Farewell to Baseball ("The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth")

Summary

Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was delivered at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, between the games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Two months earlier Gehrig, whose strength had been failing for a season, had taken himself out of the lineup in Detroit, ending his streak of 2,130 consecutive games. On 19 June, his thirty-sixth birthday, the Mayo Clinic diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive and incurable disease of the motor nerves. A crowd of 61,808 attended; members of the 1927 Yankees, including Babe Ruth, returned for the ceremony, and Gehrig received gifts from his teammates, the rival New York Giants, the stadium staff, and others. Manager Joe McCarthy and other speakers spoke before him. Gehrig at first seemed unable to speak, then came to the microphone without a script and talked for little more than two minutes. He opened by acknowledging the bad news the fans had been reading about and answering it with the claim that he was the luckiest man alive. He then counted his blessings one by one: seventeen years in baseball and the kindness of the fans; the teammates he had played beside; the owner Jacob Ruppert, the general manager Ed Barrow, his first manager Miller Huggins, and McCarthy; the gift from the Giants, a team he had always wanted to beat; the groundskeepers and other workers who had remembered him; his mother-in-law, his parents, who had worked hard to give him an education, and his wife, Eleanor, whom he called a tower of strength. He closed by granting that he had been dealt a bad break while insisting that he had a great deal to live for. Ruth embraced him at the end, and newsreel cameras captured parts of the speech. The Yankees retired his number 4 that day, the first number retired in the major leagues, and the 1942 film The Pride of the Yankees, with Gary Cooper, made the speech known to later generations, though it rearranged the order of its lines.

Top Lessons

• Gratitude as an answer to bad news

  Gehrig does not describe his disease or its prognosis. Instead he answers what everyone knew with a long list of people to thank, so that the speech becomes an inventory of gifts rather than of losses. The structure shows gratitude as a deliberate choice about what to dwell on, not a denial of the facts.

• Humility in the greatest player

  One of the most accomplished hitters in baseball history says nothing about his records. He counts it an honour to have played beside his teammates and thanks owners, managers, rivals, and groundskeepers alike. The speech shows humility as attention to others rather than self-deprecation.

• Brevity and plain words

  The speech lasted about two minutes and was not written out in full. Its power comes from short, ordinary sentences and a repeated pattern of naming a gift and pausing on it. It shows that an occasion of great feeling often calls for fewer words, not more.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Gehrig's illness gave amyotrophic lateral sclerosis its popular American name. The disease had been described by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s as a degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons, but in 1939 there was no treatment that altered its course, and the diagnosis, made at the Mayo Clinic, carried a prognosis of a few years. Gehrig's decline over 1938-1939, from a dominant hitter to a player struggling with routine plays, is one of the best-documented public presentations of the disease. The first drug shown to modestly extend survival, riluzole, was not approved in the United States until 1995. A 2010 neuropathology report raised the possibility that repeated head trauma in athletes can produce a motor neuron disease resembling ALS, prompting speculation about Gehrig, who had suffered concussions; this remains unproven and no autopsy findings are known. For a psychiatric reader, the speech is also a public record of how a man received a terminal diagnosis: it contains no denial of the facts, and it sets against them gratitude, relationships, and a sense of meaning, the resources that later clinicians would discuss under headings such as demoralization and dignity at the end of life.

• Opening

  Gehrig refers to the bad news the fans have been reading about and answers it with his claim of good fortune.

• Family section

  He thanks his wife for strength and courage, an early public tribute to a caregiver of a patient with a progressive neurological disease.

• Closing

  He concludes that despite a bad break he has much to live for.