A well-known politician, Denby added gravitas to the occasion. He had played football at the University of Michigan in the late 1800s, worked as a lawyer, and served three terms in the U.S. Congress. Now he commanded the country’s naval forces. In a speech, he complimented Scott on “the loyalty and powers of endurance which have enabled you to establish such a remarkable record” and called him “the greatest ballplayer in point of service and achievement that ever trod the diamonds of America, the home of baseball.”
When Ban Johnson spoke, he said he was proud to have such a “respected” player in the American League and presented Scott with a solid-gold medal the league had commissioned to commemorate his achievement of playing in a thousand straight games. Dressed in his gray road uniform, Scott smiled and nodded during the speeches. The fans clamored for him to speak, but he declined.
Once the game began, Scott was unable to consecrate his big day with a memorable moment on the diamond. He went hitless in a 3–0 loss to Washington and its ace pitcher, Walter Johnson, still dominant at age 35.
But Scott’s achievement generated widespread acclaim. In the edition of the Sporting News dated May 3, 1923, a large picture of Scott dominated the front page under the headline A THOUSAND IN A ROW. The paper had gone to press before Scott reached his goal, so the accompanying article noted that he would make it to his goal “providence permitting.” In its next edition, the Sporting News reported that “in attaining his goal of a thousand straight games, Scott was honored as few players in history have been honored.”
Sports columnists around the country praised him. Scott’s achievement even received mention in non-sports publications such as the Christian Science Monitor. “Perfect attendance, the be-all and end-all for so many school children and church members, is not usually thought of as the chief aim for professional ballplayers, most of whom have their hearts set on reaching new heights of hitting or fielding prowess,” the Monitor noted in May 1923. “Everett Scott, known as ‘the deacon,’ was on hand for so many diamond contests, however, that he finally resolved to try to capture the perfect attendance laurels in baseball by participating in one thousand consecutive contests.”
Why did people care about his streak? It was a fair question, for as the Christian Science Monitor noted, simply playing in games was “not usually” a goal for players. But by playing in so many games in a row, Scott had exhibited dependability, character, and toughness, qualities that transcended sports. Fans could relate to him and his achievement more than to other players and their feats. No, he did not entrance crowds by pounding awe-inducing home runs with mighty swings, but Scott was a stable family man, someone you could count on, more like a neighbor or work colleague than a ballplayer, and he just got up and went to work every day, like millions of Americans. Honestly, what was more admirable than that?
On April 18, 1923, the day Yankee Stadium opened with Everett Scott at shortstop and Babe Ruth in right field, another baseball game, matching collegiate squads, took place nearby. A burly Columbia University sophomore, Lou Gehrig, struck out 17 batters in a loss to Williams College before a sparse crowd that included Paul Krichell, a scout for the Yankees.
A chubby former backup catcher for the St. Louis Browns, Krichell had quietly followed Gehrig for several months. It was not the young man’s pitching that intrigued him. Krichell had seen Gehrig wallop a handful of mammoth home runs. Soon after the Williams game, Gehrig hit another blast that traveled more than 400 feet. “This youngster might really be something,” Krichell thought. He introduced himself. Soon, they were talking about a contract.
The Yankees offered Gehrig a $1,500 signing bonus and a playing salary of $400 a month, a pittance to the club but a fortune to Gehrig, the son of struggling German immigrants who had lived in a succession of small apartments in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northernmost Manhattan. Gehrig’s father, Heinrich, lacked ambition and seldom held a job for long. Gehrig’s mother, Christina, a thick-armed Frau, was the principal breadwinner and disciplinarian, working as a maid, cook, and laundress—whatever was needed to put food on the table. Of their four children, only Lou had lived past age three.
Though the contract offer from the Yankees was exciting, Gehrig’s parents had doubts about their son making baseball his career. They did not care for sports; baseball, in particular, was for the riffraff, they thought. They wanted him to stay at Columbia, graduate, and become an engineer, following in the footsteps of an uncle in Germany. But the signing bonus would pay for an operation Heinrich needed, so Gehrig scrawled his signature on a contract and became the Yankees’ hometown kid.
As a youngster, he had attended New York public schools and helped his mother in the afternoons, folding laundry and running errands. Christina lorded fiercely over her only surviving child, telling him how to dress, what to eat, and what to do. When he had free time, he played stickball in the streets and dreamed of playing for John McGraw and the Giants at the nearby Polo Grounds. His prospects seemed faint. He was big and strong, but clumsy.
When Lou was 11, Christina found full-time work at the Sigma Nu fraternity house on Columbia’s campus. She cooked extensive meals while Heinrich tended to the furnace and performed other odd jobs. Lou came to the frat house after school and helped his mother serve dinner and wash dishes. Occasionally, the college boys let him into their post-dinner games of catch. “He threw well and liked to play ball,” reported journalist (later screenwriter) Niven Busch in a 1929 New Yorker profile of Gehrig.
His athletic talent began to develop at Commerce High School. By now weighing over 200 pounds, he played football so adeptly that Columbia offered him a scholarship. In baseball, he threw hard as a left-handed pitcher but lacked control. As a hitter, he flailed at curveballs but also knocked several of the longest home runs ever seen on a high school diamond in New York. He traveled with his team to Chicago to play a championship squad from that city and hit a grand slam completely out of Wrigley Field, generating headlines and comparisons to Babe Ruth.
That summer, before he enrolled at Columbia, a scout for the Giants, Arthur Irwin, invited him to a tryout, telling him McGraw had seen him play, which was not true. During the tryout, Gehrig hit six straight balls over the fence, but he flubbed a ground ball in the field, and McGraw passed on signing him, at least partly because of Gehrig’s fleshy physique. The young man had “beer legs,” McGraw reportedly told colleagues, and probably would weigh 250 pounds by the time he was 25.
The insinuation of alcohol consumption was laughable. Christina Gehrig’s son was so straight his friends chided him about it. Regardless, McGraw believed the young man was too fat for the major leagues—a projection he would sorely regret.
Still, there was no denying Gehrig had impressive power, and he was so polite that Irwin, the scout, wanted to help him. He recommended that Gehrig hone his skills in a summer pro league, using an assumed name so he could retain his amateur status. “Everyone is doing it,” Irwin assured him. Gehrig joined a team in Hartford, Connecticut, and played in a dozen games as Lefty Gehrig or Lou Lewis. But his ruse was discovered, and he was banned from playing college sports for a year.
Regaining his eligibility as a sophomore, he played fullback and kicked field goals for Columbia’s football team in the fall of 1922. In the spring of 1923, he pitched and played first base on the baseball team, with Krichell following his every move. After he signed with the Yankees, he finished the semester and began his pro baseball career.
One day in June 1923, he traveled from Morningside Heights to Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were playing Cleveland, and Gehrig would take batting practice so Miller Huggins could see him. Krichell met Gehrig at the stadium and took him to the clubhouse, where he met Ruth, his idol. Huggins escorted him to the field, where the Yankees were warming up for the game, loosening their arms and taking swings at the plate. Huggins told Gehrig to grab a bat. He picked up one of Ruth’s 40-ounce weapons.
The story of what happened next has b
een repeated many times but, as with much about Gehrig, could be exaggerated. With Ruth and the other Yankees watching, Gehrig let several pitches go by, seemingly paralyzed. “Just hit the ball!” one player shouted. Gehrig finally lined a single to left, then used his powerful torso to pound a handful of pitches into the distant bleachers.
“OK, that’s enough,” Huggins growled.
Gehrig was a naïve 20-year-old, a penny-pinching mama’s boy, tongue-tied around girls, a child among men. But he could hit. The Yankees gave him a uniform and a place on the bench, wanting him to soak up the sights and sounds. Four days after his batting practice show, he made his major league debut as a ninth-inning defensive replacement. Three days later, he batted for the first time, striking out as a pinch hitter with the Yankees down by eight runs in the ninth.
There was no spot for him in the lineup of a team rolling toward the 1923 American League pennant, and in any case, he needed seasoning. The Yankees sent him back to Hartford, where, using his real name now, he batted .304 and hit 24 home runs in 63 games, a performance that thrilled the Yankees. They brought him to New York late in the season. Huggins wanted to rest Wally Pipp, his first baseman, before the World Series against the Giants. In one game, Gehrig pinch-hit for Pipp and struck out. In another, he replaced Pipp in the field in the late innings and hit a double.
On the team’s final road trip of the season, Pipp twisted an ankle getting off the train in Boston. Gehrig replaced him in the lineup for several days, hit his first major league home run, and batted .423, so impressing Huggins that the Yankees sought to make him eligible for the World Series. But he had joined the team after the cutoff date for postseason eligibility, and the Giants’ McGraw refused to grant an exception. “If the Yankees have an injury, that’s their problem,” McGraw said. Gehrig settled for watching the Yankees defeat the Giants to claim their first world championship, with Ruth leading the way.
Arriving at the Yankees’ spring training camp in New Orleans in 1924, Gehrig was in a familiar situation, having little money in his pockets. He tried to land a part-time job as a waiter, but when he went to the restaurant to apply, he noticed teammates Waite Hoyt and Bob Meusel among the diners and did not go inside. When Gehrig told the story to Dan Daniel, a New York World-Telegram sportswriter who would cover his entire career, Daniel passed it along to Huggins. The manager called Gehrig in, gave him an advance on his salary, and ordered him to stop hunting for work.
The competition for jobs was fierce throughout the major leagues, with thousands of pro ballplayers seeking roster spots on just 16 American League and National League teams. Veterans guarded their turf tenaciously in spring training, often bullying rookies. Gehrig was an easy mark for the Yankees’ established players. His “schoolboyish peculiarities were an inspiration to the team wits,” Niven Busch wrote in The New Yorker five years later. “Teammates would remember him as one of the most bewildered recruits that ever joined the club.”
Fortunately for Gehrig, Pipp was not into belittling rookies. The veteran had seen Gehrig taking batting practice and guessed the youngster was destined to replace him. But Pipp still adopted Gehrig as a project, teaching him the nuances of playing first base—a gesture Gehrig would always appreciate.
Sure enough, the job was Gehrig’s within two years.
During the 1923 season, Huggins had occasionally grumbled, ever so quietly, that Scott was not covering as much ground as in previous seasons. The manager picked up a reserve shortstop in case Scott suffered another injury. Scott’s playing streak “had to be near an end,” the Sporting News speculated in July. But by the end of the season, during which he hit .246, Scott had played in 1,138 straight games.
After the Yankees finally defeated McGraw’s Giants in the World Series in 1923, Huggins felt empowered. The soft-spoken manager had spent the season battling with Ruth, whose eating, drinking, and whoring were out of hand. Cap Huston, the Yankees’ co-owner, backed Ruth in any dispute, but Huggins somehow kept the club on track, playing well enough to win.
In the heady afterglow of the team’s success, Huggins said he might bench Scott for a few games at the start of the 1924 season. It was not hard to see the manager had grown tired of the streak. He had put up with it until now, but he might want to try another player at shortstop occasionally.
Huggins’s comment constituted the first inkling that issues could arise when a player forged a playing streak so long it made news. In essence, the manager no longer controlled his lineup, violating one of the game’s basic tenets. Years later, Scott admitted his streak put Huggins in an awkward spot. “It handicaps a team when a manager doesn’t want to take a man out and spoil his record,” Scott said. “Honestly, I don’t know why I was so set on playing in all of those games.”
After Huggins said he might bench Scott early in 1924, sportswriters thought Scott might get traded. Contacted in Indiana, Scott said he would retire before going to a losing team; he wanted to end his career with his pride intact, he said. In the end, the Yankees retained him, offering him the same salary ($10,000) he had earned in the previous two years. He went through his usual off-season regimen and kept his starting job. Huggins did not bench him. Giving the Yankees his usual blend of modest offense and solid defense, he was near 1,300 straight games by the end of the season.
As the 1925 season opened, the Yankees expected to contend. They had finished a close second to the Senators in 1924, having won three straight pennants before that, and their veteran cast remained intact. Besides Ruth and Scott, it included Whitey Witt, a fleet center fielder who had once been knocked unconscious by a soda bottle thrown from the stands; Aaron Ward, a durable infielder from Arkansas who had considered law school before electing to play baseball after college; Wally Schang, a veteran switch-hitting catcher who had hit .300 in four straight seasons in the early 1920s; Bob Meusel, a taciturn, hard-drinking outfielder who had never batted under .300 in a season; and Wally Pipp, the graceful first baseman who had played for the Yankees for almost a decade.
Tall and bookish, Pipp had studied architecture at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., before becoming a baseball pro. He wrote so expertly that Sports Illustrated would hire him as a correspondent years later. Originally signed by Detroit, he had joined the Yankees on a waiver claim in 1915 and become their cleanup hitter, leading the American League in home runs with 9 in 1916 and 12 in 1917.
When Ruth joined the club in 1920, Pipp still batted fourth, and with Ruth in front of him, his production escalated. As the Yankees became a powerhouse, Pipp played solid defense, batted around .300, and drove in close to 100 runs every year. And he was durable. Although he never played a full season of games, he never missed more than several per year.
Shortly before the 1925 season began, Pipp turned 32. He was coming off a season in which he drove in 114 runs, his career high. Big things were expected from him and the rest of the Yankees. From the outset, though, the season was a disaster. During spring training, Ruth suffered stomach pains so excruciating that he could not play. It was front-page news across the country. The source of his ailment was unclear. Some speculated he had eaten too many hot dogs or quaffed too much soda. Insiders quietly wondered if he had contracted a venereal disease.
Ruth sat out the start of the season. In late April, it was determined he had an intestinal abscess and needed an operation that would keep him out until June. The Yankees floundered without him, dropping 11 of their first 15 games, and Scott struggled, his average sinking below .200. He seemed to break out of it with two hits in a win over Philadelphia at Yankee Stadium on May 5, but Huggins had seen enough. The manager was worried about the season slipping away before Ruth returned. Seeking more offense, he put a youngster, Paul Wanninger, at shortstop on May 6.
Scott was stunned to find himself on the bench as the Yankees took on the Philadelphia Athletics in the Bronx. He had played in 1,307 straight games. But Huggins was adamant about ending the streak. Even when the manager pulled Wanninger after two
at-bats, he inserted another reserve rather than Scott. For the first time since 1916, Scott sat out a game.
His temper flared after the game, which Philadelphia won. “I was surprised to sit out because I hit so well in Tuesday’s game,” he told reporters. “If the end had come when the team was losing, I wouldn’t have cared. But it seems funny that it should come the day after we win and I get two hits.”
He continued: “Not that I care about the record. When I passed the 1,000 mark, I lost interest in the matter. I didn’t expect to go on forever. But I’ll never sit on the bench.”
Following the game, Huggins and the Yankees boarded a train for St. Louis, where they would open a road trip. Scott received permission to take a few days off. He took another train home to Indiana.
“Baseball’s greatest record for stamina and consecutive playing came to an end yesterday,” the New York Times reported. “The iron man of the sport finally came to the end of the road after setting up a mark that will be equaled only through another miracle the equal of his own.”
On the train to Indiana, Scott stared at the passing countryside, fearing what lay ahead. Sure enough, when he returned to the Yankees, he made a few token appearances before being released. He caught on with the Senators, played for the White Sox and Reds in 1926, bounced around the minors, and retired.
Meanwhile, Wanninger flopped as his replacement, and the Yankees continued to lose in 1925, even after Ruth returned in June. Suddenly, the Yankees were at a crossroads. Many of their core players had, like Scott, grown old. Ed Barrow, the general manager, wanted Huggins to start breaking in new talent such as Earle Combs, an outfielder who could replace Witt; Mark Koenig, a 20-year-old shortstop ready to assume Scott’s spot; Benny Bengough, a 145-pound catcher who was 10 years younger than Wally Schang; and Gehrig, the young slugger stuck behind Pipp.
The Streak Page 12
