Ripken: 'I'm ready to do other things'

April 18 -- Cal Ripken Jr., who holds baseball's record for consecutive games played, will retire at the end of this season, his 21st with the Baltimore Orioles, the team said Monday night.

Ripken, who will turn 41 in August, said he wants to spend more time with his family and devote more energy to his youth baseball endeavors in his hometown of Aberdeen, Md. He also said he hopes eventually to run a major league franchise.

"It's inevitable that you can't play forever," the third baseman told The Washington Post in its Tuesday editions. "I've maximized my window of opportunity as well as anyone. (Baseball) has given me a lot of joy and happiness and satisfaction. I'm proud of what I've been able to do.

"But I'm ready to do other things. I'm ready to be home and be available to my kids and family. .. I'm sure I'll miss certain parts of (playing). But when you put your heart and soul into it at the level I have every single day, you can minimize some of your regrets."

Ripken will finish this season, which almost certainly will play out as a sort of farewell tour, including an Oriole Park at Camden Yards finale Sept. 23 against the New York Yankees. His last game, barring injury, figures to be at Yankee Stadium in New York on Sept. 30, which means Ripken, in a bit of historical symmetry, will end his career on the same field where Lou Gehrig gave his famed farewell speech in 1939.

Ripken said he formulated the decision two or three weeks ago, but held on to it until now "just to make sure" it was not a fleeting feeling.

"I said early in the spring that when I decide, I don't think I will keep it a secret," he told the Post. "I'm not doing this to have a farewell tour or to have people look at it as their last chance to see me. What I really want to see happen for the rest of the year is to thoroughly enjoy the game, what I've been doing my whole life, for what it is. I want to just enjoy the freedom of just coming to the ballpark and enjoying it."

Gehrig, one of baseball's all-time greats, and Ripken are inextricably tied. Ripken broke Gehrig's "unbreakable" record of playing in 2,130 consecutive games on Sept. 6, 1995, and went on to play in 2,632 straight games -- almost 17 seasons without missing one -- before voluntarily ending the streak on Sept. 20, 1998.

Ripken said his decision to walk away was not related to his performance this season, the least productive of his career. Ripken is batting .210 --