Lou Gehrig, nicknamed the Iron Horse, is one of the most legendary players in the history of baseball. He is most famous for his streak of over 2,000 consecutive games played that stood as a Major League record for decades. He’s also well-known for the grace displayed during his battle and eventually tragic death due to ALS, now commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Even after his diagnosis, Gehrig considered himself the luckiest man alive, and after his death he would become the first player in baseball history to have his uniform number retired.
Lou Gehrig’s Early Life
Heinrich Ludwig Gehrig was born in 1903 to a pair of German immigrants living in Manhattan in New York City. The second of four children, Gehrig is the only one who survived to adulthood. His father held jobs as a metal worker but also was an alcoholic. His mother, a maid, worked as the primary breadwinner of the family.
Gehrig played for the high school baseball team, which, in 1920, travelled to Chicago to play another high school team there. Gehrig made headlines for hitting a grand slam in the last few innings of the game, and the papers would hail him as “The Babe Ruth of the High Schools.”
Gehrig attended college at Columbia University on a football scholarship. He also tried to play professional baseball for the Hartford Senators during the summers, but knew he couldn’t play college baseball if caught. Gehrig ended up playing under a pseudonym, Henry Lewis, to have the best of both worlds. However, officials discovered the ruse and banned from collegiate baseball for a year.
In 1923, after his sophomore year of college, Gehrig dropped out and joined the New York Yankees. However, for the next two years, he shuffled back and forth between the Yankees and the minor league Hartford Senators. With the Yankees, he played behind Wally Pipp, one of the best power hitters of his generation.
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Lou Gehrig’s MLB Career
Gehrig made his Major League debut on June 15, 1923. However, he played sparingly in 1923 and 1924, including getting left off the 1923 World Series team. But things changed forever in the 1925 season.
So, the story goes, on June 2nd, 1925, the Yankees’ first baseman, Wally Pipp, suffered from a headache and asked for some aspirin. The manager decided to keep him out of the game, and sent in Gehrig instead, thus kicking off his career.
However, most experts now consider this a fabrication. The manager kept Pipp out of the game because he wasn’t playing well. Later in the season, he was hit in the head with a baseball while practicing, went to the hospital for a week, and was mostly sidelined for the rest of the year. The headache story is likely a merging of the two anecdotes. That said, Pipp himself gladly helped to spread the myth.
Gehrig, of course, went on playing in every game – 2,130 consecutive games, holding the record until Cal Ripken, Jr. surpassed it in 1995. Gehrig’s streak earned him the nickname “the Iron Horse” due to his ability to play no matter what, even when injured.
His accomplishments are remarkable.
- He retired with a .340 batting average
- He hit more than 40 home runs in five seasons
- He drove in at least 100 RBI in 13 seasons
- In 1927, the year he won his first MVP award, Gehrig hit 47 home runs with an astonishing 173 RBI
- In 1931, he hit 46 home runs with 185 RBI – but finished second in MVP balloting to pitcher Lefty Grove
- He made the All-Star team seven straight years between 1933 and 1939
- He won six World Series as a key member of the Yankees
That lineup included Babe Ruth, whose flamboyance contrasted with Gehrig’s reserved demeanor. The two were friends for a short time, though for a variety of reasons (mostly involving Ruth’s second wife and Gehrig’s mother) their relationship would sour over the years.
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Lou Gehrig’s Retirement and Death
In 1939, Gehrig’s performance suddenly began to deteriorate, and soon he found himself having difficulty functioning not just on the baseball field but in his everyday life. After a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, doctors diagnosed Gehrig with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a mysterious but fatal disease that gradually severs the nervous system’s ability to control the body’s muscles. In the United States, ALS is frequently known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
This illness forced Gehrig to retire. On July 4th, 1939, the Yankees held a ceremony at the stadium to honor one of their greatest players. Here, Gehrig gave a short but moving speech about how his fatal illness was a “bad break,” but even though he was dying, he considered himself to be the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
However, there’s no exact record of the entire speech; people have pieced together the commonly accepted version from various news accounts. Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, claimed that the speech was so moving that the journalists were too caught up in their emotions to write it all down. Other reporters noted that people openly wept in the stands.
At the end, Ruth hugged Gehrig, perhaps healing a rift that had lasted about five years.
Gehrig would spend the last year of his life working as a New York City Parole Commissioner. He succumbed to his illness in 1941, at the age of 37. The Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him the year he retired, and after his death he became the first player in baseball history to have his uniform number, 4, retired from a lineup.
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