GEHRIG- AND PIPP'S STRANGE RETURN
First Time Pipp Went To See His Successor, Lou's Streak Ended
"The dramatic aspects of Lou Gehrig's life have been immortalized in celluloid in the finest sports picture ever made, The Pride of the Yankees, and on television in a Climax! program last year. But the story we would like to tell here is off-beat and starts on the second of June, 33 years ago, in Cleveland. It's the story of two aspirin tablets and the strange reappearance of Wally Pipp.
It was a sultry day and Pipp, first baseman of the Yankees, had asked for a clubhouse boy to get him two aspirin tablets. Pipp gulped them down in a glass of water and then stretched out on a bench.
Little Miller Huggins, the Yankee manager, had been watching. He asked Pipp what was wrong. Pipp explained that the heat had him down. 'Hug,' he said, 'I have an eye weakness that always breaks out in hot weather in terrific headaches. This one is killing me.'
'Take a few days off,' said Hug, 'and I'll take a look at this clumsy kid from Columbia.'
So Gehrig, who had pinch hit for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger the day before, played his first games as a Yankee June 1-2, 1925. He was awkward and cumbersome but showed signs of being a hitter. However, when Pipp informed Huggins on June 3 that he was ready to return to the lineup, the little manager did not hesitate. Pipp was listed at first base.
But a pitcher named Chuck Caldwell beaned the first-sacker in batting practice that day and rendered him hors de combat. So Gehrig took over again.
Lou walloped the baseball to all fields that day and Wally Pipp was destined never to play the bag as a Yankee again. Now surplus baggage in New York, he was sold the next winter to Cincinnati.
It was May 2, 1939, fourteen years later, and the Yankees were playing in Detroit. It is a strange fact that Pipp, from the time that he left baseball, had not seen Lou Gehrig again. He was a newspaper publisher in 1939 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and by a coincidence, had some business in Detroit that day. By another coincidence, he finished his business about 2 o'clock, noted that his ex-team, the Yankees, were in town, and decided to take in the game.
He hardly had taken his seat when Harry Heilmann, then Detroit's radio broadcaster, stopped by to chat. 'Too bad about Gehrig, isn't it?' asked Heilmann.
'What's too bad?' asked Pipp.
'Why, he's benched himself and ended his consecutive-game streak at 2,130,' said Heilmann. Harry then filled in the details of what has since become baseball's epic story: how Gehrig had gone to Manager Joe McCarthy that morning, described his slump and failure to account for it, said he felt he was hurting the team, and had asked to be replaced. He would work extra hard at batting practice and would tell McCarthy when he was ready to return.
The world now knows that Gehrig was destined never to return, that in the prime of a brilliant athletic career, he was struck down by the mysterious malady of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and died on June 2, 1941.
On that May day in Detroit, Manager McCarthy must have had a premonition. He was emotionally overcome. For 2,130 games in succession nothing had stopped the apparently indomitable, unbreakable Lou Gehrig. Something had to be radically wrong.
He said softly that maybe a rest would be the proper thing. That day the Yankees burst loose with their greatest offensive barrage of the year to win 22-2 after making a clubhouse vow to win the game for Lou.
And the man who surrendered his job 14 years before to Gehrig was, by an odd coincidence, there to see the end of Gehrig's unparalleled baseball career."
-Sam Balter, Los Angeles Herald and Express (Baseball Digest, August 1958)
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