I Was Going to Be on a Cal Ripken Reality Show. It Never Aired.

I have told this story badly for years, mostly because I never checked it.

I would say there was a TV show, that Cal Ripken was involved, that I was going to fly home from the Czech Republic for it, and that it fell apart because something terrible happened to his mother. I had the last part wrong, which I will get to.

Everything else turned out to be in a message thread I still have, with dates on it.

What it was

25 July 2012. I am in Brno, in the middle of a Czech Extraliga season, and a message arrives from a man named Jake Chapman:

Reality Show opportunity. I would love to figure out a way to get you on the show. It's on CBS, called "The Player."

Four days later he corrects himself — ten episodes, CBS Sports Network, not CBS. Premiere set for Labor Day, then Mondays for ten weeks. And here is the premise, in his words:

25 guys go to Aberdeen, MD to compete for a chance to win a contract with the Baltimore Orioles. Cal and Bill Ripken are part of the show.

Twenty-five players who had been overlooked, in the Ripkens' hometown, competing for a professional contract. I asked what the prize actually was. Jake was careful:

A professional development contract is all I'm legally allowed to say.

What I said

I want to be accurate about how fast I said yes, because I think it says something about where I was at twenty-six.

I was under contract in the Czech Republic. My team needed me for the playoffs. Filming started 4 August. Going meant walking out mid-season on people who had brought me over.

If burning the bridge here and taking off before playoffs is what it takes to have this shot...then I will do it.

Then I priced my own flight for them, because they were deciding whether I was worth the ticket. Brno's airport was too small, so it was about $1,500 out of Prague — a two-hour bus ride and twenty dollars away.

That was my whole calculation. Not should I. Just how do we make this work.

The line I wrote before anything went wrong

This is the part that got me when I read it back fourteen years later. Jake and I are talking through the odds, and I write this:

Even if cal ripken loves me and thinks I am the best player out there...there is still a good chance that his "advisory board" or whoever assesses the business risk of players, will still advise him to deny me.

I was twenty-six. Three years earlier the Padres had signed me and then un-signed me when their medical staff looked at the hip. The Red Sox had done a version of the same thing.

So before a single frame was shot, I already knew the shape of it. It would not be about whether I could pitch. It would be a room full of people I would never meet, doing a risk assessment on a piece of chromium cobalt in my leg.

I said yes anyway. I would say yes again.

How it ended

It did not end. It just stopped.

20 August 2012. Jake: "seems as though filming is pushed back." I flew home.

1 September 2013 — a full year later. Me, to Jake: "cal Ripken show contacted me last month...told me to be ready...u heard anything? U ever get paid for your work?"

He never got paid, as far as I know. The show never aired. Nobody ever told me it was over; it simply stopped being a thing that was about to happen, which is how most of the near-misses in a baseball career actually go. There is rarely a phone call. Things just stop arriving.

The correction

Here is where I have been wrong, and I want it on the record because it involves a real family.

Cal Ripken Jr.'s mother was not killed.

Violet Ripken, then seventy-four, was abducted at gunpoint from her home in Aberdeen, Maryland on the morning of 24 July 2012. She was held for about twenty-four hours and found the next day in the back seat of her own car, hands bound, otherwise unharmed. The case went cold. Ripken later raised the reward to $100,000. She was threatened again in 2013.

I had it in my head as something much worse. It was not, and I am glad, and I should have checked years ago before repeating it.

The timing is genuinely eerie, though. Jake's first message to me is dated 25 July 2012 — the day she was found.

And I do not know whether it had anything to do with the show falling apart. The casting kept moving through August, and the production was still contacting me in 2013, so the honest answer is that I have no idea why it collapsed. Almost nobody ever finds out why.

What I actually took from it

For about three weeks in 2012 I believed I had one more real shot, and I was prepared to burn a season and a set of relationships to take it.

That is not a sad story to me. That is the correct response, and it is the same response that got me on a mound eleven months after they replaced my hip.

The show never happened. I went home, and a few weeks later I went to see a woman I had met in Mazatlán two years before, and that turned into a marriage and the next decade of my life.

I have stopped assuming I know which door was the important one.