The Gift Is Gone
In late June 1939, America was dumbfounded at the news that Lou Gehrig―baseball’s Iron Horse―was retiring. The New York Yankees announced that July 4 would be “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day.” Gehrig had become a national icon, a hero. The Fourth of July is meant for celebrating national heroes, but this year it was a day of mourning. Gehrig was not simply retiring; he was dying.Gehrig stood at home plate. His feet close together at the corner of the chalked box, his doffed cap tucked under his right arm. His eyes focused on the ground, only poking his head up every so often to glance at the speaker or receive a gift. For the previous 16 years, Gehrig had made home plate his home. It was where his strength captivated audiences. Now, they were captivated by the tragedy that his strength had vanished.
An Unwitting Hero Is Born
Gehrig was born on June 19, 1903, to German immigrant parents, Heinrich and Christina. He was strong, approximately 14 pounds―as if born for athletics. He was the Gehrigs’ only surviving child. None of their other three children would reach the age of two. They were a close family, with an exceptionally strong mother-and-son bond.His father struggled to hold down a job, which placed much of the responsibility on his mother to make ends meet. She worked tirelessly as a maid, and she constantly encouraged Gehrig to pursue his studies. He graduated high school and attended Columbia University in hopes of becoming an engineer (more his mother’s wish than his). But growing up in Manhattan near the Polo Grounds―home of the New York Giants―baseball was his first love.
He was a star in high school. That star shone brightest before a crowd of 10,000-plus spectators at the 1920 Chicago-sponsored intercity game between Manhattan’s High School of Commerce and Chicago’s Lane Tech High School. His soaring grand slam in the ninth inning led the New York Daily News to call him “Babe Gehrig.” The moniker was not hyperbole. He would soon be considered “the Babe Ruth of the colleges.” Three years later, while Gehrig was playing baseball for Columbia University, Paul Krichell, the Yankees scout, swore he had found the “second Babe Ruth.” His discovery was well-timed, perhaps destined. Gehrig’s mother had come down with pneumonia, and with little money, the outlook was dim. Krichell offered Gehrig a contract for the six months remaining in the season of $400 a month and a $1,500 signing bonus. Gehrig signed, and his mother was able to get the treatment she needed.
“I’ll never forget the night I went home and told my mother that I was going to quit college and go into baseball,” Gehrig wrote in 1927. “She broke down and cried when I told her. She insisted that I should stay on in school.”
Competing National Heroes
The first and actual Babe Ruth entered the major leagues in 1914, less than a month before the outbreak of war in Europe. He came in as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. When the war ended, so did his days in Boston. He would become a Yankee, but no pitcher. He would become the Sultan of Swat, the Great Bambino, The Babe. The year Gehrig hit his high school grand slam, Ruth was on pace for an unprecedented 54 home runs.Just like every other kid who loved baseball, Gehrig idolized Ruth. To be signed with the Yankees and to play next to Ruth was unfathomable. To be considered The Babe’s second coming seemed almost blasphemous.
After two seasons in the minors, Gehrig was officially called up to join the Yankees full-time. For the first few months, Gehrig was a pinch-hitter and back-up position player. Yankee first baseman Wally Pipp had been a staple on the team and had recently come off his best year. When Pipp began suffering from headaches, it afforded manager Miller Huggins the opportunity he had been waiting for. On June 2, 1925, Gehrig was put at first base and would remain there for the next 14 seasons.
He would hit 20 home runs in his limited plate appearances, still good enough for third best behind Bob Meusel (33) and Ruth (25). Two seasons later, Gehrig would officially live up to the “second Babe Ruth” title as the two competed in what would become known as the Home Run Derby of 1927. Gehrig’s charge to become the season’s home run king pushed Ruth to do something never done before: hit 60 home runs. Gehrig would finish with 47. The Yankees would cap the year by sweeping the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series.
Riding the high of such an immaculate season, Ruth and Gehrig set out west to spread the good news of baseball on a barnstorming tour. MLB had yet to settle west of the Mississippi, and the two towering giants of the game seemed fantastical. They crushed baseballs, signed autographs, and took photographs with fans of all ages. On the stat sheet, Gehrig seemed like a replication of Ruth. Off paper, the two were polar opposites, as if summoned from different planets. Ruth was built like “toothpicks attached to a piano,” while Gehrig was of “perfect physical condition.” Ruth lived loudly to the point of collapse, while Gehrig lived modestly and avoided the nightlife. Ruth negotiated major contracts, while Gehrig signed whatever the Yankees offered. Ruth was surrounded by women, while Gehrig lived with his parents until he married in 1933. Ruth would restlessly reflect the spendthrift nature of the Roaring ’20s, while Gehrig would exemplify the resolve and frugality of the Depression Era. The Gehrig mythology was hardly of his own creation; but it was created nonetheless.
The Legendary Streak
Gehrig defied the improbable by playing in 2,130 consecutive games. He played sick and injured. Once, he took a fastball to the head, knocking him unconscious for five minutes. He started the next day.In mid-June 1933, he was asked by a sportswriter if he knew how many games he had played in a row. He was oblivious to the number. The answer was 1,250. The record of 1,307 was held by former Yankee shortstop Everett “Deacon” Scott. A few months later, that record would fall, earning him the preternatural moniker of “Iron Horse.”
As Busch made clear, it was not about the reactions of the crowds, though he did appreciate them. It was simply that he enjoyed playing the game.
The streak could not have come at a better time for a country in need of inspiration. America was in the throes of the Great Depression, and Gehrig was a man who, as teammate and Hall-of-Famer Bill Dickey said, “just went out and did his job every day.”
His hands provided the best example of his grit and determination. His post-career X-rays showed that he had broken every finger at least once and that he had sustained at least 17 fractures of varying degrees. During the last three weeks of his best season, in which he batted .379 and hit 41 home runs and drove in 174 runs, he played with a broken finger. While having surgery on his finger, the doctors found bone chips in his left elbow, which also required surgery.
The lore around Gehrig and other greats grew as Christy Walsh, baseball’s first sports agent, began a marketing campaign. He hired approximately 30 sports journalists to ghostwrite for players, like Ruth, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Gehrig.
Only recently were the Gehrig columns unearthed by historian Alan Gaff. Though the players, Ruth in particular, never wrote and possibly never read a word of their ghostwritten columns, Gaff argues that if Gehrig didn’t write them, he definitely dictated them. As Gaff said of Gehrig’s “rags-to-riches” tale, “The words are all his.”
It was during the fabled 1927 season that Gehrig wrote his syndicated columns for Walsh. In one of the last ones, he wrote, “Of course, I am just a kid at the game, and I realize it. I still have much to learn, and I hope I still have many years in which to learn it. As for the years that lie ahead, I can only hope for the best.”
As he typed or simply spoke, Gehrig was at the height of his powers. Lou Gehrig and baseball seemed an eternal tandem. “Gehrig has everything in his favor―power, youth, perfect physical condition [and] unbounded confidence.”
Teammates, like George Selkirk, felt similarly. “Lou Gehrig … seemed so durable that many of us thought he could have played forever.”
The Myth Becomes Tragedy
On May 8 of his historical 1933 season, Gehrig proposed to Eleanor Grace Twitchell, and they would wed on September 29. It was a match made in heaven.The following season, and Ruth’s last one with the Yankees, Gehrig would lead the league in nearly every major category: home runs (49), RBIs (166), batting average (.363), on-base percentage (.465), slugging (.706), and total bases (409). His second MVP came in 1936, along with a World Series win. He and the Yankees would win the following two World Series, but during the 1938 season, something changed in the man who would’ve played forever.
Eleanor would later reflect that “somewhere in the creeping mystery of that summer, Lou lost the power.”
His numbers for 1938 (.295, 29, and 114, batting average, home runs, and RBIs, respectively) were by no means pedestrian, but for Gehrig they were a substantial drop-off. The Iron Horse was running out of steam.
During the 1932 World Series, Ruth had miraculously “called his shot.” Was it possible that the first Yankee demigod had predicted his successor’s demise?
In 1937, Ruth told reporters, “I think Lou’s making one of the worst mistakes a ballplayer can make by trying to keep up that ‘iron man’ stuff. ... He’s already cut three years off his baseball life with it. … The next two years will tell Gehrig’s fate.”
Two years later, Ruth’s words proved prophetic. Spring training would indicate as much when he swung through 19 straight pitches. The newest Yankee hero, Joe DiMaggio, took note.
“They were all fastballs, too, the kind of pitches that Lou would normally hit into the next county. You could see his timing was way off. Then he had trouble catching balls at first base. Sometimes he didn’t move his hands fast enough to protect himself.”
After eight games and 33 plate appearances, resulting in only four hits, the Iron Horse took himself out of the lineup. On May 2, the streak ended.
Just as Ruth involuntarily abdicated the Yankee throne for Gehrig, Gehrig would abdicate for DiMaggio. But as Ruth was able to check himself into another baseball club, Gehrig would check himself into the Mayo Clinic in mid-June to undergo a barrage of tests.
A Hero Says Goodbye
The news shocked the baseball world and the nation as a whole. During “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day,” the Yankees announced that Gehrig’s number 4 would be retired. His was the first number to ever be retired in baseball.On that hot July 4 afternoon, between the double-header against the Washington Senators, Gehrig hovered around home plate—the glory faded, the immortality stripped away. Members of the vaunted 1927 Yankee ball club lined up on one side, the current ball club on the other. Wally Pipp, the man Gehrig had replaced at first base 14 seasons prior, was there. Everett Scott, the man whose consecutive game streak Gehrig had broken, was there. Postmaster General James Farley spoke. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia spoke. Manager Joe McCarthy fought through tears to commend the great hero and express his love and admiration. Groundskeepers and stadium workers placed gifts at his feet. His fellow teammates presented him with a silver trophy honoring their “leader” and the “idol of cheering millions.” Seventy-one-year-old Yankee President Ed Barrow stood by his side, providing a stable arm and shoulder for the ailing hero. Sixty thousand fans wept, with more listening in alongside the stadium and in the streets. Babe Ruth stepped to the microphone and made a direct correlation between Gehrig and the home of gods when he suggested Gehrig should head to the mountains and catch every fish there is.
As sports journalist Shirley Povich recalled, Gehrig almost went without giving a speech. As the ceremony was coming to a close, a chant went up from the crowd, “We want Lou!” It would prove to be his final display of all that he embodied over the years: perseverance, strength, and courage. Or as Zeigler put it, “the aspirations of a society.” This moment at home plate would be more memorable than any of his previous. He would give the greatest speech in the annals of sports history.
“For the past two weeks you’ve been reading about a bad break,” he began. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
He expressed his appreciation for his teammates; owner Jacob Ruppert, who had passed away earlier that year; Ed Barrow; his first manager Miller Huggins; Joe McCarthy; the fans; the Yankees’ archrival New York Giants; his mother and father; and his wife Eleanor, “who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed.”
“So I close in saying that I may have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”
On June 12, the day Gehrig played his last baseball game (an exhibition), the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown hosted its first induction ceremony “enshrining such living immortals as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson.” On December 7, 1939, the Baseball Writers Association of America voted unanimously to waive the five-year waiting period and elect Gehrig into the great Hall.
Eighteen months later on June 2, 1941―16 years to the day Gehrig began his streak―he would pass on into eternity. Babe and his wife Claire were second behind Barrow to arrive at the Gehrigs’ house upon hearing of his passing.
Gehrig would be buried in Kensico Cemetery and would join or be joined by Barrow; team owner Jacob Ruppert; the scout who discovered him, Paul Krichell; and his college baseball coach, Andy Coakley. Babe Ruth would be laid to rest just next door to Gehrig at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery. Most fittingly, Gehrig―one of baseball’s immortals and America’s culture hero―with his name and bust already enshrined in the great Hall, was buried in the small town of Valhalla.
Lou Gehrig’s Farewell Speech
“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
“When you look around, wouldn’t you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such fine-looking men as are standing in uniform in this ballpark today? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.
“When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift—that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter—that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body—it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed—that’s the finest I know.
“So, I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.”
The poem on the silver trophy written by New York Times sports columnist John Kieran:
To LOU GEHRIG
We’ve been to the wars together; We took our foes as they came: And always you were the leader, And ever you played the game. Idol of cheering millions: Records are yours by sheaves: Iron of frame they hailed you, Decked you with laurel leaves. But higher than that we hold you, We who have known you best; Knowing the way you came through Every human test. Let this be a silent token Of lasting friendship’s gleam And all that we’ve left unspoken. Your Pals of the Yankee Team.
Lou Gehrig Day
Beginning on June 2, 2021, Major League Baseball now celebrates Lou Gehrig Day to celebrate the player and to spread awareness about ALS.
