The Pride of the Yankees

1

A Brilliant Career, a Tragic Death

On a late March day in 1939, Tommy Henrich played first base for the Yankees in a spring training game against their Kansas City farm club. Ordinarily, Henrich's position in a meaningless exhibition would not make news. On that day in Haines City, Florida, though, Henrich's unexpected shift from outfield to first base caused a stir: He was replacing Lou Gehrig, whose lackluster, even embarrassing, spring training was worrying teammates and the Yankee brass. He had cooled off considerably in 1938. At thirty-five, he might simply have been shedding his greatness.

The thought of Gehrig nearing the end—of his career, not his life—was difficult to accept. He had been there every day since 1925. He was adored. He was heroic. Anything worse than an athlete nearing his natural end was unfathomable.

It was impossible not to notice the sharp diminution in Lou's skills. Team president Edward Barrow was concerned, saying he wished "the old guy" had played against Kansas City. Manager Joe McCarthy said he was resting Gehrig. Emotional when Lou was the subject, McCarthy was a fierce protector and unlikely to tell reporters the full truth. Lou, however, looked like a different man from the one who showed up at spring training the year before or the one who had played in 1938, when he was good (.295 batting average, 29 homers, 114 runs batted in, especially after a dreadful April) but not as routinely extraordinary as in the past.

James Kahn of the New York Sun detected that something was wrong with Lou during a long slump during the '38 season: "I have seen him hit a ball perfectly, swing on it as hard as he can, meet it squarely—and drive a soft looping fly over the infield. In other words, for some reason that I do not know, his old power isn't there. He isn't popping the ball into the air or hitting it into the dirt or striking out. He is meeting the ball, time after time, and it isn't going anywhere."

Once the spring training of '39 was in full swing, nearly every reporter admitted to seeing what Kahn had seen—and had the guts to say it in print.

"His throwing has been open to question," the New York Times's James Dawson reported, "he has not fielded balls like the old Gehrig, he has not been even a reminder of the Gehrig he was. He has committed five errors in ten games. In thirty-eight trips to the plate, he has connected for five hits, all of them singles."

Something had caused this steep decline. No one knew what; Lou did not learn the diagnosis for another three months, when he went to the Mayo Clinic.

Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press wrote that Gehrig "has slowed up dreadfully and has been brooding for a month over his inability to hit." Talbot's AP colleague Dillon Graham described him with delicacy: "not so pert."

Jimmy Wood of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said that Gehrig's failure to end his consecutive games streak was behind his poor play. And George Kirksey, of the United Press, quoted a pitcher who said Lou had lost his batting eye: "Gehrig bends over backward and away from the plate on pitches that are right over."

Still, Lou had enough goodwill in the press corps that some were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Kieran, for one, refused to make a panicky judgment and cited three minor signs of a change in him: He was thinner (but a "very husky citizen just the same"), his hair was graying, and his step had slowed. He let Lou explain himself (saying he had skipped the Haines City exhibition game the year before and had missed others in previous springs—no big deal). Gehrig joked that the press was casting him in a movie called Buried Alive.

"Yes, sir," he said, "the pallbearers have me dead and buried. Do I look it?"

On the contrary, Kieran wrote.

Kieran was an intellectual in the midst of a long run as a panelist on the NBC Radio quiz show Information, Please! And in this column, he cited Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" to deflect other reporters' Gehrig prophecies about a "sudden plunge from his old heights." Lou, he wrote, was not like the poem's titular horse-drawn carriage, which falls apart "all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles do when they burst." He was correct; Lou was falling apart gradually and inexorably, as ALS takes its victims.

The column was a brief in defense of Lou—an influential friend's plea to stop the drumbeat of grim predictions, most of them right, of Gehrig's demise.

"Lou's request," he wrote, "is for the volunteer pallbearers to stand away from the Iron Horse's head. He thinks he can pull his own weight and maybe a little bit more."

It would have been convenient to blame his decline on aging limbs and less supple muscles and the toll of playing in 2,122 games, to that point with injuries and broken bones. His wife, Eleanor, had witnessed a litany of woes that suggested something much more dire: Lou could get inexplicably drowsy; he stumbled over curbs like a "punch-drunk fighter"; he flopped around while ice skating at PlayLand Ice Casino. She remembered, too, a vomiting fit between games of a doubleheader accompanied by a 104-degree fever that a doctor diagnosed as a gall bladder condition.

"Lou had a greenish color," she reported. Another doctor told him to avoid butter, fried foods, and bread. Another diagnosis suggested he was low on calcium.

His local doctors—none of them yet neurologists, who likely would have understood the signs of ALS—were failing him as surely as his body was.

Lou was understandably confused: How could someone with so much power and coordination—who could hit whistling line drives like no one else, who fielded his position brilliantly, and who, since Ruth's departure from the Yankees in early 1935, was the team's undisputed leader—lose his skills so rapidly?

His teammates saw it. Joe DiMaggio watched him whiff at nineteen consecutive batting practice pitches that he would normally destroy. "He didn't have a shred of his former power or his timing," he wrote in his autobiography. Johnny Sturm, a minor leaguer at St. Petersburg that spring, recalled that Gehrig told him, "I can't do it no more." In German, Gehrig told Sturm that he felt "schlect," or terrible.

There was little question of Lou making the 1939 roster. Barrow and McCarthy could only hope that Gehrig would recover his form and give the Yankees a season like 1938.

"McCarthy will keep him in there," Talbot wrote, "as long as the club is in the race, though he doesn't hit over .250 and fields only the balls that are hit right down his gullet… They have in Joe Gordon a great second baseman, a kid who can go so far to his left and come up with the ball that few spectators will ever realize he's helping Gehrig with his chores."

But that was wishful thinking. His stumbles were only too noticeable.

The Yankees headed north from Florida—at a stop in Norfolk, Lou's two homers brought fleeting encouragement that he was renascent—and played the Dodgers in an exhibition game at Ebbets Field. Frank Graham of the New York Sun recalled a few years later in his biography of Gehrig that McCarthy sidestepped reporters' questions about Lou's condition. He would not concede anything definitive but guided reporters to the all-too-obvious before them.

"Watch Lou," he told the press as fielding practice began.

"Lou looked very bad," Graham wrote, continuing:

"He would go down for a ground ball hit straight at him, and the ball would go through him. Or he would come up with the ball and throw it to second or third base and then start for first base to take a return throw but he would be woefully slow. Back of first base some fans jeered at him. 'Why don't you give yourself up?' one of them yelled. 'What do you want McCarthy to do, burn that uniform off you?'"

Lou played as awfully as he felt, as the season began. Schlect, indeed.

He played eight games starting April 2. His streak was up to 2,130 games.

In 28 at-bats, he had no home runs. Just 4 singles, and 1 run batted in, collected in a game where he had 2 hits but exhibited further proof that his athletic death was moving rapidly closer.

On April 25 against the Philadelphia A's at Yankee Stadium, he singled DiMaggio to second. In the fifth, his weak dribbler to A's first baseman Nick Etten scored Henrich. And in the eighth, a weak fly ball—a Texas Leaguer—gave him his second hit of the day. Then, as he tried to turn it into a double—an instinct, perhaps, or a vain attempt to prove that his skills weren't gone—he was tagged out standing up at second base. Times writer Arthur J. Daley dropped a disquieting note late in his story that Yankee reserve second baseman Bill Knickerbocker "saved Gehrig from an error in the fourth when he fielded a ball that had caromed off Lou's glove, Ruffing making the putout at first."

Lou knew it was over. On an off day before the Yankees traveled to Detroit, he came home to Larchmont. Eleanor wrote that she saw a man "troubled, even shocked" by the stinging remark of a teammate—so simple and hurtful.

"He's through," he heard the teammate say.

Lou was hurt by whispers that had grown louder about his failures at bat and in the field. He knew he wasn't giving the team what he used to. Eleanor reminded her devastated husband that "he'd always said he would step down" if he felt he could no longer help the team. Her devotion was to her husband, not his team, although he had, since they wed in 1933, balanced his loyalties to both. Eleanor saw more than a Yankee: She saw the man she loved.

"I told him the heartbreaking words," she said. "'Maybe that time's come.'"

That moment came the next morning in the lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Gehrig saw McCarthy at the cigar counter and they rode the elevator to the manager's room. He told McCarthy he was benching himself.

"I'll let him take a rest," McCarthy told reporters before the game, "and then when he is feeling better, I'll put him back in to see how he goes. Meantime, I will give Babe Dahlgren every opportunity to win a regular job."

That afternoon, when Lou brought the lineup card to the umpires at home plate, Tigers announcer Ty Tyson told the crowd that the consecutive games streak was now over. "Give a good ballplayer a good—" Tyson said, but fans cut him off with rousing cheers. Lou tipped his cap and walked to the bench, his head bowed.

The Detroit Free Press's coverage of Gehrig's decision included two large pictures, one of Lou sitting on the Yankee bench, another of Dahlgren at first. Over the images, the headline read: "DETROIT, JINX CITY, IS PLACE WHERE HIS LONG STRING IS ENDED." A caption explained that he had, over the years, been sick or injured during games at Briggs Stadium but always managed to keep his streak going.

Now it was over, and he poured out his feelings to Eleanor in a letter written on Book-Cadillac's hotel stationery, with its tiny corporate crest above its name.

Taking himself out of the lineup, he wrote, "was inevitable, although I dreaded the day, and my thoughts were with you constantly—How would this affect you and I—that was the big question and the most important thing underlying everything. I broke just before the game because of thoughts of you—not because I didn't know you are the bravest kind of partner but because my inferiority grabbed me and made me wonder and ponder if I could possibly prove myself worthy."

He still had hope, but it was tempered.

"As for me," he added, "the road may come to a dead end here, but why should it?—Seems like our backs are to the wall now, but there usually comes a way out—where, and what, I know not, but who can tell that it might not lead right out to greater things—Time will tell—"

Nothing could stop ALS. Incurable then. Incurable now.

A month later, Lou was still with the team, slipping into his uniform at home and on the road, still the team captain. On June 1, a team secret became public knowledge. The Yankees were in Cleveland for a three-game series with the Indians with a six-and-a-half-game lead in the American League. Johnny Schulte, a journeyman catcher serving McCarthy as a coach, was speaking to a Knights of Columbus group and blurted out that Lou was headed for an examination at the Mayo Clinic.

"Lou is a sick man," he said. "Sometime in the next few days he's going to Rochester to find out what it is that's been sapping his strength. We hope it's nothing serious, though it doesn't look good now," he said.

Lou denied it as a rumor. A few days later, though, he confessed it was true, and he said that he lied because he hadn't told Eleanor about his plans. Given their relationship, and Eleanor's strong personality, not telling her of his pending Mayo visit sounded unlikely and even rash. What he said also contradicts Eleanor's written account in her memoir, My Luke and I, that it was her idea for him to go to Mayo, and that she called the clinic from the 21 Club to schedule the appointment. She had waited until after the Yankees finished their game in Chicago the following week to call Lou, who quickly agreed to fly to Rochester, Minnesota, the next day. Her version might be entirely true, but her tendency to put herself at the center of a critical event like this makes Lou look almost like a passive player.

Lou's remarks suggested how worried he was by the early signs of the disease that he preferred not to divulge—typically, they are muscle cramps, twitching, weak limbs, and clumsy hands—and how much denial he was in.

"I'm not sick," he told reporters. Almost certainly lying, he added: