Cal Ripken Jr. hit a home run with Bakersfield Business Conference attendees Saturday.

Ripken asked the audience to pretend that he had just hit a home run and gone into the dugout. He wanted the audience to ask him for a curtain call. After going backstage, he ran out arms outstretched above him just like he did after he broke Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played.

On cue, the audience gave Ripken a standing ovation while waving their American flags. “Thank you very much. It still gives me the same kind of goosebumps, I tell ya,” he said.

Ripken, 43, spent 21 years in the major leagues, all with the Baltimore Orioles, in which he played 2,632 straight games from May 30, 1982, to Sept. 19, 1998, breaking Gehrig’s record.

Since retiring from baseball, he has been concentrating on operating his businesses.

“I guess you can look at me and call me a rookie in the business world,” Ripken said.

He tries to apply what he learned in his 21 years of playing baseball to the business world. Leadership is one quality that Ripken said can be applied.

“I am interested in the kind of leadership that sets the map, that sets the direction,” he said. “Without good direction, you don’t have anything.”

Teamwork is another important topic in business. After all, we all can’t do it by ourselves. We all are part of some sort of team in business.”

According to Ripken, there are two parts of a team, the individual and the team.

“The hard part is how do you take all those individual talents and pull them together and act as a team,” he said.

His answer is everyone needs to connect by interacting with each other. It’s important in all team situations to go the extra mile and connect one to one.”