align the shoulders and cock the arm to gun down a would-be base stealer.
"You gotta stay low," Senior says. "Everything is low when you're a catcher."
It is the classic baseball tableaux: the teacher and the student and an empty diamond, a cooling breeze rustling through the dugouts. Once upon a time, every Oriole player was taught this way.
Behind them, the sun is beginning to dip and the sky is an endless expanse of blue and the green fields stretch as far as the eye can see.
And if you love baseball, there is probably no better place on Earth to be.
Pub Date: 7/03/98