Our short list of Future Hall of Famers Who Will Retire With the One Team:

	Cal Ripken Jr. began to look more and more like his father with each passing day of his career.

1. Cal Ripken Jr.

2. Tony Gwynn.

3. Could you give us just a second?

Not to put too fine a point on the most recent revival of the Ripken madness, but Cal's announced intention to retire at the end of this season seems like the perfect moment to reflect upon the second-most awe-inspiring streak of the man's fine baseball career: He will have begun it and ended it as an Oriole, and with nary a pockmark in the Baseball Encyclopedia in between.

Trust us on this: It ain't as easy as it looks. It may have been a smidge less difficult than, say, playing in more than 2,600 games without a day off, but in the modern arena of sports (Official motto: What's Mine Is Mine, What's Yours Is Mine), it is perfectly acceptable to walk away quietly amazed that Ripken could spend two-plus decades in the same organization and not once really seriously contemplate getting himself somewhere else.

Think about it: Wholesale ownership turnover. Generations of players come and gone. Peers, genuine competitors, fading out years before Ripken was ready to go. Managerial switches too numerous to count. Heck, Cal watched his own dad get sacked and his brother slide right out of the organization.

Ripken persevered not merely through the years of everyday play that got him to the point of challenging and then surpassing Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games record, but through the streaming-media onslaught that accompanied that walk-down in 1995. He made it through three (or four or five or six) different mini-dynasties of the Stop the Streak question, endured the needling of those who believed he was actually hurting the Orioles by insisting on playing every day.

It may not have been the common man's burden, but burden is burden. Ripken carried it, straight on through, without ever even flirting significantly with the idea of playing somewhere else.

You want to know how unusual that is? Proceed directly to the box scores. It's all in there.

The odds of a great player finding happiness, competitive satisfaction and the gold-paved road all in one place -- and not once, but over and over again for an entire career -- are just staggeringly lousy.

Mark McGwire: Nope. Barry Bonds: Two teams, with a possible third upcoming. Junior. A-Rod. Randy Johnson. Roger Clemens. Wade Boggs (retired, but we're still seeing stars over the whole Devil-Rays-cap-in-the-Hall-of-Fame thing). Sammy Sosa. Pedro. Larry Walker. The odds of a great player finding happiness, competitive satisfaction and the gold-paved road all in one place -- and not once, but over and over again for an entire career -- are just staggeringly lousy.

Ripken made his sacrifices to remain in Baltimore, not the least of which was a string of hideously bad teams -- and, probably worse, some mediocre squads that, based upon the salaries and the star power, had been projected as real contenders. Moreover, if you look at the careers of both Ripken and Gwynn (who repeatedly accepted less-than-market-value contracts to stay with the Padres, and played on a bunch of no-chance teams in return), you understand why the seamless organizational tenure is such an outdated concept.

Gwynn, of course, had a million personal and family reasons for making San Diego his place, and it is certainly so with Aberdeen's Cal Ripken Jr. and the Baltimore area, his home for life. But it is also inarguably true that, whatever the terms of those bargains struck, both Ripken and Gwynn will be rewarded for those choices with something so rare in modern baseball as to feel practically unique: Clear and total identification with the one team.

It isn't a totally lost cause out there. Barry Larkin is going to go wire to wire with the Reds. Right off the top, you can think of the two really fine Yankees players, Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams, who might wear pinstripes for the duration. Most fans of most teams have at least one promising younger or prime-career player about whom they're hopeful of seeing all the way through.

The odds say it doesn't happen, though. It's a tall stack of money and rings and "expanded professional opportunities" on the one side and some vague, elusive concept of wholeness on the other, and most observers will tell you to wise up and get over it, the identification thing. Cal Ripken Jr. just made it official that he will complete his pro baseball career entirely within the framework of a single organization. They pretty much don't make 'em like that anymore.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a Web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.