Buster Olney, ESPN baseball reporter and former Orioles beat writer for The Sun

"Cal collapsed into a batting slump immediately after he broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive-game record, hardly a surprise given the extraordinary energy that he had expended on those remarkable days and the days leading up to them. His batting average slid downward in mid-September - not that anyone really cared.

"They had a day game in Detroit, and he struggled at the plate again. The fans filed out, and the writers went into the shoebox clubhouse at old Tiger Stadium and talked to Cal and the other Orioles, and returned to the press box to write our stories.

"About an hour after the game ended, a lone figure stepped out of the dugout and walked onto an otherwise empty field. It was Cal, and he had a batting tee and a bucket of baseballs. He set the tee on home plate, stood in the right-handed batter's box, set the first of perhaps 50 balls from the bucket on the tee - and proceeded to spray balls all over Tiger Stadium, one by one. Cal was in a slump, he didn't like it, and this was his way of finding a solution.

"He emptied the bucket, then walked around the field retrieving all the balls himself; there was a nation of baseball fans and some clubhouse kids who would have done this for him, but Cal did it - his penance, it seemed, for his slump. Then he returned to home plate, and started over, hitting balls into the twilight."

Steve Phillips, ESPN commentator and former New York Mets general manager

"More than any other player in its history, Cal Ripken understands what makes baseball a great game. It's not the great players, but the great fans.

"Cal respected the game. More importantly, he respected the people who paid his salary - the fans."