2nd to Ruth, 2nd to Ripken
By Shirley Povich
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 06, 1995
It will happen tonight. The unimaginable, the unthinkable will happen.
The baseball record long deemed as the most defiant to challenge, the most unassailable, the most unapproachable, will yield to the unstoppable 13-year assault of Cal Ripken.
Cal Ripken, who reported for work in the Orioles' infield every game day since May 30, 1982. When he lopes out to his shortstop position tonight, he will be measured for baseball immortality as the man who played in 2,131 consecutive major league games, upstaging the record set by Lou Gehrig that stood, decade after decade, for 56 years.
In anticipation of The Day, Ripken has been celebrated for weeks and months by America's communication industry, and properly so. All of this couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
But it is also proper to look at the obverse side of the consecutive-games coin; the one that bears a figure of Henry Louis Gehrig.
There, too, was a nice guy, the one who set the record that Ripken broke. Lou Gehrig can go proudly into history as No. 2 in the category he alone made famous.
In truth, when measured against Cal Ripken, Lou Gehrig was much the better ballplayer, one who had a greater impact on the game. He was more famed for his bat than is Ripken for his glove. It was recently noted that Ripken has hit more home runs than any shortstop who ever lived. Interesting. Also interesting, Gehrig hit 170 more home runs than Ripken. His stats will tell the story of Lou Gehrig, superstar.
And the Lou Gehrig story otherwise is a fascination.
In the beginning, there was nothing to suggest that Lou Gehrig would be any kind of baseball hero. Unlike Ripken, who was born into a baseball family, his father a minor league player and big league manager and coach, Gehrig was the fat little son of poor German immigrants in New York, his father a sometime-tinsmith and odd-job seeker, and his mother a cook in the Columbia University fraternity houses.
As a beefy high school kid, baseball was not in Lou Gehrig's thinking. He dallied with a football career. His size dictated he would be the fullback on his school team. Helped by friends of his mother who enjoyed her cooking, Gehrig gained a football scholarship at Columbia. But in his second year, he gave up football for baseball, with ambitions as a pitcher.
Young Gehrig's turns at bat doomed his pitching career. When his baseball coach marveled at the distance of the big kid's swats, he wanted him in the lineup every game and played him in the outfield and at first base. But Lou sneaked away sometimes to play with a Hartford, Conn., pro team under an assumed name, and it was then that Walter Johnson, pitching in an exhibition, saw Gehrig bat, and described to me his first impression of the young first baseman.
"I'm out there on the mound," Johnson said, "and this young fellow with his sleeves rolled up was showing me big fists and arms, but it looked to me like I was facing a blacksmith with a bat in his hands."
One of baseball's biggest boo-boos was committed by the New York Giants of that era. They had a claim on Gehrig but let him slip out of their system, enabling the Yankees to take a chance on the big kid who could hit the ball so far out of the park, if only sometimes. With young Lou scrimping for money to send to his needy parents, the Yankees signed him at a $3,000 salary and a $1,500 bonus, left him in Hartford for two years, and called him up for good in 1925.
In June of that year came the day of the oft- repeated story of how Wally Pipp, the Yankees' regular first baseman, complained of a headache and asked out of the lineup. Manager Miller Huggins wrote Gehrig's name into the lineup and Pipp never started another game for the Yankees.
Young Gehrig, who turned 22 that month, began to show an aptitude for playing first base and he cut an imposing figure out there with his broad shoulders and twin-oak legs and unique sprightliness. He quickly asserted himself with his bat from the left side, a line drive hitter.
For the next 15 years—most of them batting cleanup behind Babe Ruth—he would be a member of the Yankees' Murderers' Row. They would win eight pennants, seven World Series, Ruth hitting the most homers, Gehrig most always No. 2. He gave life to the tale that it was Gehrig's fate to play in the shadow of Babe Ruth.
It was with easy grace that Gehrig accepted his lot as No. 2 to Ruth. Whereas the Babe would arrive at Yankee Stadium on game day by bringing his convertible to a screeching stop at the main gate, the shy Gehrig parked his own car three blocks from the park and found his way into the stadium through a side gate.
Let there be no misunderstanding about the eminence of Lou Gehrig as a big league ballplayer. Even Ruth never hit four homers in a single game, as Gehrig did at Shibe Park on June 3, 1932. He also holds the record for home runs with the bases loaded, 23; three times he led the league in homers, although Ruth did it 12 times (they tied in 1931 with 46). A difference was that the Babe hit those majestic sky-high shots while Lou's signature was those fierce line drives that so often hit the fences.
For all his fame, there is no sadder tale in baseball than the story of Lou Gehrig, who was cut down at the age of 37 by the disease to which he gave his name, "Lou Gehrig's Disease," a progressive and deadly sickness that claims the strength and mobility of its victims. It was the highest irony that it happened to a man who was a physical giant and who in baseball had displayed more stamina than any man who had ever played the game.
A case could also be made that no player suffered so many slings and arrows of outrageous destiny as haunted Gehrig in his baseball career. In addition to his lot of playing in the shadow of superstar Babe Ruth, and his fate as a victim of a rare disease, Gehrig was star-crossed and jinxed in so many other ways that denied him top notice.
Some of them can be cited:
The day he hit those four home runs in Philadelphia, Gehrig again finished second in the baseball news. The top story of the day was the retirement of John McGraw after 60 years as the legendary manager of the New York Giants.
When Gehrig died on June 2, 1941, certainly his passing called for top billing in the next day's obituaries. 'Twas not to be. Germany's detested Kaiser Wilhelm died in Holland the same day, and the Gehrig obit was reduced to number two.
Against the Cardinals in the 1928 World Series, Lou amassed a .545 batting average, a figure that would usually lead all the batters. Uh-uh. In that same series, Babe Ruth intruded again, hitting an incredible .625.
And in that legendary 1932 World Series game against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field, Lou Gehrig banged two homers, usually worthy of top notice. But Lou had chosen the wrong setting, and it got scant mention in accounts of that game because that was the day of Ruth's famous "called shot" against Charley Root. Incidentally, the Babe, like Gehrig, also hit two homers.
Back in 1931 Gehrig tied Ruth for the lead in homers (46). But Gehrig actually hit 47 that season and was denied one of them. This caused one of the most intriguing stories in my baseball memory.
The scene was Griffith Stadium. Two out, Gehrig at bat, Lyn Lary on first base for the Yankees, Harry Rice, a sometimes-clowning center fielder, was out there for the Senators.
Gehrig hit a soaring fly ball toward the empty center field bleachers, and Lary took off, head down. Center fielder Rice, playing close to the wall, didn't bother to chase the hit, which would land in the empty bleachers a dozen rows up. But when the ball rebounded in a high arc back toward the field, Rice reached upward and caught it in a grandstand stunt with the bleachers still at his back.
It was at this point that Lary, now nearing third base, looked up to see Rice making the catch. Assuming he had just seen the third out, Lary raced across third base into the Yankee dugout, unseen by manager-third base coach Joe McCarthy, who, exulting in Gehrig's homer, had already headed for the Yankees' bench to celebrate.
Gehrig, meanwhile, rounded the bases and continued home, unaware of the mix-up at third. As he reached the plate, Gehrig was declared out for passing the runner.
Home run No. 47 was reduced to a triple, costing him the home run title that year. Gehrig luck.
There was more ill luck for Gehrig. Finally, when Babe Ruth retired in 1935, Gehrig would surely succeed him in the role of number one Yankee. But, curses! Along came a rookie named Joe DiMaggio, who led the league with 46 homers in 1937 and became its hitting leader in 1939 and 1940. Gehrig was still runner-up.
Gehrig did become uniquely famous for one off-field incident in the 1930s. He had signed a radio contract to promote the boxed cereal Huskies, which was challenging Wheaties in the market. In a radio interview, when the announcer, also working for Huskies, asked him the leading question, "Tell me, Lou, to what do you owe your tremendous strength?" Gehrig blurted "Wheaties," thereby committing a monumental goof.
Lou Gehrig was 34 when the calamity began to appear, late in the 1937 season. He was oddly slow around the bag, no longer making the unassisted play on ground balls, but waiting for the pitcher to get to the bag, and he was no longer spry on the bases, and there were some fumbles he wouldn't ordinarily make. A baseball writer, unaware of his disease, unwittingly called him a malingerer.
He gave it up in 1939 after playing only eight games for the Yankees. He sought out McCarthy, his manager, in his Detroit hotel room and said: "I'm a detriment to the team. I can't make the plays anymore. I'm quitting for the sake of the team."
That day he did appear on the field, given the chore by McCarthy of handing the Yankees' lineup to the umpires. When he failed to appear at first base, the Detroit crowd sat up to chant "We want Lou," but it was all over. Gehrig racked up his consecutive-games streak at 2,130.
What had gone wrong with the most durable player in baseball? The man who went to work every game day for 15 years was now an invalid.
The explanation came on his 36th birthday in June 1939 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. America was to learn that Gehrig was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, "a disease of the motor pathways and nervous system. . . . Mr. Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player." Gehrig had become the most celebrated victim of a rare disease.
Steadily, Gehrig lost more control of his movements. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia gained approval when he appointed Gehrig to the city's parole board. But Gehrig even found it difficult to work a pen. The 200-pound power hitter had wasted to 150 pounds. His time was drawing near.
It was the Fourth of July, 1939, two years before his death, that Gehrig figured in one of the most remembered of all baseball scenes, at Yankee Stadium between games of a doubleheader with the Senators.
Wearing the Yankee pinstripes for the last time, Gehrig was led onto the field to receive the tributes from thousands. Led to a microphone at home plate, Gehrig was accompanied by Babe Ruth, who draped a sympathetic and comforting arm across Lou's shoulder. Other members of the famous 1927 Yankee team—Bob Meusel, Herb Pennock, George Pipgras and Joe Dugan—had responded to the Day while both the Yankees and Washington players lined up in respectful order. In the stands, 61,808 fans chanted at intervals, "We want Lou!"
Sid Mercer, the master of ceremonies, sensed that Gehrig was too choked up to respond to the many tributes, and announced, "I shall not ask Lou Gehrig to make a speech. I do not believe that I should."
Yet, as they began to haul away the microphones, Gehrig suddenly stepped forward, held up his hand for attention, gulped, tried for a smile, and started the speech that would become a treasured part of baseball lore.
"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got," said Gehrig. "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."
Fidgeting with his cap and choking back tears, the stricken Gehrig continued with his litany of thanks to all—to his wife, Eleanor, to his immigrant German parents, concluding, "I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for." Few were the dry eyes among the 61,000 at this display of the immense courage of the man.
So sweeping was the emotion at Yankee Stadium that day, so intense was the admiration for Lou Gehrig, now mingled with the all-pervading sadness of the scene, that it could not be lost on any witness.
In the press box, I made an attempt to describe the scene and the depth of the affection for Lou Gehrig. I wrote, "I saw strong men weep this afternoon . . . and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit." It was a chapter of the Lou Gehrig story that went into history as companion to his famed consecutive-games streak. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's eulogy to a departed friend, Lou Gehrig now has a successor, but as a giant figure in the game, he has not been replaced.
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