Business View Magazine - January 2024

Retired since 2001, the Hall of Fame shortstop has authored books, established charities, owned several minor league baseball teams, and founded the Ripken Experience, a group of sports complexes that allows young athletes to play their favorite sport in replicas of some of the most notable major league ballparks in America while competing in tournaments and learning how to improve their game. Ripken Experience complexes are located in Elizabethtown, KY, Myrtle Beach SC, Cooperstown, NY, Cedar Point, OH, Pigeon Forge, TN, and the flagship destination in Aberdeen, MD, Cal’s hometown. Ripken Experience Aberdeen contains 9 fields, one of which is a two-thirds replica of Oriole Park at Camden Yards with a 2,500 seating capacity, 15 batting cages, 16 bull-pens, and 1 warm-up area. In 2002, Ripken purchased the Utica Blue Sox, renamed the team the IronBirds, and moved them to the newly-opened Ripken Stadium, which sits right next door to the Ripken Experience in Aberdeen. The Ironbirds are a Class High-A affiliate of the Orioles and play a 132-game season in the 12-member South Atlantic League. In 2015, Leidos, an American defense, aviation, information technology, and biomedical research company, secured the naming rights for the 6,300-seat Ripken Stadium, which then became known as Leidos Field. A SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION Jack Gumbert is a Leidos Vice President whose expertise is program oversight for some of the company’s Department of Defense contracts. He and several hundred of his Leidos colleagues work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), one of the country’s pre-eminent military research, development, and testing institutions. He explains how the firm decided to become part of the Ripken baseball universe. “Back in 2013, our company, Leidos, was originally known as SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation).The decision was made to spin off a part of the company and allow it to keep the SAIC name, and then rebrand the major part of the company as Leidos. Leidos is the root word of kaleidoscope, which in Latin means ‘to collaborate.’This rebranding 199 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 11, ISSUE 01 LEIDOS FI ELD AT RI PKEN STADIUM