Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Photo Framed with Plate Signatures.

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Photo Framed with Plate Signatures. A Moment Captured in a Single Photograph Showing Two Baseball Legends simply Sharing Their Love For The Game. 

When Gehrig established himself as a Yankees regular in 1925, the 22-year-old had long been a Ruth fan. The two bonded easily, with Gehrig assuming a subservient, little brother role at first. The two barnstormed together in the off seasons once Gehrig became a star (a very lucrative venture for both), and travelled to spring training together. 

The Ruth-Gehrig relationship fell apart around 1932 or 1933. When Ruth remarried in 1929.

Gehrig when he married Eleanor Twitchell in September 1933 (the Ruths were not invited to the reception).

Although not enough was understood about Gehrig's diagnosis in 1939 for reporters not to screw that up, too, even with the words right in front of them. Here's Dan Daniel in the Sporting News:

The event was a reconciliation between Ruth and Gehrig, who had not spoken to each other in some time. They had tiffed over some silly thing, and Lou had resented Babe's interview in which he said Gehrig was making a serious mistake playing every day. Ruth was correct, only Gehrig did not know it. Nor did any of us.

No, Ruth was not correct, and Daniel should have known that. The Mayo Clinic's press release on Gehrig had been issued in late June:

It was found that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This type of illness involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system and in lay terms is known as a form of chronic poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis). The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr. Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player.

Regardless, there were other reasons for Ruth and Gehrig falling out. They weren't well-matched personalities in any sense except being great athletes. Ruth was outgoing and uncensored, Gehrig reticent and retiring. "The big guy has a big, loose mouth," he once said of Ruth. "He pops off too damn much about a lot of things." Ruth spent lavishly and Gehrig was notoriously tight with a buck. Yankees politics also got between them. Ruth thought manager Joe McCarthy was getting in the way of his managerial bid and actively disliked him, while Gehrig was an avid supporter, he had inscribed a picture to McCarthy, "May I always deserve your friendship."

Eleanor did add to the friction between Ruth and Gehrig, she pushed Lou to think of himself as the star that he was, rather than a second banana to the fading Babe. That's not to say she was incorrect, but there was a long-time pecking order in which she was interfering. Once asked if he minded standing in Ruth's shadow, Gehrig had replied that it was a big shadow and there was plenty of room for him to spread out beneath it. Eleanor encouraged him to think more like the star he was. 

Can a reconciliation after a deep break happen with just a handshake, a hug, or a kiss? Still, maybe that's enough of reconciliation in the end. Lou was beyond help, but there were still those left behind, those who loved him, who needed comforting. The Ruths were second, after Yankees president Ed Barrow (who undoubtedly heard first), to arrive at the Gehrigs' house after Lou passed away, offering support to Eleanor, and that may indicate the state of the relationship at the time. Eleanor Gehrig never remarried. After Babe died in 1948, she and Claire Ruth spent the next 28 years, until Claire's passing. appearing at Yankee Stadium as stand-ins for their husbands. It's not clear if they ever became friends. Eleanor died in 1984, at the age of 79. Then all was even and would remain that way forevermore. All now is reconciled, or perhaps more accurately, inert. The Babe's parting from this world is remembered with the same pain and awe as Gehrig's, not because of what he said, but because of a picture that did tell the whole story. 

The words will endure as long as there is baseball, if not beyond. They are so big as to have crowded out the embrace and made the latter a mere detail in both their lives. Yet, the feud and its resolution 75 years ago in its way looms just as large. It belongs not just to them but to that small group of us who are moved not just because one man looked at his mortality and said he was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, but by loving-kindness, generosity, and the possibility that if those two giants could embrace each other in the end then we too might be forgiven by those we have wronged, and that we might have the wisdom to grant that same forgiveness to those who have wronged us if it is asked for.

Those are the things we can change if only we have the wisdom. Babe Ruth had it, at least once.

Item Code - MEMSOU16B1204155GA

Width: 14 1/2"  Height: 19 1/2"  Depth: 3/4"  Weight: 1.105 kg