Free Republic

Lou Gehrig’s worst full season was his best. Despite leading the league in games played (as always), he hit fewer than 30 homers for the first time in a decade, and his batting average dropped nearly 60 points and tied for his career low. His conditioning was questioned, his games-played streak was scrutinized, his All-Star selection was widely lamented. And even when the season ended with his Yankees once again victorious in the World Series, Gehrig’s four singles in 14 at-bats had barely been a factor. Back in 1938, it would have been preposterous to propose that Gehrig was having...

1939: New York Yankee ironman Lou Gehrig tells manager Joe McCarthy that he is taking himself out of the starting lineup. Gehrig will never play again. His record of 2,130 straight games played will stand until Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken tops the streak in 1995. 1949: Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe gets his first career start, shutting out the Cincinnati Reds 3-0. He goes on to lead the Dodgers’ pitching rotation with 17 wins on their way to a National League pennant. Newcombe will lose two seasons to the Army during the Korean War. 1954: The St. Louis Cardinals’ Stan...

In the 71 years since the Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” despite dying from a disease that would soon bear his name, he has stood as America’s leading icon of athletic valor struck down by random, inexplicable fate. A peer-reviewed paper to be published Wednesday in a leading journal of neuropathology, however, suggests that Gehrig’s demise — and that of some other athletes and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease — might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions...

It is easy to find a clip of the speech on YouTube, consisting of just a few short lines captured on a long ago day by the television cameras. The Lou Gehrig we see in black and white at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939 is movie-star handsome: tall, seemingly strong, a New York Yankee through and through. Joe McCarthy, the Yankees manager, takes Gehrig by the elbow and leads him to a bank of microphones behind home plate. The crowd of 61,000 gets to its feet. The emotion in the moment is obvious. Gehrig - native New Yorker, two-time...