For fourteen years Lou Gehrig simply turned up. Through broken fingers, fevers and a back that sometimes had to be straightened by a trainer before he could stand, the Yankees first baseman played 2,130 games in a row, and then stopped because something was badly wrong.
He was the son of German immigrants in New York, raised in a household where money was short and a steady profession was the only sensible ambition. His mother wanted him to be an engineer. He went to Columbia University, where he was discovered hitting baseballs an improbable distance, and signed with the Yankees in the early 1920s.
Batting behind the loudest man in America
Gehrig's career was conducted almost entirely in the shadow of Babe Ruth, and he seems to have minded less than everyone around him assumed. Ruth was theatrical, enormous and endlessly quotable. Gehrig was quiet, lived with his parents well into adulthood, and gave interviewers very little to work with.
On the field the arrangement worked brilliantly. Pitchers who had survived Ruth found no relief in the next man, and the 1927 Yankees lineup, remembered as Murderers' Row, is still the standard against which heavy batting orders are measured. Gehrig drove in runs in quantities that look like misprints.
The streak
It began in 1925 when he replaced the regular first baseman and simply never gave the position back. The streak eventually became a story in itself, then a burden. He played with his hand in a splint. He was knocked unconscious by a pitch in an exhibition game and was in the lineup the next day. X-rays taken late in his life reportedly showed a catalogue of healed fractures he had never mentioned.
Modern opinion is divided on whether the streak helped or hurt the Yankees, and Gehrig himself said he would have preferred nobody kept count. What is not in doubt is what it represented to people living through the Depression: a man who showed up for work every single day, without complaint, for fourteen years.
The season something changed
In 1938 his numbers slipped, and in spring training the following year the decline was impossible to ignore. He was falling over on routine plays. He could not get around on pitches he had destroyed a year earlier. Team-mates watched him struggle to tie his shoes and said nothing, because nobody knew what to say.
Early in the 1939 season Gehrig took himself out of the lineup. He walked the lineup card to the umpires himself, and the streak ended at 2,130. Tests at a clinic in Minnesota returned a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease of the nerve cells that control muscle, for which there was then no treatment at all.
"Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."- Lou Gehrig, Yankee Stadium, 4 July 1939
The fourth of July
The Yankees held a day for him between games of a doubleheader on Independence Day in 1939. The stadium was full. His old team-mates from the 1927 side came back. Gehrig, who hated speaking in public and had been told he was dying, stood at a cluster of microphones and told a packed ballpark that he was the luckiest man alive.
He went on to thank the groundskeepers, the owners, his team-mates, his wife and his parents, and then stepped back while Babe Ruth, with whom he had not spoken in years, put an arm around him. It is probably the most quoted speech in the history of American sport, and the thing people forget is how short it was.
What he did with the time left
Gehrig did not retreat. He took a position on New York City's parole commission and worked at it conscientiously for as long as his hands allowed, reading case files and interviewing young offenders. He kept it up until the disease made the journey to the office impossible. He died in June 1941, short of his thirty-eighth birthday.
The Hall of Fame waived its waiting period and elected him by special vote while he was still alive. The Yankees retired his number, the first time any club had done such a thing, and it has stayed out of circulation ever since.
In much of the English-speaking world, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is still commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. It is one of the few cases where an athlete's name attached itself permanently to a medical condition, simply because his diagnosis was the first most people had heard of it.
The 1927 lineup
The Yankees side of 1927 is the one every subsequent powerhouse team gets measured against. Ruth hit home runs in a quantity nobody had managed before. Gehrig, batting behind him, had what many consider the finest season of his career and was named the league's most valuable player.
Pitchers facing that order had no safe place to go. Walking Ruth, the obvious defensive move, simply brought a left-handed hitter to the plate with a man on base. Opposing managers described the experience as choosing which way to lose, and the nickname Murderers' Row stuck permanently.
The shape of the legend
Gehrig's streak was eventually passed, decades later, by Cal Ripken Jr, and the baseball world treated the moment with unusual tenderness towards the man being overtaken. Records are supposed to fall. This one had been attached to a story that nobody wanted to see diminished.
What endures is not the number of consecutive games. It is the sequence: an unglamorous man who made a career out of reliability, who was quietly the second-best hitter on the most famous team in the sport, and who, handed the worst news a person can receive, walked onto a field and told fifty thousand people how fortunate he had been.
