With Barrow’s blessing, Huggins began to make changes. Soon after he ended Scott’s streak, he benched Witt for Combs. Pipp, Ward, and Schang would soon lose their jobs, too.
When Ruth made his season debut on June 1, the Yankees were in seventh place. Before a small crowd in the Bronx, he walked once in a loss to the Senators. Wanninger failed to reach base in three at-bats, and when he was due up in the eighth, Huggins sent Gehrig up to hit for him. Washington’s Walter Johnson fired a fastball. Gehrig swung late and lofted a soft fly to left that was easily caught. Just 25 days had passed since the end of Scott’s consecutive-game streak, widely regarded as a feat never to be repeated. No one could have imagined that Gehrig’s eminently forgettable at-bat against Johnson was the start of an even longer streak, destined to become one of baseball’s signature achievements.
That same afternoon, Pipp collected one hit in four at-bats against Johnson. Hitting .244 for the season, he had been dropped to sixth in the order. Still, he came to Yankee Stadium the next day expecting to play, as always. But according to the legend of June 2, 1925, when he complained of a headache in the clubhouse and asked a trainer for two aspirin, Huggins overheard him and gave him the day off.
“We’ll try the kid today and get you back in there tomorrow,” Huggins reportedly said. The kid was Gehrig.
Did that conversation happen? There was no mention in the newspapers about a headache sidelining Pipp. In a 1939 interview with sportswriter Dan Daniel, Pipp said that, indeed, he often experienced headaches stemming from a childhood hockey accident, and a vicious one derailed him that day. But in 1956, he told a different story to the Associated Press, claiming he sat out the game after getting hit in the head by a pitch during batting practice. “The ball hit me on the temple; down I went, and I was much too far gone to reach for any aspirin bottle,” Pipp said. But again, no newspaper reported that such an incident occurred.
Regardless, what really happened seems clear in hindsight. Huggins wanted to overhaul an aging team that suddenly had collapsed. On the day he benched Pipp, he also benched Schang and Ward, the catcher and second baseman. Bengough caught; Howie Shanks played second. Combs manned center field. And Gehrig played first base. “Huggins has arrived at the inevitable conclusion that he is carrying too many fading stars and now is the time to lay a new foundation,” the Sporting News reported.
The Yankees won that day, breaking a five-game losing streak, with Gehrig contributing a double and two singles. Huggins gave him another start the next day, and he went hitless in three at-bats before Pipp pinch-hit for him in the eighth, a move that suggested Gehrig’s spot in the lineup was temporary and Pipp might still “get back in there,” as Huggins had promised.
But that opportunity never came.
9
Gehrig
PLAYING EVERY DAY
Although Gehrig had batted .405 in his brief time with the Yankees in 1923 and 1924, it was difficult to envision him as a star in the making. He was clumsy in the field. Teammates snickered at his lack of worldliness away from the ballpark. On the day he replaced Pipp as the everyday first baseman, he was batting .167 with no home runs so far in the 1925 season.
To that point, his most memorable contribution to the growing litany of Yankees lore was a brawl with Ty Cobb that he initiated in 1924, a somewhat embarrassing incident later viewed as the first inkling of Gehrig’s competitiveness.
Cobb frequently taunted opponents, not because he wanted to fight them but rather to distract them from playing their best. The ultimate proponent of “scientific” baseball, which emphasized bunts and stolen bases over home runs, Cobb saw his game becoming antiquated in the early 1920s. It irritated him, and the plodding Gehrig represented everything Cobb did not like about where his game was going. He taunted Gehrig on the field, reportedly calling him a “thick-headed Dutchman.”
Gehrig ignored Cobb until one day in Detroit when he reached base on a single, then got caught in a rundown between first and second. Cobb raced in from center field to complete the play, called for the ball, tagged Gehrig out, and insulted him. Boiling inside, Gehrig waited until the game ended, charged Cobb in the Detroit dugout, took a swing, missed, lost his balance, and hit his head on the concrete dugout roof as he fell, knocking himself out.
Now, less than a year later, Huggins had given him Pipp’s job. Plainly nervous, Gehrig hit .208 in his first week as a starter, raising more doubts. But then he pounded a home run and a triple and drove in three runs on June 8. Two days later, he socked another home run. By early July, he was batting .320 in the heart of the lineup, slotted right behind Ruth and Meusel in Huggins’s order.
Huggins was still loyal to Pipp and sought to find a role for the veteran who had played so well for so long. Pipp replaced Gehrig for defensive purposes in the late innings of five games in June. It seemed inevitable he would get another start. But on July 2, Pipp was beaned by a pitch during batting practice, likely the incident he would mistakenly recall as occurring on the day Gehrig replaced him. The newspapers reported the beaning, which put Pipp in the hospital for a week with a skull fracture. He played little the rest of the season.
In case Gehrig faltered, the Yankees acquired 36-year-old Fred Merkle, infamous for a baserunning gaffe that cost the Giants the 1908 National League pennant. He could still hit, and Huggins put him at first base against the Senators in Washington on July 5. After starting 31 straight games, Gehrig was on the bench. Merkle singled twice and scored a run, and it appeared he would finish the game, giving Gehrig the whole day off. But Merkle grew faint in D.C.’s notorious summertime heat, and Gehrig hit for him in the eighth, extending his playing streak.
Two weeks later, at Navin Field in Detroit on July 19, Merkle again started ahead of Gehrig and reached base twice in three at-bats. But when the Tigers rolled to a 12–3 lead through four innings, Huggins replaced Merkle with Gehrig, seeking more power. Gehrig slugged a three-run homer, and although the Yankees lost, Huggins had seen enough. Gehrig did not miss another start all season and ended up hitting .295 with 20 home runs. The Yankees were encouraged enough about his potential to sell Pipp to the Cincinnati Reds after the season.
The Yankees’ generational shake-up did not result in a turnaround in 1925. They finished seventh, 28½ games behind the pennant-winning Senators. It was quite a falloff for a team that had won the World Series two years earlier, and Ruth’s ailment was deemed the primary culprit. He drove in just 66 runs, barely a third of his 1921 total, leading some sportswriters to speculate he was done as a marquee player.
But big picture, the lineup overhaul was a crucial moment in Yankees history. It set up the club for another run of success. New York would win three straight pennants beginning in 1926 with Combs, Koenig, and Gehrig as mainstays alongside Ruth and Tony Lazzeri, a slugging second baseman who debuted in 1926.
Paying tribute to Pipp as he departed, the New York Times called him “one of the most popular players who ever cavorted locally.” Pipp had won two league home run titles with the Yankees, started on three pennant winners, and bashed 121 triples, a club record. And unlike Scott, he showed he was not washed-up after the Yankees gave up on him, batting .291 with 99 runs batted in for the Reds in 1926. By the time he retired two years later, he had driven in nearly a thousand runs. But because of what happened after he lost his job to Gehrig on June 2, 1925, Pipp would only be remembered for a headache that may not even have occurred.
When trying to ascertain what made Gehrig into a player who never wanted to miss a game, it is easy to fall back on convenient psychology: His hardscrabble upbringing taught him to hold on fiercely to whatever he accumulated, be it a dollar, a nice suit of clothes, or a starting job with the Yankees. Once he had that job, he gripped it with all his strength, owing partly to the fear that he could always lose it and wind up back on the bench if he allowed himself to rest and relax, even for a day.
That philosophy likely did inform his approach to some degree. Although no record exists of hi
s domineering mother telling him to “take nothing for granted” as she cooked, cleaned, and folded clothes to support their family while her husband fiddled away the years, it is easy to imagine Christina expressing the thought to her impressionable son in her firm, Teutonic-accented voice.
But while Gehrig’s background probably helped carve his determination, other factors played a larger role in what he would one day label his consecutive-game “stunt.” There was the era he played in, the team he played on, and, of course, his talent.
Lineup decision making remained relatively unsophisticated in the 1920s, certainly a far cry from what it would become decades later with so many statistical analytics to consider. Although savvy managers had known since the 1870s that left-handed hitters fared better against right-handed pitchers, and vice versa, positional platoons were rare. Although managers benched slumping players and played hunches, they changed their lineups relatively little from day to day. Throughout the 1920s in the American League, almost 12 percent of the starts went to players who did not miss a game all season. (Pitchers and catchers excluded.) In 1926, 10 players in the league, including Gehrig, played in at least 151 games.
“Lou played at a time when there was a huge value placed on being there for your team every day,” Cal Ripken Jr. said. “It was important that you were a gamer. The season was long, you faced challenges, and it was a high achievement if you could always play.”
Huggins, as the St. Louis Cardinals’ player-manager a decade earlier, had believed in giving players an occasional rest, thinking they came back fresh and performed better. In the five years he wrote out lineups in St. Louis, only one Cardinal did not miss any games: Del Pratt, a gritty infielder who had played football at the University of Alabama. Pratt appeared in every game in 1913, 1915, and 1916. The other Cardinals rested now and then.
But Huggins’s philosophy changed when he came to New York. He had better players now and let more go entire seasons without resting. Pratt, a personal favorite whom he acquired as soon as he got to New York, kept on going, playing two full seasons of games for the Yankees. Frank “Home Run” Baker and Duffy Lewis also played in every Yankees game in 1919. Pipp did not miss one in 1921, and Everett Scott did not miss one for more than three years after he joined the team in 1922. Ruth played in every game in 1923 and 1924. Aaron Ward played in 567 in a row between 1920 and 1924.
As the 1926 season began, Huggins was still not sure Gehrig warranted such respectful treatment. But with Pipp gone and Fred Merkle now coaching, Gehrig was his only viable option at first base. And once the season began, Gehrig made it impossible for the manager to write out a lineup without him. He hit a triple and double and drove in three runs in the Yankees’ opener. The next day, he hit another triple. By early June, Gehrig had driven in more than 30 runs, and the Yankees were in first place.
Few sportswriters had expected Huggins’s club to contend after its miserable showing the year before, but the Yankees went on to capture the 1926 pennant with an offensive display that illustrated the passing of the dead-ball era. They scored 5.5 runs per game, almost a run more than the league average, and the whole lineup contributed. Ruth, determined to embarrass the naysayers who had suggested he was finished, cut down on his drinking and viciously battered the league’s pitchers, hitting .372 with 47 home runs and 153 runs batted in. Lazzeri, the sloop-shouldered son of a San Francisco boilermaker, had never seen a major league game until he played in one on Opening Day, but he drove in 117 runs. Gehrig hit .313 and scored more runs than any other player in the league except Ruth.
Huggins tinkered little with the lineup. He gave Ruth a day off only after the pennant was secured in the final week. Gehrig and Lazzeri were in every game. When Gehrig slumped late in the season, it appeared he might, in fact, need a break. But the Yankees and Indians were battling for first place, and Huggins kept playing Gehrig in hopes that his bat would reawaken. On September 19, he pounded three doubles and a home run in a crucial win in Cleveland.
Playing the Cardinals in the World Series, the Yankees won the first game as Gehrig drove in the winning run. The Cardinals then won the next two games before Ruth slugged three home runs in Game 4 to even the series. The series came down to Game 7, played on a gray afternoon at Yankee Stadium. The Cardinals led, 3–2, when Ruth drew a walk with two out in the bottom of the ninth. On the first pitch to the next batter, Bob Meusel (Gehrig was batting fifth), Ruth tried to steal second and was thrown out. It was a bizarre end to an otherwise fine season for both the Yankees and their young first baseman.
Home runs had made Ruth one of America’s leading celebrities, a larger-than-life figure of great fascination. Every aspect of his life was newspaper fodder—his marriages, his mistresses, his eating and drinking, his hospital visits to sick youngsters. Most men would have crumbled under the scrutiny, but Ruth relished it . . . and profited from it. Aside from playing baseball, he appeared in advertisements, movies, and vaudeville shows; lent his byline to syndicated newspaper columns (actually authored by ghostwriters); and staged elaborate annual salary negotiations. In 1927, when most major league players earned no more than $10,000, Ruth signed for $70,000.
Gehrig was Ruth’s polar opposite. He brought his mother to spring training, went to bed early, rarely dated, carefully watched his diet, and seldom drank more than one beer at a sitting. He was excited just to get paid to play baseball. When the Yankees offered him $8,000 in 1927, he quickly signed and sent the contract back, fearing they might change their minds. But Ruppert had taken advantage of him; several backups signed for the same amount.
Watching his famous teammate cavort through life, Gehrig admired how Ruth interacted with reporters and fans; he was so breezy and casual, so adept at conjuring funny lines. But while Gehrig could not match Ruth’s off-field persona, he emerged as Ruth’s equal on the field in 1927.
Huggins had patiently brought him along, schooling him in nuances such as using his power to hit to all fields, as opposed to just pulling the ball to right. Ruth helped, offering tips about where to aim his swing in certain parks—for instance, right down the right-field line in Cleveland, where the fence was less than 300 feet away. Meanwhile, Gehrig continued to develop physically, his neck and trunk growing thick with muscles. By 1927, he was a man in full at six feet one and 230 pounds.
Batting cleanup on Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, he lined a double and drove in two runs as the Yankees battered Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, a team expected to challenge them for the pennant. The next day, he hit a triple and double and drove in three runs. After two weeks, he was batting .400 with more home runs than Ruth. “This giant of a youth is heading fast for a prominent place among baseball’s great players,” the New York Evening World wrote.
On May 19 in Cleveland, Gehrig hit his ninth home run of the season as the Yankees improved their record to 21-8. That he had played in 300 straight games drew zero attention, but it was becoming clear that Huggins wanted to play him every day. It certainly made sense. Gehrig was young, strong, disciplined, in great shape, and productive. “No one on the team has more of a chance of playing in all 154 games than Gehrig,” the New York Evening World reported.
The sport had never seen anything like the thrashing the Yankees administered to the rest of the American League in 1927. With a 110-44 record, they set a standard against which all great teams would be measured, capturing the pennant with an offensive display that boggled the mind. They batted over .300 as a team. Combs led the league with 231 hits. Meusel and Lazzeri each drove in more than 100 runs. And Ruth and Gehrig competed to make history. Ruth owned the record for home runs in a season, having clouted 59 in 1921. Now he and Gehrig raced for what the New York Times called “the hitherto unattainable height” of 60.
After Ruth hit two home runs on June 22 to give him 24 for the season, Gehrig hit three the next day to raise his total to 21. Soon Gehrig passed Ruth. Back and forth they went, lashing the ball, surpassing 40 in August and captivating fans across
the country. “The most astonishing thing that has ever happened in organized baseball is the home run race between George Herman Ruth and Henry Louis Gehrig,” syndicated columnist Paul Gallico wrote.
At Fenway Park on September 5, a sellout crowd stood and cheered Ruth, who had played for the Red Sox, after he smacked a ball into the right-field seats, giving him 44 for the season. Gehrig had the same total, but a day later Ruth hit three in a doubleheader to start a binge that was prodigious even by his standards. Ruth would hit 16 home runs in the Yankees’ final 28 games. Gehrig could not match that pace. After keeping up all season, he hit under .300 in the final weeks. Those close to him knew his beloved mother was ill with a goiter, distracting him from his routine. (She eventually had surgery and recovered.)
With three games left in the season, Ruth had 57 homers and seemed destined to fall short of his record. But on September 29, he hit two out against Washington, tying his own record before 7,500 fans at Yankee Stadium. The next day, in the Yankees’ next-to-last game of the season, he walked twice and singled before coming up in the eighth. The score was tied, 2–2, with a tough lefty, Tom Zachary, on the mound for Washington. Zachary threw a fastball for a strike. Another fastball sailed high. The third pitch was low and inside, and Ruth stepped away and swung mightily, connecting with what the New York Times called “a crash heard audibly in every part of the stands.”
The ball started out on a low line toward the right-field foul pole before curving well into fair territory and landing halfway up the bleachers. Zachary slammed his glove on the ground in disgust as Ruth slowly circled the bases, extracting every ounce of drama from the moment. Fans tossed their hats and shredded newspapers in the air. “The spirit of celebration permeated the place,” the Times reported.
The Streak Page 13
