I’m saving all of my pennies to purchase Cal Ripken Jr.’s old home park. Not Oriole Park, and certainly not the long-vanished Memorial Stadium, both of which Cal called home for so long, but the estate that resembles a national park, out there in Reisterstown, where Cal lived for years and raised his family and now wishes to sell.
It’s not bad, if you like this kind of thing, and I think I do. Sitting on 25 acres of land, it’s got a full-size baseball field, an indoor basketball court, a batting cage, a pool, a pond, a personalized locker room with a massage table and an ice machine and a stainless steel tub — all just like the ones used at Memorial Stadium by the Baltimore Orioles and the old Colts.
As I said, “If you like this kind of thing …”
But while many would certainly like it, most of us can only dream about it. The place has been on the market for a while now. Originally, it was listed for $12.5 million but found no takers. The price dropped to $9.7 million last year, but still nobody stepped up to the plate.
Now, it’s selling at a no-minimum, no-reserve auction on May 12. In the meantime, they’ve begun holding open houses there, and advertising like crazy. A few Sundays ago, an ad in The Sun took up an entire real estate section front page, with color photos. Now there are TV commercials for the place, with Cal himself talking about what a nice home it is for a family.
Actually, you could raise quite a few families there, such is the size and space on the estate.
All of this is a reminder on multiple levels to Baltimoreans. It’s a reminder that Cal, for two decades a nightly fixture of our summers on the left side of the Orioles infield, is no longer our icon of endless youth.
Cal’s 57 now, and puffed-up from his playing time. His marriage ended in divorce, his kids are well into their 20s, and Cal’s moved to Annapolis, where he’s reportedly in a relationship with Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Laura Kiessling.
It’s a little disconcerting to see so much high-profile effort to sell such a spectacular spread. For all his public profile in uniform, Cal’s always been a private guy off the field. He’s approachable – but the people who handle his off-field pursuits can be notoriously secretive and constricting.
Now, he’s out there hustling real estate. The only kind of hustle we’ve ever associated him with has been baseball. This is a new definition of safe at home.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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