The Streak

by John Eisenberg

  But his return to Boston did not go well. Horribly out of shape, he slumped early in the season. His outfield play was abominable. The Braves were in a shambles. Ruth soon wanted no part of any of it. Within days of his last great performance, a three-homer game in Pittsburgh in late May, he retired.

  The Yankees did not miss him. McCarthy named Gehrig the team’s captain in 1935. A splendid rookie outfielder, Joe DiMaggio, joined the club in 1936. Although the Yankees finished second in 1935, they reclaimed the top spot in the American League in 1936 and defeated the Giants in the World Series. An era of unparalleled success lay just ahead.

  In the summer of 1935, Grantland Rice cornered Gehrig for an interview before a game at Yankee Stadium. “How much longer is this thing going to go on?” Rice asked, referring to Gehrig’s endurance streak, which had surpassed 1,500 games earlier that season.

  “I haven’t thought much about it. It’s become a habit and you get used to a habit. I’ve been lucky,” Gehrig told Rice.

  His streak had survived several challenges, and another soon arose. On June 8, the Yankees were at Fenway Park for a doubleheader. In the bottom of the first inning of the opener, Carl Reynolds, a Boston outfielder, reached first base on a walk and took a large lead. After a pitch to the next batter, Bill Dickey, the Yankees’ catcher, snapped a throw to first, trying to catch Reynolds. The throw sailed inside the baseline, and as Gehrig reached for it, Reynolds crashed into him while retreating to the bag. Gehrig was briefly knocked unconscious, and when he came to his senses, he reported feeling intense pain in his right shoulder. “I thought for sure it had been fractured,” he said later.

  He talked McCarthy into letting him stay in the game and initially seemed fine. In the top of the second, he walked, stole second, and scored on a hit. But his shoulder throbbed, and he finally left the game after six innings. In the second game, he played all nine innings, reached base three times in four plate appearances, and drove in a run, but his right arm “hung almost limp at his side,” the New York Sun reported.

  His shoulder still ached when he arrived at Fenway Park the next day for a game against the Red Sox. “I would not have been able to play,” he said later. Fortunately, the game was postponed by rain. The Yankees also had the next day off as they traveled by train to St. Louis for a series with the Browns.

  In the first game in St. Louis, Gehrig cracked a double, scored twice, and handled a dozen chances in the field without an error. Three days had passed since the collision that knocked him out and injured his shoulder, but he was fine now. “The extra day off gave me time to mend and keep my record going,” he explained.

  Gehrig churned on. On August 8, 1935, he hit a home run while running his streak to 1,600 games. On June 5, 1936, he reached 1,700 straight, again hitting a home run to commemorate the occasion.

  By now, he was accustomed to playing in pain. During a 1936 interview with Sid Keener, he held up his gnarled right hand. The pinky resembled “a piece of granger twist tobacco,” Keener wrote, with “heavy knots” on the knuckles and a “badly bent” tip.

  “This finger has been fractured four times,” Gehrig told Keener. “But what’s a broken finger when you’re with a ball club fighting for a pennant?”

  According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Gehrig had suffered “more than enough injuries that would have stopped the ordinary ballplayer who welcomes a respite from his work. Gehrig has been hit in the head three times; broken almost all of his fingers; the toe on his right foot has been fractured; he tore a muscle in his right leg; and a few years ago his shoulder was thrown out of kilter in a collision. But nothing has been able to stop him.”

  In 1936, Gehrig came out of one game when the Yankees were 23 runs ahead, and also took off several at-bats after the Yankees clinched the pennant in September. Otherwise, he always played. He was 33 years old, and by the end of the season, his streak stood at 1,808 straight games. He had surpassed the record of his predecessor, Everett Scott, by more than 500 games.

  But as impressive as it was, his feat had detractors, including, of all people, Everett Scott, Gehrig’s former teammate, whose record Gehrig had broken. “Gehrig can probably stay in there for a good many more games, barring injury, if he cares to,” Scott told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, “but I believe he would be wise to take a rest when he feels that he needs it. It’s the old legs that begin to feel the strain, sooner or later.”

  Before the 1936 season, Ruth offered sportswriter Bill Corum a similar opinion, stating that Gehrig should end the streak and focus on his hitting rather than playing every day. In January 1937, Ruth fired an even harsher shot. “I think Lou’s making one of the worst mistakes a ballplayer can make by trying to keep up that ‘Iron Man’ stuff,” Ruth said. “He’s already cut three years off his baseball life with it.”

  Gehrig “ought to learn how to sit on the bench and rest,” Ruth continued, because the Yankees “aren’t going to pay off on how many games in a row he’s played. The next two years will tell his fate. When his legs go, they’ll go in a hurry. The average fan doesn’t realize the effect a single charley horse can have on your legs. If Lou stays out there every day and never rests his legs, one bad charley horse might start him downhill.”

  The comments angered Gehrig. He felt he knew what his body could tolerate—a lot more than Ruth’s body, which had broken down at least partly because Ruth did not take care of himself. Gehrig stayed in much better shape.

  Ruth’s sour grapes convinced Gehrig to keep his streak going. When he summoned the press to what was billed as a “tea party” at the Commodore Hotel in New York in January 1937, reporters expected him to state his case for making the $40,000 salary he wanted from the Yankees that season. But once he had the press around him, Gehrig used the platform to reflect on his streak, his career goals, and his legacy. It was evident he was miffed about Ruth’s comments.

  “I have played in 1,808 straight games and plan to stretch that string to 2,500,” he declared. “That’s my five-year plan. Some people think I’m crazy to play day in and day out. But I know myself better than other people know me. I get enough off days during the season to prevent my going stale. I am only 33 and I don’t have to begin worrying about my legs—not just yet. I’m not going to endanger my health or the success of our ball club by sticking in the lineup when I am not fit. But just so long as I am fit, I will hang on grimly to my determination to play in 2,500 straight games.”

  His overall goal, he said, was to play long enough to break “about a dozen records which lie within my grasp,” including the major league career marks for runs scored and runs batted in. The home run record, held by Ruth, was insurmountable, he acknowledged, but “I plan to join the 3,000-hit club.”

  In a one-on-one interview after the event, sportswriter Dan Daniel asked Gehrig to name the greatest player he had seen. It was a trick question. The obvious answer was Ruth. But Gehrig named Honus Wagner, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ shortstop, calling him “a marvelous player who went along doing a grand job without any thought of himself. He was a team man all of the time.”

  Not once did Gehrig mention Ruth’s name—neither in his “tea party” remarks nor in his interview with Daniel. His distaste was evident. The comment about Wagner’s having no “thought of himself” was an obvious slap at Ruth.

  Until now, Gehrig’s motivation for playing every day had been to help his team. But now it was personal.

  15

  Ironmen

  SHENANIGANS

  By the 1950s, consecutive-game streaks had become the oddball in the family of baseball feats—not a black sheep so much as a crazy, complicated cousin, beloved by some, irksome to others.

  On one hand, the public and many players viewed them as a worthwhile achievement. Five of the 15 longest streaks in history began or ended in the 1950s, and fans faithfully responded with swells of applause, appreciating the toughness and dedication required. Gehrig’s “Iron Man stunt” was still a vivid memory, having ended not th
at long ago. In deference to Gehrig, streaks were treated with respect.

  But they also had accumulated a set of detractors, skeptics who believed it was a silly, pointless goal, and certainly an odd thing to become known for. Youngsters playing imaginary games in their backyards dreamed of hitting home runs and winning the World Series, right? They did not envision themselves simply playing in hundreds of games in a row.

  Babe Ruth had chided Gehrig for caring about the streak. A columnist in Detroit had eviscerated Gehrig after watching him stumble to the plate, bat leadoff, and leave a game in 1934, all for the sake of extending his streak. “Records preserved in the manner in which Gehrig preserved his at Navin Field prove nothing except the absurdity of most records,” the columnist wrote. Gus Suhr had extended his league-record streak with even more “token” appearances that raised questions about his feat’s legitimacy. Everett Scott later wondered aloud why he had bothered to play in so many games in a row.

  Obviously, it was a challenge for a player to stay healthy enough and productive enough that his manager kept him in the lineup for years. But did his resolve to take zero days off really make his team better? The correlation was not always clear. Miller Huggins wanted to end Scott’s streak several years before he did. Suhr admitted in hindsight that he should have rested more for the sake of the team.

  Anyone skeptical of the legitimacy and importance of consecutive-game streaks was handed plenty of ammunition in the 1950s. The contrivances reached a new threshold of dubiousness. Eddie Yost, the Washington Senators’ third baseman, somehow kept a long streak going for nine days without stepping into the batter’s box. Stan Musial, the St. Louis Cardinals’ magnificent right fielder, quietly engineered what sounded like an act of sporting chicanery, extending his career-longest streak one night without setting foot on the diamond.

  Yost had played in more than 800 games in a row when he began resorting to manipulations to keep his streak intact late in the 1954 season. Twenty-seven years old at the time, he was, like Gehrig, a German American from New York, born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens. Having grown up cheering for the Yankees, and Gehrig in particular, he enjoyed that he was now being compared to his hero as an exemplar of endurance.

  Yost had made his major league debut as a 17-year-old in 1944 when the Senators, their roster ravaged by the war effort, signed him and brought him straight to Washington. After spending the next two years in the navy, he resumed his baseball career, expecting to hone his skills in the minors. But the GI Bill contained a provision that guaranteed returning servicemen the jobs they had left behind, so he stayed in the majors. Within a year, he was the Senators’ regular third baseman.

  Although he did not hit for a high average, the five-foot-ten, thick-chested Yost possessed a keen eye at the plate. He had “a precise sense of the strike zone,” the New York Times wrote, and could foul off strikes for hours, it seemed. Fans began calling him “the Walking Man,” and not because he resembled Auguste Rodin’s headless bronze sculpture of the same name. No one in the major leagues, not even Ted Williams, drew more bases on balls.

  His consecutive-game streak began on July 8, 1949, when he returned from an ankle sprain so severe he had walked on crutches for weeks. The Senators’ trainer wrapped his ankle with tape before every game, and he was able to play the rest of that season without taking a break. The next year, he played a full schedule for the first time, starting each of the Senators’ 155 games on a still-tender ankle bulging with tape. He collected 169 hits and 141 walks, finishing with a .440 on-base percentage. The OBP (as on-base percentage would become known) statistic received no attention at the time, but Yost’s season ranked with the best performances of Ruth, Gehrig, and Williams.

  After playing another full season in 1951, Yost continued to bat leadoff for the Senators in 1952 even when a slump dropped his average below .200. He would lead the American League in walks that year. “Every time I look up, that feller is on base,” said Casey Stengel, the Yankees’ manager, who put Yost on the American League All-Star team even though he was hitting only .196 at the time.

  Paul Richards, manager of the Chicago White Sox, grew so frustrated watching his pitchers walk Yost that he started fining them $25 per walk. (They rang up almost $600 in fines.) Yost also irritated the Yankees, who tried to trade for him after the 1952 season.

  “All I hear from other clubs when they talk trade is Yost, Yost, Yost,” Washington’s owner, Clark Griffith, said. “They look at his batting average and think they can make a deal for him. But I wouldn’t swap him for Mickey Mantle even up, and to prove it, I’m paying him almost twice as much as the Yankees pay Mantle.”

  Yost received a $21,000 salary in 1953 after pointing out to Griffith that the club did not have to pay a backup third baseman because of his consecutive-game streak. He had played in more than 800 straight games by September 17, 1954, when Russ Kemmerer, a pitcher for the Red Sox, hit him in the head with a fastball at Washington’s Griffith Stadium in the bottom of the fourth inning.

  After spending the night in the hospital, Yost returned to the ballpark the next day. His head still throbbed, and it certainly was not crucial that he play; the Senators were 43½ games out of first place. But Yost wanted to preserve his streak, later admitting his goal was “to get to a thousand” games in a row.

  Just as Joe McCarthy helped Gehrig in the 1930s, Washington’s manager, Bucky Harris, devised a plan that enabled Yost to keep his streak going. Hours after leaving the hospital, he was on Harris’s lineup card and stationed at third base when the game against the Red Sox began. After two Boston players batted in the top of the first, Harris pulled him from the field. It was the briefest of workdays, but it extended Yost’s streak. Since 1912, both major leagues had accepted that “all appearances by a player in a championship game count as a game played,” according to Total Baseball, the modern encyclopedia. The next day, Yost was on the field for just four at-bats by the Red Sox before Harris pulled him. But his streak continued.

  Leaving Washington after that game, the Senators ended the 1954 season with series in New York and Boston. Yost never batted but appeared in every game. One day in New York, he was on the bench as Roy Dietzel started at third base, batted in the top of the first, and played the field in the bottom of the first. Yost then replaced Dietzel in the field in the bottom of the second for two batters before being replaced himself. One day in Boston, he was out of the lineup for the first game of a doubleheader but took the field with two out in the bottom of the first. Standing at third base with his glove on, he watched a Washington pitcher issue an intentional walk, then was taken out of the game. In the second game that day, a catcher, Bob Oldis, was the Senators’ leadoff hitter and third baseman and batted in the top of the first. Yost replaced Oldis at third in the bottom of the first and again lasted two batters before being replaced himself.

  By the end of the season, Yost had played in 813 straight games. If his teammates or the media thought poorly of the tactics he had used to keep his streak going, their gripes did not receive a public airing. No one suggested that his streak had become a contrivance, or that Yost had selfishly put his interests ahead of his team’s. Since they last won a pennant in 1932, the Senators had become also-rans. Why not let one of their players have some fun? Nothing was at stake.

  At spring training the next year, Yost was the subject of a flattering Sporting News profile authored by Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich and headlined YOUNG IRON MAN YOST KEEPS STROLLING. Povich noted that Yost had used “token appearances” to keep his consecutive-game streak going but did not criticize him. Gehrig had also done that, Povich wrote, and what mattered was Yost’s overall durability.

  But early in the 1955 season, Yost came down with tonsillitis, ran a fever, and felt too weak to play nine innings. The Senators’ new manager, Charlie Dressen, helped him keep his streak going. Yost played third base for an inning on May 11, 1955, to reach 829 straight games. But he still had a fever and felt mis
erable the next day. Dressen asked what he wanted to do. The Senators were playing the Cleveland Indians.

  “Bench me. I’m not doing the team any good with these token appearances. It’s no way to keep a record going,” Yost said.

  He was not listed on the lineup card. The Senators scored a run in the first inning and added another in the third. The game moved along quickly. Soon it was the sixth, and many in the crowd of 9,653 were aware Yost’s streak was on the line.

  “We want Yost! We want Yost!” the fans chanted.

  Yost sat quietly in the dugout until Dressen approached him in the eighth. “Want to play?” the manager asked.

  “No, I’ve had it,” Yost said.

  When Yost’s streak ended, Stan Musial’s consecutive-game streak became the longest active streak in the major leagues. He had played in more than 500 games in a row for the Cardinals.

  Musial, like Rose, was a classic “Ironman without the status of being an Ironman.” Endurance was an underrated hallmark of his brilliant 22-year major league career. By the end of it, he would complete more full seasons without a day off (nine) than any player in history except Ripken, Gehrig, and Rose. In 1955, he was 34 years old and closing in on 13 straight seasons of hitting .300 or better, and he had missed just 14 games since breaking in with the Cardinals in 1941. Yet his absences had been timed just right (or wrong) to prevent him from building a notable playing streak.

  By late in the 1955 season, though, he was within 250 games of Gus Suhr’s National League consecutive-game record, by now two decades old. When sportswriters asked him about it, he shrugged. That record was small potatoes for a player who would win three Most Valuable Player awards and capture seven National League batting titles. Unlike Everett Scott, Musial was not obsessed with consecutive-game history. Now that a record was within sight, though, he cared enough to go to some lengths to keep his streak alive.