Lou Gehrig: 2,130 Games and a Farewell Speech

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Lou Gehrig's career in numbers, from the 2,130-game streak and the 1934 Triple Crown to the ALS diagnosis, the 1939 farewell speech and the disease that now carries his name.

Lou Gehrig played 2,164 major-league games, hit .340 with 493 home runs and 1,995 runs batted in, and was a Yankee for all of them. He is remembered first for the streak, 2,130 consecutive games over almost fourteen seasons, and then for the speech he made on July 4, 1939, after the disease that now carries his name had ended his career. Those two facts crowd out the hitting, which was on its own terms among the best any first baseman has produced.

The numbers deserve more attention than the legend usually gives them. Gehrig drove in 100 or more runs in 13 consecutive seasons, drove in 184 in 1931, won the Triple Crown in 1934 and was voted the league's Most Valuable Player twice. He did this beside Babe Ruth, in the same lineup and often in the same inning, and in most accounts he was the less celebrated of the two. This article follows his career in phases and says what the numbers meant, using the historical record through the 2025 season for every figure.

A New York kid at Columbia

Henry Louis Gehrig was born on June 19, 1903, in New York City, and grew up there. He went to Columbia University, where he played football and baseball, and the Yankees signed him in 1923. That detail is in the historical record as his college, and it is one of the few items that separates his path from most players of the era, who came to the majors from the minor leagues or sandlots rather than the Ivy League.

He batted and threw left-handed and is listed at 72 inches and 200 pounds. His first appearances were minor. In 1923 he played 13 games and batted 26 times, getting 11 hits for a .423 average, and in 1924 he played 10 games and went 6 for 12. Those are tiny samples, too small to judge, and the real career began two years later.

The streak begins, 1925 and 1926

Gehrig became a regular in 1925. He played 126 games that season, hit .295 with 20 home runs and 68 runs batted in, and his streak of consecutive games began on June 1 of that year. The story that is usually told is that the incumbent first baseman, Wally Pipp, sat out with a headache and Gehrig took his place and never gave it back. Accounts of that day differ in their details, and it is better to say that Gehrig took the job in 1925 and held it.

In 1926 he played 155 games, hit .313 and drove in 112 runs. That was the first of the 13 straight seasons with 100 or more runs batted in. The Yankees won the pennant that year and lost the World Series to St. Louis, and Gehrig appeared in his first one.

1927: Murderers' Row

The 1927 Yankees are the team people mean when they ask for the best of all time, and the database supports the claim at least on the record: 110 wins and 44 losses, the pennant, and a four-game sweep of Pittsburgh in the World Series that year. Gehrig's season would have been the story of almost any other year. He hit .373 with 47 home runs and led the league with 175 runs batted in, along with 218 hits.

He was the league's Most Valuable Player, even though Ruth hit 60 home runs that year. As the rules of that award are usually described, a player who had already won it was not eligible again, and Ruth had. Gehrig hit 13 fewer home runs than Ruth and drove in 11 more runs. The AL batting title went to Harry Heilmann at .398, with Gehrig second.

The pairing is the point: the American League's home-run leaders in 1927 were Ruth with 60 and Gehrig with 47, and the next man in the major leagues had 30.

The prime, 1928 to 1933

Gehrig's best years for the Yankees ran from 1927 through 1937, and the table shows how steady they were.

Two of those seasons stand out. In 1930 Gehrig hit .379 with 220 hits, 41 home runs and 174 runs batted in, in a season when the major leagues as a whole averaged 5.55 runs and 0.63 home runs per team game, one of the highest-scoring years of the era. In 1931 he drove in 184 runs, with Ruth second in the league at 163, and he tied Ruth for the home-run lead at 46. The 184 remains the American League record for a season.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1927, 1928 and 1932. Gehrig played in seven World Series in all (1926, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937 and 1938), and the Yankees won six of them. The historical record shows his postseason batting line as 34 games, 43 hits in 119 at-bats, 10 home runs and 35 runs batted in.

1934 and 1936: the Triple Crown and the second MVP

Gehrig's best year by the usual measures was 1934, when he won the Triple Crown. He hit .363, hit 49 home runs and drove in 165 runs, leading the American League in all three. The next-best home-run total was Jimmie Foxx's 44. The runner-up in the batting race was Charlie Gehringer at .356, and the next-best RBI total was 142.

He did not win the Most Valuable Player Award that year. It went to Detroit's Mickey Cochrane, a catcher who also managed the Tigers to the pennant that year. Gehrig's Yankees finished behind them, and voters of the day leaned toward players on the winning club. The outcome looks strange now and is a reminder that awards record what voters valued at the time, not only performance.

Two years later Gehrig did win it, the second of his two. In 1936 he hit .354 with 49 home runs and 152 runs batted in, and the Yankees won 102 games and the pennant. The RBI title that year went to Hal Trosky with 162. The historical record also shows that Gehrig's final two full seasons were still excellent: 37 home runs and 159 runs batted in at .351 in 1937, and then a drop to .295 with 29 home runs and 114 RBI in 1938, his first season below .300 since 1925.

What the numbers meant in the 1930s

The career line is .340 average, .447 on-base percentage and .632 slugging percentage, for an OPS of 1.080. In a period when the major leagues scored roughly 4.5 to 5.5 runs per team game, those figures describe a batter who reached base almost every second time and hit for extra bases in a way that few ever have. He had 2,721 hits, 534 doubles and 163 triples, 1,888 runs scored, and 1,508 walks against only 790 strikeouts. That last comparison is almost impossible to imagine for a power hitter today.

The batting average of .340 ranks 22nd in the historical record's list of career averages, which includes the Negro Leagues rows for 1920 to 1948. It sits close to Babe Ruth's .342, which is 14th, and well behind Ty Cobb's .366 at the top. That is worth saying plainly: Gehrig was not the best pure hitter of average in his own era, and the combination of average, patience and power is what put him in a different class. The Babe Ruth profile covers the other half of that lineup.

Runs batted in need care. A hitter drives in runs partly because the players ahead of him reach base, and Gehrig hit behind Ruth in a lineup that was among the best ever assembled. The 1,995 career total is real, but a modern reader should treat it as a product of both his own bat and the opportunities he was given. That does not make it less impressive; it explains why on-base percentage and slugging are the better lens.

The streak: what it was and what it cost

The streak of 2,130 consecutive games ran from June 1, 1925, to April 30, 1939. It was the record for decades and was surpassed by Cal Ripken in 1995. For a first baseman who played every day through long summers and rail travel, the number is partly a record of health and partly of stubbornness, because Gehrig is widely documented to have played through injuries that kept others out.

His nickname, the Iron Horse, came from the streak. Durability is a skill of its own, and it counted: from 1926 through 1938 he never played fewer than 149 games in a season, and his production did not suffer for being on the field every day. The streak also had a limit, as any streak must. A player who is on the field every day when he is unwell can hurt the club, and in 1939 that is what happened.

In hindsight, the dip in 1938, when the average fell to .295 and the home runs to 29, is usually read as an early sign of the illness, although the numbers alone cannot prove it. By 1939 something was clearly wrong. He played eight games, collected 4 hits in 28 at-bats for a .143 average, and his last game was April 30. On May 2, in Detroit, he asked to be taken out of the lineup. The streak ended there at 2,130.

The diagnosis and July 4, 1939

On June 19, 1939, his 36th birthday, Gehrig was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive disease of the nerve cells that control muscles. The disease is now commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease in the United States, and it has no connection to baseball or to his career except through the name. The Yankees held a day for him on July 4, 1939, at Yankee Stadium, between games of a doubleheader.

The speech he gave there is among the most quoted in American sport. He said, "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth," and thanked the fans, his teammates and his family. The text is short and unadorned, which is part of why it endures. The Yankees retired his number 4 that day, and it is generally described as the first number retired in the major leagues.

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in a special election in 1939, with the usual waiting period waived. The historical record also shows that he received 51 votes in the writers' balloting of 1936, when 170 were needed, while he was still an active player. He died on June 2, 1941, in the Bronx, at age 37.

Legacy: from a film to a day on the calendar

The film The Pride of the Yankees, released in 1942, carried the story to people who never saw him play. In 2021 MLB designated June 2, the day of his death, as Lou Gehrig Day, observed across the league each year. The date is used to raise awareness of ALS. For readers who want a governing-body source on the Hall of Fame, the Baseball Hall of Fame site has his plaque and biography.

Gehrig's place in the sport is secure on the numbers alone. A .632 slugging percentage together with a .447 on-base percentage over 8,001 at-bats is a pairing very few hitters have approached. He was also named to the All-Star team in each of the seven games the database lists, from 1933 through 1939, which were the first seven All-Star Games ever played.

What the historical record cannot tell us

The historical record counts what the scorers counted. It has no wins above replacement, no park adjustments and only basic fielding counts such as putouts, assists and errors, so it cannot say how good Gehrig was at first base, how much Yankee Stadium helped a left-handed hitter, or how he rates against modern players on a common scale. It does not have Statcast, which did not exist. It also gives only partial coverage of the Negro Leagues, whose players were barred from the majors in his era and so were never his competition.

What it does supply is the plain record: totals, averages and awards. Gehrig's are enough to justify the reputation. A reader who wants more should compare his seasons with the league averages on the leaders pages and with the Hall of Fame topic page.

Common questions

How many consecutive games did Lou Gehrig play? 2,130, from June 1, 1925, through April 30, 1939. He took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939.

What were his career numbers? A .340 average, 493 home runs, 1,995 runs batted in, 2,721 hits and a 1.080 OPS over 2,164 games, all with the Yankees.

Did he win a Triple Crown? Yes, in 1934, with a .363 average, 49 home runs and 165 runs batted in.

What disease did he have? Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, diagnosed in 1939. It is a progressive neurological disease, and anyone with questions about it should ask a doctor.

Who broke his streak record? Cal Ripken Jr. passed Gehrig's total of consecutive games in 1995. The streak is a measure of durability, not hitting.

Where to go next

If you want to compare Gehrig with other early stars, read the profiles of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Cy Young. Younger players who want to protect themselves on the bases can read the safe-sliding guide.