Double Legacy Of The Iron Horse

Gehrig was also a mama's boy. His parents were German immigrants, and he was the only one of their four children to survive childhood. His parents understandably made Gehrig the focus of their lives, and their dream was for him to graduate from college. He lived at home with them until he married Eleanor Twitchell at the then late age of 30. Gehrig's relationship with his mother was so intense that he almost skipped the 1927 World Series to stay near her as she underwent an operation. Yankee management had to argue hard to convince that season's Most Valuable Player that he belonged with his team, which would of course be remembered as a legendary one, winner of 110 regular-season games, and possibly the greatest ever assembled.

Gehrig was skilled at all sports—when he was 11 he swam across the Hudson River at the point where it is now spanned by the George Washington Bridge—but he was, above all, a hitter. He worked hard to develop his talent, and in 1920, as a senior at the New York High School of Commerce, he announced himself to the world. His school won the city public baseball championship, and a game was arranged with the champions of Chicago, Lane Technical High School, to be played at Cubs Park, now called Wrigley Field. It was Gehrig's first appearance as a ballplayer in a major league park, and he made himself at home with a precocious feat that set the tone for the rest of his career. In the ninth inning Gehrig came to the plate with the bases loaded and two out. He crushed a 3-2 pitch over the rightfield wall to ice the win. As a major leaguer, Gehrig would hit 23 grand slams, a career record that still stands.

After high school Gehrig headed downtown to attend Columbia University, where his mother had worked as a cook and housekeeper in one of the fraternities. He entered Columbia in the fall of 1921 and left after only two years, a short stay marked by success and scandal. The success took the form of the towering home runs that he hit for the university team. The baseball field was in the middle of the main campus in those days, and Gehrig earned the nickname Columbia Lou by knocking 450-foot blasts off the surrounding buildings and even out onto not-so-nearby Broadway. The scandal concerned the fact that Gehrig had made his professional debut the summer before he got to Columbia, playing under the name Lou Lewis for a Class A team in Hartford.

Gehrig cut short his college career because he knew he could make money playing baseball. His parents were hardworking but poor, and it must have made little sense to him to continue to play for free while his father was unemployed and his mother was ill and unable to work. He signed with the Yankees for a $1,500 bonus in 1923, the year Yankee Stadium opened.

Gehrig spent his first two years tearing up the minors, making just two brief trips to the majors. In 1925 he made the big team and rode the bench for the first two months of the season. But on June 2, regular first baseman Wally Pipp came down with what turned out to be the most famous headache in baseball history. Manager Miller Huggins sent Gehrig in to play for Pipp, and the story began. (Actually, the famous streak started the day before, when Gehrig pinch-hit for the Yankee shortstop, Pee Wee Wanninger. But the Pipp story is the more lyrical beginning, and it marks Gehrig's debut as a regular.)

Of course the thing about the streak is that it wasn't the streak for many years. Gehrig played the early part of his career free of the renown that went with the streak. What made him famous in the beginning was his incredible talent for producing runs. Long before he dominated the sport as the Iron Horse he dominated it as Larrupin' Lou, cleanup man in the Yankee lineup known as Murderers' Row.

Gehrig's stats simply boggle the mind. They are so far above today's standards that they have an unreal aura about them. Studying them now, in the era of the overpaid .280 hitter, can make even the casual fan want to run down to the local bar and rattle them off. Gehrig wound up with a career batting average of .340, which tells us that when it came to seeing the ball and getting his bat on it, he was one of the best of all time. But it was the kind of hits Gehrig got that made his name—the long kind, the kind that scored runs.

Scoring runs, obviously, is the point of the game, the diamond-hard fact at the center of the whole business. Lou Gehrig was a run-producing machine. He drove in more than 100 runs 13 years in a row. In seven of those years he topped 150, including 1931, when he drove in 184 (the American League record and second best—to Hack Wilson's 1930 mark of 190—of all time). Not counting his three partial major league seasons (1923, '24 and '39, which totaled only 31 games), Gehrig averaged 141 RBIs and 134 runs scored for 14 years. And there's an important detail to remember: Gehrig batted right behind Ruth for 10 years, and Ruth's own amazing ability to drive in runs undoubtedly cut into Gehrig's totals.

What Gehrig's numbers finally define is an overwhelming offensive force, a masterful presence in the batter's box, a slugger who consistently generated action on the field. When he swung his bat, he blew the elegant geometry of the game to pieces; he hit 493 home runs, which the carefully placed defenders could only watch, and 535 doubles and 162 triples, which sent those defenders charging into the empty places on the field, where Gehrig's rockets bounced and rolled to the wall. When you think of Gehrig, you should think of a field with all the players running as hard as they can—some on the way to score, the rest in a rush to control the ball.

Gehrig's career was one of great seasons, great games, great moments. On June 3, 1932, he hit four home runs in a nine-inning game, a feat only two other players had accomplished (Robert Lowe in 1894 and Ed Delahanty in 1896). He was the MVP twice, in '27 and '36. In '27, besides driving in 175 runs, Gehrig hit 47 home runs and had a batting average of .373 and a slugging average of .765. That was the year Ruth hit his 60 home runs, and what has often been forgotten is that for most of that season Ruth and Gehrig were neck and neck in pursuit of the home run title (they were tied as late as Sept. 5 with 44). In '36 Gehrig hit 49 homers, batted .354 and drove in 152 runs. In '34 he won the Triple Crown.