Lou Gehrig: Stamina, Stats, and Baseball Career

Lou Gehrig's Stamina and Career

• Lou Gehrig played through fevers, migraines, crippling back pain, pulled muscles, and sprained ankles.
• Gehrig once suited up and played in Babe Ruth's hat after being hit in the head by an eighty-mile-per-hour fastball due to swelling.
• Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive games as first base for the New York Yankees.
• Gehrig's consecutive game streak stood for five-and-a-half decades.

Gehrig's Achievements and Physical Condition

• The MLB regular season was 152 games during Gehrig's time.
• Gehrig's Yankees reached the World Series seven times.
• He played for seventeen years from April to October, barnstorming in the off-season, sometimes traveling as far as Japan to do so.
• Gehrig played approximately 350 doubleheaders and traveled over two hundred thousand miles, mostly by train and bus.
• X-rays of Gehrig's hands revealed at least seventeen healed fractures.
• He broke nearly every finger during his career but never said a word about it.

Gehrig's Statistics and Accolades

• Gehrig's career batting average was .340.
• He hit .361 in his postseason career and batted over .500 in two different World Series.
• Gehrig hit 495 home runs, including twenty-three grand slams, a record that stood for more than seven decades.
• In 1934, he won the MLB Triple Crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs.
• Gehrig is sixth all-time with 1,995 RBIs.
• He was a two-time MVP, seven-time All-Star, six-time World Series Champion, and Hall of Famer.
• Gehrig was the first player to have his number retired.
• He was one of the greatest teammates in the history of the game.

Early Life and Determination

• Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp in June 1925.
• Born in New York in 1903 to German immigrants, he was the only one of the four children to survive infancy.
• He was a whopping fourteen pounds at birth.
• He developed a powerful lower body at the turnverein, his father's German gymnastics club.
• A boyhood friend once joked that Gehrig's body often "behaved as if it were drunk."
• Gehrig wasn't born an athlete but made himself one.

Dedication and Work Ethic

• Gehrig's father was a drinker, and his chronic excuses shamed Gehrig.
• He didn't miss a day of school, partly due to his mother's work ethic as a cook, laundress, baker, and cleaning lady.
• A classmate recalled that Gehrig often came to school in the winter without an overcoat or hat.
• Gehrig saw playing baseball as a job demanding control over the body.
• A teammate said that fitness was like a religion to him; Gehrig considered himself a "slave to baseball.”
• He never threw his bat or flipped it.
• He got in trouble for playing stickball with local kids after Yankees games.

Perseverance and Discipline

• He cultivated the the strength to ignore thoughts of quitting, frustration, and tiredness of conforming to his own high standards
• Gehrig said that "Baseball is hard work and the strain is tremendous"
• Others are dedicated up to a point, but quit if it gets too hard.
• Joe DiMaggio once asked Gehrig who he thought was going to pitch for the opposing team "Never worry about that, Joe,” "Just remember they always save the best for the Yankees."
• Paul Gallico, wrote that Gehrig's “clean living did not grow out of a smugness and prudery, a desire for personal sanctification, chose the most sensible and efficient route to getting it."
• Gehrig did not take care of his body because to abuse it is a sin, but because if we abuse the temple, we insult out chances of success.
• He believed that getting comfortable was the enemy and that success is an endless series of invitations to get comfortable
• According to Gehrig, temperance was an interior force
• In his early career he once played better after drinking, a seasoned coach explained the long term costs of seeking pleasure and not developing sustainable coping mechanisms to him

Temperance and Personal Life

• It meant something to Gehrig to be a ballplayer, a Yankee, and a first-generation American, to be someone who kids looked up to.
• Gehrig lived with his parents for his first ten seasons, often taking the subway to the stadium.
• He tore off a section of the team’s upgraded dugout with padded seats replacing the old Spartan bench, stating “I get tired of sitting on cushions... cushions in my car, cushions on the chairs at home - every place I go they have cushions.”

Lou Gehrig's Approach to the game

• Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth had the same number of league batting titles
• Ruth struck out almost twice as many times as Gehrig.
• Once his trainer said that if all ballplayers were like Gehrig, there wouldn't be any job for trainers on ball clubs.
• The only thing that Gehrig asked the staff to do was leave a stick of gum out for him or two if they were going into a double header
• A bad throw from his third baseman caused Gehrig to jam his thumb into the group so hard it was thought to be broken

Overcoming Challenges and Physical Decline

• Gehrig was knocked unconscious by a pitch in June 1934.
• After being hit, Gehrig leaned in and hit a triple, followed by another hit, and a third before the game was rained out
• His only postgame comment was “A thing like that can’t stop us Dutchmen”
• The Yankees played thirty-six games in thirty-five days in August 1938.
• Gehrig hit .329 with nine home runs and thirty-eight RBIs that month although as the early stages of ALS ravaged his body.
• His swing wasn’t as fast and he struggled to put his mitt on.
• He pulled himself from the lineup in May 1939, telling the Yankees’ manager “I always said that when I felt I couldn’t help the team anymore I would take myself out of the lineup. I guess that time has come.”
• Twelve thousand people in Detroit attended Gehrig's starting lineup where his name wasn't called for the first time in 2,130 games.
• In 1941 The New York Times wrote "Death came to the erstwhile 'Iron Man' at 10:10 o'clock,”
• The preacher said of the man, "We need none because you all knew him"
• Muhammad Ali's point stated that when we master the lower self, we elevate ourselves to a higher plane.
• To stay pure, to be tough and to conquer our bodies before they conquer us.

Final Farewell

• July 4, 1939, Gehrig entered Yankee Stadium for the final time in uniform.
• He struggled to hold himself up, exclaiming “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break,”..."Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."