Lou Gehrig at Briggs Stadium, May 2, 1939
In between, he had batted .346, collected 2,750 hits, hit 492 home runs, had 1,983 RBIs, appeared in baseball's 1st 6 All-Star Games, won 7 American League Pennants and 6 World Series.
But he had slown down a bit in 1938. Early in the 1939 season, he looked terrible. And so, on this day, as the Yankees were about to start a series against the Detroit Tigers at Briggs Stadium in Detroit (renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961), he told manager Joe McCarthy he should be taken out of the lineup.
He performed his duty as team Captain, and presented the lineup card to the umpires. When the Tigers' public-address announcer listed the Yankees' lineup, he concluded by announcing that Gehrig would not be playing, ending his streak at 2,130 consecutive games.
When Gehrig's consecutive-games-played streak began on June 1, 1925, hardly anybody noticed. When it ended, everybody noticed. But the way he handled the end was pure class: He took himself out, in his own words, "for the good of the team," and there was no self-aggrandizement.
Playing 1st base for the Yankees that day would be Ellsworth Tenney "Babe" Dahlgren. He had a Ruthian nickname, and put up a Gehrigesque performance, going 2-for-5 with a home run and 2 RBIs. All 3 outfielders also hit home runs: Charlie Keller, Tommy Henrich and George Selkirk. Oddly, another superstar, Joe DiMaggio, also didn't play that day, due to an ankle injury.
Red Ruffing went the distance for the Yankees. Tiger starter Vern Kennedy did not get out of the 1st inning. Hank Greenberg, the Tigers' biggest star, went 0-for-3. The Yankees won, 22-2, and it remains the biggest margin of victory in franchise history.
By a weird twist of fate, Wally Pipp, the man that Gehrig replaced as the regular Yankee 1st baseman in 1925, was in Detroit, in his new business. He went to the game. (He was 44, and, with Hank Greenberg at 1st base, there was no reason for the Tigers to offer him a contract.)
Pipp was a decent player: He led the American League in home runs in 1916 and 1917, and helped the Yankees win their 1st 3 Pennants: 1921, 1922 and 1923, including the 1923 World Series. But he lost his batting stroke in 1925, and that, and Gehrig's rise, made him expendable. He lived until 1965.
Gehrig finished his career with a .340 batting average, 493 home runs, and 1,995 RBIs. Had he not been stricken, he could have had over 600 home runs. The record for most RBIs in a career is 2,297, by Hank Aaron. Gehrig could have surpassed that.
And given the manpower shortage of World War II, and his being too old to be drafted, he could still have been playing through the 1945 season. He would have been 42, and his streak would have reached 3,200. Cal Ripken Jr. never would have caught him.
And before you say that that's outrageous, okay, maybe he wouldn't have kept the streak going that long. But Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson were all still playing at 42, and all were still All-Star caliber when they were 40. It's hardly outrageous to imagine a 40-year-old Gehrig leading the Yankees to victory in the 1943 World Series, instead of the man who unofficially replaced him as captain, his best friend on the team, Bill Dickey, doing that. (Dickey then did go into the U.S. Navy.)
Soon, Gehrig would go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to find out what was wrong with him. He was told: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It became known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease."
On July 4, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. It was already known that Gehrig had been forced to retire. It was not yet widely known that he was dying. That day, he told the crowd, "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth," and, "I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for." Two years later, he was dead.
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May 2, 1939 was a Tuesday. Football, basketball and hockey were all out of season. These other games were played in baseball that day:
* The New York Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 8-7 at the Polo Grounds. The Reds led 7-5 going to the bottom of the 9th, but Mel Ott hit what we would now call a walkoff home run.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-2 at Ebbets Field.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Bees, 2-1 at National League Park in Boston. This was the 4th of 5 seasons in which the Boston Braves and Braves Field were operating under new names, before going back to the old names in 1941.
* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 4-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
* The Washington Senators beat the St. Louis Browns, 9-7 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
* And the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians were supposed to play each other at Fenway Park in Boston, but the game was postponed due to cold weather. It was rescheduled as part of a doubleheader on August 27. The Indians swept that doubleheader, 1-0 and 5-3. Bob Feller won the opener. Rookie Ted Williams went 1-for-8 in the 2 games.
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