Double Legacy Of The Iron Horse

In spite of what he did with his bat, Gehrig became best known for the consecutive-game streak. And that's probably the way it should be, because the streak was as much a result of his personality as it was of his endurance and skill. He was a hardworking man whose low-key style stood in sharp contrast to Ruth's. Playing first base for the Yankees was his job, and it was there that he established himself in the minds of the fans as the Iron Horse. He played with broken fingers, pulled muscles and crippling back pain. He played in spite of beanings and who knows how many routine aches and pains. He played with Ruth and, a decade later, he played with DiMaggio.

Strangely enough, as the streak approached 2,000 games, his wife became concerned that Gehrig was getting compulsive about it, that the thing had taken control of him. On the day of the 2,000th game, May 31, 1938, she suggested that he break the streak off at 1,999. She argued that putting an end to it would take the pressure off and make even more headlines than continuing. "He was fascinated and appalled [by the idea]," Eleanor Gehrig later wrote. And Lou played on.

When a baseball player is in his stance at the plate, awaiting the pitch, his entire nervous system is on full alert. His cerebral cortex (gray matter), the largest part of the brain, is originating motor output and processing sensory input, and the hitter may even be using it to think. His cerebellum, a large, semidetached part of the brain located at the the back of the head, is involved in the maintenance of equilibrium, muscle tone and posture control. The batter is receiving sensory information from his visual system, his inner ear and from sensory nerves known as proprioceptors, deep in his muscles and joints. These are the nerves that provide the hitter with his sense of body awareness and movement. The player's spinal cord is flashing with nerve impulses to and from his brain.

When the pitch is thrown, he makes his split-second decision to swing, and his nervous system goes into high gear. He follows the ball with his eyes as it comes toward him, and he begins to bring the bat around; and as he does, he makes adjustments in body and arm and leg position even as he continues swinging. Sensory information is still coming in and being processed instantly as he carries out an explosive voluntary motor function. If everything goes right, he hits the ball.

Both the subtle, unconscious movements the player makes while waiting for the pitch and the coordinated, voluntary movements he makes when he swings at the ball are the result of the action of a kind of nerve cell called a motor neuron. Motor neurons are well described by their name. Their job is to carry the motor impulses from the brain through the spinal cord and to the muscles. They are the critical links in the chain between the mind and the body. They enable you to move.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a neuromuscular disorder in which the motor neurons degenerate. As a result, the muscles atrophy and the patient becomes paralyzed. It is a progressive, terminal disease. The cause is unknown, and there is no cure. It usually runs its course in two to three years.

The earliest symptoms are almost perversely minor—weakness in a finger, a twitching muscle in the forearm. The onset is so insidious that the first signs are often either overlooked or mistaken for some other problem. As the disease progresses, the weakness spreads and grows worse. Usually only the muscles of the eyes are spared. Death is often the result of respiratory failure due to muscle weakness. The disease is painless, and the brain itself is unaffected. As the body dies, the intellect remains intact.

A superb athlete like Gehrig, acutely attuned to the condition of his body, must surely have picked up on the earliest signs of ALS. And just as surely, he must have dismissed them as something minor, something that would just go away.

The disease killed Gehrig's game before it killed Gehrig. As early as spring training in 1938, more than a year before the end of the streak, observers noted that Gehrig didn't seem to have the old power anymore, and his numbers for his last full season support that. He finished 1938 with a batting average of .295, 29 home runs, 115 runs scored and 114 RBIs. Today, such a season would qualify a man as a million-dollar player, but for Gehrig it marked a serious drop in production.

As the 1939 season began, sportswriters knew that the end of the streak was near, and they knew it was going to be a big story. They watched Gehrig closely, and what they saw was far worse than anything they'd seen the season before. He couldn't hit the ball and he couldn't play defense. "Yankee followers were amazed to see how badly Gehrig had fallen from the peak," The New York Times reported later. "He was anchored firmly near first base and only the fielding wizardry of Joe Gordon to his right saved Gehrig from looking very bad." Offensively, Gehrig had trouble getting the ball out of the infield; his line drives had become pathetic pop-ups.