There is nothing shocking about the announcement of Cal Ripken Jr.'s retirement. His days of greatness are long past. Time to move on? Definitely.

	Ripken won two MVP awards and has been selected to the All-Star team 19 times.

The only shock is that he has now set himself up for a farewell tour, which seems so out of character. Every major-league team and city will want to honor him. He'll be like Larry Bird, who also had to endure a long goodbye. Those guys just wanted to play. Everything else was in the way.

Ripken gave baseball a lot of things, but one of the most valuable was how he helped the game recover from the strike of 1994. He sensed that the game needed a boost and that the gulf between players and fans needed to be bridged. So Cal would patiently sign autographs and interact with the fans a little more than he used to. Because it was the right thing to do.

Then in 1995, when he broke Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played, he made the final repairs on baseball's relationship with the fans. The whole country waited and watched for him to break that astonishing record. President Clinton and Vice President Gore even showed up the day the record fell. Ripken reminded us that night why we love baseball.

For some perspective on that streak of 2,632 consecutive games played, consider these two facts:

Last year, five guys played in all 162 games. The current active consecutive games played streak is held by the Dodgers' Shawn Green at 333.

What do you think? Is the record safe?

To me, Ripken is a first ballot Hall of Famer even if he had taken a night off in 1987 or whenever. He changed our perception of what we expect from a shortstop. He was a wonderful fielder who was always in the right position. He got to all the balls, deep in the hole or scooting up the middle. And his arm finished the play. But his offensive production really changed the position. His power numbers were simply not expected from a middle-of-the-diamond defender. At 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, he was not the prototypical shortstop at the beginning of his career. Now, with Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Nomar Garciaparra dominating from shortstop, it is clear that Ripken became the prototype.

My favorite moment of Ripken's career, and the one that tells you the most about his stature, occurred in the fall of 1998 when he decided to end his consecutive-games-played streak. He did it quietly -- or at least as quietly as he could. The game was in Baltimore, so he would have been at third when the game started. When he wasn't there, the Yankees stood on the steps of the visitors' dugout and applauded.

Ironically, Ripken's last game will be at Yankee Stadium, the baseball home of Lou Gehrig. One gets the feeling that if Gehrig could have picked a guy to break his record, it would have been Cal Ripken Jr.