JULY 4, 1939 | NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A tired, frail, shadow of his former self told 61,808 people in Yankee stadium on the Fourth of July in 1939, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” New York Yankee first-baseman Lou Gehrig was very sick.
He stopped playing baseball. He was getting weaker by the day and would be gone in less than two years.
The suddenness of Gehrig’s decline was shocking. He was known as the “Iron Horse.” He played every single game for 14 years. When Babe Ruth set the single season home run record in 1927 with 60 home runs, Gehrig hit 47 – more than anyone, other than Ruth, had ever hit up to that time.
Gehrig had 29 home runs, 114 runs batted in and 115 runs scored in his last full season – 1938. It was not his best year, but still quite good. The only stat that appeared to show decline was batting average. He hit .295. He hadn’t hit under .300 in twelve seasons and hit .351 in 1937, .354 the year before that.
Clearly, Gehrig had lost a step, he was 35 years old, so slowing down a bit was not unexpected. But Gehrig’s decline was clear in spring training 1939. His power had faded. He was hitting just .143 with no extra base hits when he took himself out of the lineup after eight games of the regular season. He never got back in.
A few weeks after asking out of the lineup Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with a rare, crippling, fatal disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The sickness would become known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Contributing sources:
Lou Gehrig web site
Baseball-Almanac (Gehrig)
