Quotes from Cal Ripken, Jr.

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

I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I'd like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.

If you really think about it, the stadium can't last forever. There is going to have to come a time when it replaces.

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

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.

When things happen to you in the worst way, you live with it, you go over it, you think, 'What else could I have done?'

I never set out to do this; I never set out to say, 'Can I break this record?' Then all of a sudden, the preparations made for the celebration put pressure on me. I said, 'Okay, I have to get there.' After 2,130, there was sort of a realization it was a foregone conclusion you're going to play tomorrow.

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

I've been asked to interview for many managing jobs, and I never said yes because I was never serious about it, and I thought it would be wrong to go through that process.

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.

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.

You could be a kid for as long as you want when you play baseball.

I don't love the idea of the responsibility falling on the manager. That just adds to their in-game responsibility.

I had trouble with my temper all the way through the minor leagues.

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

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

My dad was part of the Oriole way. I think he was there 14 years in the minor leagues; I think seven of those years, they had the same people in place. So it was about continuity. It was about stability.

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

Baseball can be slow in many ways. The action starts with when the pitcher delivers the ball. But the action really starts when the crack of the bat happens.

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.

When you're in the day-to-day grind, it just seems like it's another step along the way. But I find joy in the actual process, the journey, the work. It's not the end. It's not the end event.

Normally, some people think about 50 as a big moment in life. I kind of think 30 because in your baseball career, 30 was considered on top kind of looking at the end of your career. So I remember thinking about 30 in different ways, but 50 just seems like another step right now.

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.