Lou Gehrig appears in his 2,000th consecutive game for the Yankees

On the day he reached 2,000 consecutive games – May 31, 1938 – no one could have guessed that his superhuman consistency was a by-product of familial love. At this point, Gehrig was one of the highest paid players in baseball at $39,000 a year. The Associated Press heralded his feat as “the greatest endurance record in sports,” while The New York Times featured him on their front page, surrounded by a gaggle of pinstriped Yankees congratulating their teammate before the game.

But while Gehrig’s paycheck had certainly grown since the streak began, his ego hadn’t. The Iron Horse still held himself to same level of dependable excellence, day in and day out, as he had on that historic day in 1925. If he was going to take the field for 2,000 straight appearances, they were going to be appearances of quality.

Wasting no time, now he eyed 2,500.

“There’s no point to [stopping the streak],” he told The New York Times. “I like to play baseball and if I were to sit on the bench for a few games the worrying and fretting would take too much out of me.”

Notching an RBI single in the eighth and recording the final three putouts in the ninth, Gehrig and the Yankees celebrated his streak with a 12-5 win against the Red Sox at home. The Iron Horse’s streak would continue for 130 more games, when he took himself out of the lineup on May 2, 1939, after he started suffering from the effects of ALS, now referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” Cal Ripken Jr. would surpass the mark 59 years later, and set the bar at 2,632.

“I never try to hit hard,” Gehrig told NEA. “Sometimes my hard drives are good for home runs. That’s incidental. My consecutive-game record is incidental, too. As I look back over the season, the thing that impresses me most is the realization that I always have tried to do my best, and that I have helped the Yankees to win.”

Alex Coffey was the communications specialist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum