Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday and shared how his playing days in the big leagues prepared him for a career outside of the sport that made him a legend.
Ripken, whose book “Just Show Up” was released Tuesday, told host Brian Kilmeade that he always knew if he had a long baseball career that he was going to go into the business world. Ripken played 21 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles and set the record for most consecutive games played – 2,632.
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“The principles you spend your whole life learning and applying in baseball definitely apply to business. A lot of trial and error and a lot of mistakes that are made but we’ve been very successful in two aspects of my life,” Ripken said, attributing the lessons to his success with Ripken Baseball and the Cal Ripken Foundation.
Ripken, who also recorded 3,184 hits and was selected to 19 straight All-Star Games, said part of life is adjusting when life throws a curveball your way.
“You can practice all you want, but once you get into the game and the pitcher’s doing something to you, you better make some sort of adjustment,” he said.
“I always thought dad’s influence was really good: Practice makes perfect, not necessarily. Perfect practice makes perfect, he used to say. It was about building good habits but once you go into the game you gotta learn from each and every day. You gotta learn from the game and you gotta apply that learning to the next day.”
Ripken added that part of building a good character in sports is just showing up.
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“Sometimes you sit around a table trying to solve a problem and you need your whole team there and a couple people are missing and you go ‘I wonder where they are?’ So you need to show up, especially in those moments,” he said.