Facing Death When He Said It: “I Consider Myself the Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth.”
Okay, so think about this for a second. There’s a man who played 2,130 consecutive baseball games. Not 2,130 great games. 2,130 games in a row, never missing one. Showing up every single day for 14 years, regardless of injuries or illness or anything else life threw at him. And for most of those 14 years, he was doing it standing next to Babe Ruth, which meant that every single day, the most dominant offensive player in the history of baseball was right there beside him, taking all the air out of the room, getting all the headlines, being Babe
Ruth. And this man just quietly kept showing up and kept being maybe the second best player in the world. And almost nobody noticed. And then one day in 1939, he walks up to a microphone at Yankee Stadium in front of 60,000 people. And he has already been told he is going to die. He has a disease that is going to take everything from him.
His strength, his coordination, eventually his ability to breathe. And he knows it. And he stands at that microphone and he says he considers himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. 60,000 people go completely silent and then they start to cry. And here’s the thing, he meant it. That’s the Lou Garri story and it deserves to be told.
So, let’s go back to the beginning. Henry Louie Garri was born on June 19th, 1903 in Yorkville, Manhattan, which, and I say this as someone who grew up in New York, is about as New York as it gets. Yorkville was a workingclass German-American neighborhood on the Upper East Side, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody and nobody had very much, and that was just the condition of life rather than a complaint about it.
is his parents were German immigrants, Hinrich Garrick and Christina Faulk, who had come to America looking for the thing everybody who came to America was looking for. His father was a metal worker. His mother took in laundry and worked as a cook and a housekeeper to keep the family going. They had four children. Three of them died in infancy.
Lou was the one who survived. And I think about that sometimes being the child who survived when your siblings didn’t. What that does to a family, what it does to a mother. Because Christina Gerri, mom Gerig, as everyone called her, became one of the defining forces of Lou Garri’s life in ways that were both deeply loving and genuinely complicated.
She worked herself to exhaustion to give Lou opportunities she had never had. She pushed him academically, pushed him athletically, pushed him to be something that would justify everything the family had sacrificed. And Lou, who was by every account a gentle and devoted son, absorbed all of that love and all of that pressure, and carried both of them for his entire life.
The relationship between Lou Garri and his mother is one of the most interesting and underexamined parts of his story, and we’re going to come back to it. He was a big kid, physically imposing in a way that was unusual for his age. Broad shoulders, thick legs, the kind of build that made coaches notice him before he had even done anything.
He played football well enough that Colombia University offered him a scholarship. He played baseball too and it was clear from early on that the baseball was something different. His coach at Colombia, Andy Kley, he had said that Garri was the most naturally gifted hitter he had ever worked with at the college level. The Yankees scout Paul Crickle saw Garri hit a home run at Colombia that reportedly landed so far beyond the outfield fence that Cricle went back to the Yankees office and told them he thought he had just seen the next babe, Ruth. The Yankees signed
Garri in 1923. He was 19 years old. Now, here’s the thing about Garri’s early career that most people don’t know. When he first came up with the Yankees, the starting first baseman was a veteran player named Wally Pip. Solid player, experienced, not going anywhere. Garri spent time in the miners developing and then came back up as a backup.
And then on June 2nd, 1925, Wally Pip told manager Miller Huggins he had a headache and asked to sit out. Huggin put Garri in at first base. Pip never got his spot back. Garri played every single game from that day forward for the next 14 years, 2,130 consecutive games. The streak that defined his career and that stood as the major league record until Cal Ripken Jr.
broke it in 1995. And here is what I want you to understand about that streak. It wasn’t just a number. It was a statement about who Lou Garri was as a person. Because he played through things that would have kept any reasonable person out of the lineup. He played with a broken thumb. He played with broken fingers.
17 fractures in his hands over the course of his career, according to X-rays taken after he retired. He played with back spasms so severe that teammates said he could barely stand up straight in the clubhouse before games. And there was one stretch where he was hit in the head by a pitch and was visibly concussed and came back the next day and went four for four.
The trainer would tape him up, shoot him full of whatever they had in 1930s sports medicine, and Garrick would walk out to first base and do his job every single day without complaint, without drama, without ever once suggesting that maybe today was the day he should sit down. And he was doing all of this next to Babe Ruth.
I keep coming back to that because I think it’s the key to understanding Garri’s place in baseball history and why he occupies this strange position of being simultaneously one of the greatest players who ever lived and one of the most underappreciated. Ruth and Garri batted third and fourth in the Yankees lineup. Ruth third, Garri fourth, and together they formed the most feared one-two punch in the history of the sport.
Garri’s career numbers are almost incomprehensible. 340 lifetime batting average, 493 home runs, 1,995 RB is still the American League record. He won the Triple Crown in 1934. He was a seventime allstar. In 1927, the year Ruth hit 60 home runs and everyone talks about Ruth. Garri hit 373 with 47 home runs and 175 RBI’s and finished second in the MVP voting second behind Ruth in a season where Garri produced one of the greatest offensive performances in baseball history.
I grew up in the Bronx and my grandmother used to talk about Garri. She was a kid during the Garri years and she said the thing people forget now is that at the time everyone knew Garri was extraordinary. It wasn’t that people didn’t appreciate him. It was that Ruth was simply operating at a level that made extraordinary look ordinary by comparison.
Standing next to Babe Ruth was like standing next to the sun. Everything around it is real and significant and worth paying attention to, but the sun is all you can see. Now, let’s talk about Elellanar because Lou Garri’s love story is one of the genuinely beautiful things in this whole story and it doesn’t get told enough. Ellaner Twitchell was a Chicago socialite.
smart, funny, independent, completely unlike the quiet domestic partner that mom Garri had in mind for her son. Garri met her in 1928 and was immediately completely gone. He was not a smooth operator. He was a large, gentle, slightly awkward man who was very good at baseball and not particularly practiced at romance. Iki fell for Elellaner hard and pursued her with the same quiet persistence he brought to everything else in his life.
They married in 1933. And here’s where the complicated part comes in. Mom Garri did not approve of Ellaner. Not subtly, not privately, openly, persistently, in ways that created real tension in the marriage. For years, mom Garri had devoted her entire life to her son, and she was not prepared to share him.
And Elellanar was not prepared to be managed by her mother-in-law. And Lou Garri, this man who had faced down every physical challenge the game could throw at him without flinching, found himself genuinely unable to navigate the conflict between the two women he loved most. It was the one arena where his famous quiet strength simply didn’t have the tools for the job.
E Eleanor later wrote about this period in her memoir with a directness that is both funny and painful. She loved Lou completely and she spent years fighting for the space to actually be his wife. And then in 1938 things started to change on the field. Garri’s numbers dropped. His timing was off. Balls he would have hit out of the park were dying on the warning track.
Fielding plays he had made thousands of times were suddenly difficult. His teammates noticed. The coaches noticed. Gerri noticed most of all. He was 35 years old and he had played every game for 14 years. And at first everyone assumed it was age where the accumulation of all those broken fingers and back spasms and bean balls finally catching up.
He pushed through the winter. He came back for spring training in 1939 and it was worse. Jor on May 2nd, 1939. He took himself out of the lineup for the first time since June 2nd, 1925. He told the manager, Joe McCarthy, that he was taking himself out for the good of the team, that the team needed someone who could actually help them win.
McCarthy, who had managed Garri for years, and who understood exactly what it had cost him to say those words, reportedly couldn’t speak for a moment after Garri left his office. The diagnosis came shortly after. Amiotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, a progressive neurodeenerative disease that attacks the nerve cells controlling voluntary muscle movement.
There was no treatment. There was no cure. There still isn’t. Lou Garri was 35 years old and he had maybe 2 years to live and he knew it. July 4th, 1939, Yankee Stadium, Lou Garri appreciation day. 61,000 people, each his teammates from the 1927 World Series Championship team, the greatest team ever assembled, came back to honor him.
Babe Ruth came back. Ruth and Garri had been estranged for years over a comment Garri had reportedly made about Ruth’s wife. One of those family conflicts that starts small and grows into something larger and harder to resolve. But Ruth came, and at the ceremony, Ruth walked over to Garri and hugged him.
And Garri, who had been holding himself together all afternoon with visible effort, buried his face in Ruth’s shoulder. For a moment, they were just two old teammates. Whatever had come between them didn’t matter anymore. And then Garri walked to the microphone and he said, “And I’m going to give you the actual words because they deserve to be heard in full.
” He said, “Fans, for the past 2 weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He went on to talk about his teammates, his managers, his family, Eleanor, his mother and father. He talked about the kindness people had shown him. He talked about having spent 17 years in the majors and never having received anything but kindness and encouragement.
And then he said, “So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for. Thank you. 61,000 people were silent for a moment and then the sound that came out of that stadium was not cheering exactly. It was something older and more human than cheering.
He died on June 2nd, 1941, exactly 16 years to the day after he had replaced Wally Pip at first base and started the streak. He was 37 years old. Elellanar never remarried. She spent decades advocating for ALS research and refused every offer to sell the rights to lose story in ways she felt were exploitative. She died in 1984. She was devoted to his memory for 43 years.
And here’s what I keep thinking about when I think about Lou Garri. That speech could have been so many other things. It could have been angry. It could have been a reckoning with the unfairness of a 35-year-old man being told he’s going to die. It could have been bitter about the years of playing in Ruth’s shadow, about the broken fingers and the back spasms and the 14 years of showing up every single day and never once being the story.
And instead, it was gratitude. genuine, specific, unperformed gratitude for the people and the experiences that had made his life what it was. I don’t know how a person gets there. I genuinely don’t. But I think it has something to do with the fact that Lou Garri had spent his entire career being the person who showed up, who did the work, who played through the pain without making it anyone else’s problem.
And when the hardest moment of his life arrived, he just kept being that person all the way to the end. If you want more stories like this, hit subscribe and drop a comment telling me who you want me to cover next. I read every single one. I’ll see you in the next one.
