(This story originally appeared in the July 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)
It can be a bit too easy sometimes to think of Lou Gehrig’s famous speech, and the happy tones in which we use it to craft our memories of the Iron Horse. The luckiest man? Why, that sounds wonderful!
In reality, Lou Gehrig was dying of a cruel disease that is as deadly today as it was in 1939. Indeed, patients diagnosed with ALS in 2021 have the same likelihood of survival that Gehrig did.
All of which is to say that the first league-wide celebration of Lou Gehrig Day was about more than recognizing the death of a great baseball man. Rather, the hope is that adding attention to more than just the speech and the ballplayer can help finally move the needle toward a cure.
A couple of interesting things that stood out to me from my reporting on this one. First, I was asking Gerrit Cole (whose father-in-law, Mike Crawford, was very involved in the effort to make MLB adopt the league-wide recognition) what it meant to be a Yankee during the first Lou Gehrig Day. How did it compare, I asked to being a Pirate on Roberto Clemente Day? What was interesting was that he reminded me that, on top of those two examples, he also played baseball at UCLA, where Jackie Robinson starred, so he really has an attachment to all three days on the MLB calendar that honor individuals.
The other thing was something that Crawford told me, a ray of light that could come from the struggle against COVID. What we all saw in the last year was that when all of the scientists and medical workers can focus on something, we can do amazing things. We got a vaccine for COVID in a matter of months. So rather than viewing ALS as an impossible problem, there’s hope that with the right amount of money and the right publicity push, maybe there are lessons to learn from the struggle to find a pathway to eradicating COVID.
The inaugural Lou Gehrig Day was a special celebration throughout MLB and America. I was proud to write about it.
https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-lou-gehrig-speech?t=yankees-magazine
