Explore Quotes by Cal Ripken, Jr.

I had one of my best years in 1991; I was 31. I made a renewed effort to work harder. I got better at my diet. I paid attention to how much sleep I got. I was always someone of routine. I became more strict.

I see myself as extremely lucky.

When you are away from the game and busy with other areas, you realize that the world does not revolve around baseball.

My dad had premature gray. I was always the one with the most energy, the one who continued to practice longer. I ran up and down the stairs of different stadiums. I didn't feel the need to cover up the fact that I was losing my hair or it was graying. When you're on a team, age is only a factor when you're talking in the locker room.

My approach to every game was to try to erase the games that were before and try to focus on the game at hand.

Even though my dad was a manager in the minor leagues, I still traveled around with him and saw it from the field out. Now, as an owner, you're kind of looking from the whole baseball activity from outside in, from a fan's perspective.

Being elected to the Hall of Fame is about your career pretty much and your impact on the game.

I stayed attached to baseball through the kids and through minor league baseball, and I'm very satisfied with the schedule it allows me to have, which means I'm home until my kids go off to college. I value that time.

You learn as a player not to listen to the criticism. Many of the people who put out that criticism might not be as accomplished, might not understand the game as well from the inside-out.

Your job as a baseball player is to come to the park ready to play every day, and the manager, it's his job to make those decisions about who plays.

Whether it was Little League or playing with your brothers or sisters, that was always a problem. If I would lose - because I very rarely lost - then everything would go crazy.

The older you get, the things that you thought you wanted to do when you were younger, you're checking them off your list because you no longer want to them.

When you're an athlete and you play every day and are conditioning yourself every year, the aging is gradual.

Quite frankly, I don't miss standing in the box or standing on the field playing.

There have been times in my life when I felt compelled to write things down as a matter of therapy, but whatever I kept about those days, I shredded. It was too personal.

I always thought being a gamer and someone who had a sense of responsibility to the game and to my teammates was the honorable thing.

One person's going to win, and everybody else is going to not win. So let's not feel like we're losers. Let's utilize the cultural opportunities, get to know the other players on the other team, look around you, enjoy your world series.

You can keep going on and on about the interactions of people, which makes it a great drama and great event ,and you'll always hold that special, but if you're looking at a baseball moment, the feeling you get when you win the World Series by far exceeds anything else in the game that you're able to do.

By far, the best moment of my big league career was when I caught the last out at the World Series.

Sometimes I think sportsmanship is a little bit forgotten in place of the individual attention.

I've felt some great feelings on the baseball field... in front of 50,000 people and millions on TV... but the feeling you get when you give a kid a chance, that is a hundred times greater than that feeling.