Bob Considine
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive ballgames for the New York Yankees from 1 June 1925 to May 1939, when his career was cut short by a form of spine paralysis. This became known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”, chiefly in tribute to the valiant way he faced his demise.
The Yanks won easily in 1938, Lou’s fifteenth year with the ball team. They went on to demolish the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. But Lou’s contribution was modest. During the regular season he hit .295, a highly acceptable figure in today’s baseball, but a source of great embarrassment for Gehrig in 1938. It was the first time he had hit under .300 since joining the team. DiMag had beat him in home run production the year before. Lou played through the Series against the Cubs, but the four hits he got in fourteen times at bat were all singles.
The first hint I had that Lou’s problem was more sinister than a routine slump that year was provided by a wild-and-woolly Washington pitcher named Joe Krakauskas. After a game at Yankee Stadium he told Shirley Povich of the Washington Post and me that a frightening thing had happened to him while pitching against Gehrig. Joe had uncorked his high inside fast ball with the expectation that Lou would move back and take it, as a ball. Instead, Krakauskas said, Lou – a renowned judge of balls and strikes – moved closer to the plate.
“My pitch went between his wrists,” Joe said, still shaken. “Scared the hell outta me. Something’s wrong with Gehrig . . .”
Lou’s salary was cut three thousand dollars a year before he went south with the Yankees in 1939. There was no beef from him. He had had a bum year, for him, so the cut was deserved. He’d come back. After all, the Babe played twenty-two years without ever taking good care of himself . . .
Joe McCarthy started Gehrig at first base on opening day of the 1939 season, contemptuous of a fan who, a few days before in an exhibition game at Ebbets Field, had bawled, in earshot of both of them, “Hey, Lou, why don’t you give yourself up? What do you want McCarthy to do, burn that uniform off you?”
Lou hobbled as far into the 1939 season as May 2. Then, on the morning of the first game of a series against Detroit, he called McCarthy on the hotel’s house phone and asked to see him.
“I’m benching myself, Joe,” he said, once in the manager’s suite. McCarthy did not speak.
“For the good of the team,” Lou went on. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for the kindness you’ve shown me, and your patience . . . I just can’t seem to get going. The time has come for me to quit.”
McCarthy snorted and told him to forget the consecutive-games-played record, take a week or two off, and he’d come back strong.
Gehrig shook his head. “I can’t go on, Joe,” he said. “Johnny Murphy told me so.”
McCarthy cursed the relief pitcher.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Joe,” Gehrig said. “All the boys have been swell to me. Nobody’s said a word that would hurt my feelings. But Johnny said something the other day that made me know it was time for me to get out of the lineup . . . and all he meant to do was to be encouraging.”
McCarthy, still angry, asked for details.
“You remember the last play in that last game we played at the Stadium?” Lou asked. “A ball was hit between the box and first base. Johnny fielded it, and I got back to first just in time to take the throw from him.”
“So?”
“So, well, I had a hard time getting back there, Joe,” Lou said. “I should have been there in plenty of time. I made the put-out, but when Johnny and I were trotting to the bench he said, ‘Nice play, Lou.’ I knew then it was time to quit. The boys were beginning to feel sorry for me.”
At the urging of his devoted wife, Eleanor, Lou checked into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In due time he emerged with a bleak “To Whom It May Concern” document signed by the eminent Dr Harold C. Harbeing:
“This is to certify that Mr Lou Gehrig has been under examination at the Mayo Clinic from June 13 to June 19, 1939, inclusive. After a careful and complete examination, it was found that he is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This type of illness involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system and, in lay terms, is known as a form of chronic poliomyelitis – infantile paralysis.
“The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player, inasmuch as it is advisable that he conserve his muscular energy. He could, however, continue in some executive capacity.”
Lou returned to the team for the remainder of the 1939 season, slowly suiting up each day, taking McCarthy’s lineups to home plate to deliver to the umpires before each game. It was his only duty as captain. It was another winning season for the Yankees, but hardly for Lou. The short walk from the dugout to home plate and back exhausted him. But more exhausting was a cruel (but mostly true) story in the New York Daily News to the effect that some of his teammates had become afraid of drinking out of the Yankee dugout’s drinking fountain after Lou used it.
“Gehrig Appreciation Day” (July 4, 1939) was one of those emotional salutes which only baseball seems able to produce: packed stands, the prospect of a doubleheader win over the Washington Senators, a peppery speech from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the presence of Yankee fan and Gehrig buff Postmaster General Jim Farley, and the array of rheumatic and fattening old teammates of yesteryear. And The Family in a sidelines box. Presents and trophies filled a table.
For Lou, now beginning to hollow out from his disease, one basic ingredient was missing. Babe Ruth wasn’t there. Babe, the one he wanted to be there more than he wanted any of his old buddies, had not answered the invitations or the management’s phone calls.
Then, with little warning, a great commotion and rustle and rattle in the stadium. The Babe was entering. He magnetized every eye, activated every tongue. Lou wheezed a prayer of thanksgiving.
The ceremony between games of the doubleheader was not calculated to be anything requiring a stiff upper lip. Joe McCarthy’s voice cracked as he began his prepared tribute. He promptly abandoned his script and blurted, “Don’t let’s cry about this . . .” which had just the opposite effect among the fans.
When Lou’s turn came, he, too, pocketed the small speech he had worked on the night before. He swallowed a few times to make his voice stronger, then haltingly said:
“They say I’ve had a bad break. But when the office force and the groundkeepers and even the Giants from across the river, whom we’d give our right arm to beat in the World Series – when they remember you, that’s something . . . and when you have a wonderful father and mother who worked hard to give you an education . . . and a wonderful wife . . .”
His words began to slither when he tried to say something about Jake Ruppert and Miller Huggins, dead, and McCarthy, Barrow and Bill Dickey, alive.
But nobody missed his ending.
“I may have been given a bad break,” he concluded, briefly touching his nose as if to discourage a sniff, “but I have an awful lot to live for. With all this, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Babe, the irrepressible, stepped forward, embraced him and blubbered, an act that turned out to be epidemic.
Gehrig made the trip to Cincinnati that fall to watch his old club clobber the Reds in the World Series. He had a good time, but some of his friends found it a troubling experience being around him. Going out to dinner one night, with Dickey at his side, Lou staggered and was on the brink of plunging down the long flight of marble steps that led from the lobby of the Netherlands Plaza hotel to the street level. Dicky made one of the better catches of his life and saved Lou from a possibly fatal fall.
Then there was a scene on the train that brought the victorious Yanks back to New York. Lou spotted his friend Henry McLemore of the United Press and invited him into his drawing room for a drink. A table had been set up. Lou slowly but surely put ice in the glasses, then reached for the partly filled fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label. He wrapped a bony hand around the cork and tried to pull it loose. It was not in tightly, but he did not have the strength to loosen it. Henry stopped listening to what Lou was saying about the Series. He was mesmerized by Lou’s struggle, and too reverent of the man to offer to help. Finally, Lou raised the bottle to his lips, closed his teeth on the cork, and let his elbows drop to the table. The cork stayed in his teeth. He removed it, poured the drinks, and went on with what he had been saying.
Henry got very drunk that night.
Just before he died on June 2, 1941, Lou called me from his office. Mayor La Guardia had appointed him to the New York City Parole Board to work with and encourage youthful law-breakers. Gehrig threw himself into the work with everything he had, or had left. He also kept up a lively interest in research into the disease that had driven him out of baseball.
It was a note about the latter that prompted his phone call.
“I’ve got some good news for you,” he said. “Looks like the boys in the labs might have come up with a real breakthrough. They’ve got some new serum that they’ve tried on ten of us who have the same problem. And, you know something? It seems to be working on nine out of the ten. How about that?” He was elated.
I tried not to ask the question, but it came out anyway, after a bit.
“How about you, Lou?”
Lou said, “Well, it didn’t work on me. But how about that for an average? – nine out of ten! Isn’t that great?”
I said yes, it was great.
So was he.