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(upbeat music) - Hey everyone, Steve Adubato.

Do not adjust your TV set or wherever you're watching us.

Steve Adubato with a good friend and colleague and hardcore Yankee fan, the president of and CEO of the WNET Group, Neal Shapiro.

Neal, why are we dressed up like this for Yankee Week here on "One-on-One?"

What is going on?

We're public television.

- Well, what people may not know is you asked me to do this and I said, "Hey, would it be more fun if we wore Yankee jerseys," which led to a whole thing.

I mean, to be honest, I'm wearing Yankee cuff links that you can't quite see.

- No, you're not.

Are you really?

- Yeah, yeah, that's how serious I'm taking this.

- Now, and Neal has his Derek Jeter cup.

I have mine somewhere in the house here.

Neal, remind folks what came in these Yankee hats.

- It's the soft ice cream, the vanilla and chocolate swirls, - Absolutely serious business.

Yankee Week here on "One-on-One."

Every night this week, we're gonna be featuring different Yankee greats and authors who wrote about those Yankee greats.

Neal, today we kick off Yankee Week talking about the Bambino, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, if you will, and also a little bit about Aaron Judge.

As we tee up this book, the author Jim Reisler, who talked to us about Babe Ruth.

It was the house that built... Talk about Babe Ruth, Neal.

- Babe Ruth probably transformed baseball, maybe sport in a way no one else did.

He was so singularly better than everybody else.

And he brought the home run as an element of the game, which was so spectacular, that people wanted to see it, right?

And that they shared a field with the Giants, the Polo Grounds.

The Giants were incredibly stupid about this and tried to drive them out.

Instead, they built a much better stadium across the river, which had bigger capacity.

People flocked to it, especially to see Babe Ruth, and I think the first home run ever hit in Yankee Stadium was hit by Babe Ruth.

- So it's interesting 'cause Babe Ruth had an interesting complex relationship with this guy and the author Jonathan Eig.

You'll see the interview that I did with Jonathan Eig.

Extraordinary author.

"Luckiest Man" comes from that speech, July 4th, the year that he passed.

1939, was it, Neal?

- Yeah.

- "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth," as he was dying.

Talk about why Lou Gehrig continues to be such an inspirational and important figure in Yankee lore, in sports history, in American culture.

- First, you know, an incredibly accomplished player.

Had he gone, had he not died early, he would've set incredible records.

But beyond that, his character, as a guy who really you could look up to.

And I have to say, off the field, the two of 'em cannot be any different than Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

But Lou Gehrig is the kid you'd want your son to grow up to be.

And inclusive of all that is this incredible courage he faces when he faces this disease.

And everybody sort of knows where it's going.

And he says, "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

That compared to his baseball exploits alone, make him such a memorable guy.

- And he came out and played every day.

The streak that was- - 2,130 games.

- Broken by Cal Ripkin.

I mean, he played well over 2,000 games.

He just kept playing, hurt, sick, whatever.

But real quick.

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, their relationship.

Number three, Babe Ruth.

Number four, Lou Gehrig.

Did not like each other very much.

- No but I think they respected each other.

And I think that they respected their talent and I think they knew how important they were as a tandem.

They were each individually great.

But together... You know, the fact that Ruth bats three, Gehrig bats four, that's where the numbers come from.

- Together, an incredible arsenal.

- Can you gimme 30 seconds on Aaron Judge?

Yes, it's after... We're taping this after the World Series.

We don't need to talk about that.

The 62 couple years back.

How significant and does it put him with Ruth and Gehrig?

- I think it'll be...

I think, and hopefully when he wins a few World Series titles, it will.

But I think he is a pantheon in the Yankeedom already.

Not just breaking the single season record, but the way he carries himself.

Because he does have the qualities, just like Derek Jeter, about the quiet captain whose respect is so important in the clubhouse, who motivates his team and performs the way on the field, which is that he is always supportive of his teammates, inspiring.

He once again, is the guy you'd want your son to grow up to be if he could be 6' 7".

- Yeah, 6' 7" 280, and an extraordinary player.

And he will be great in the postseason.

Just watch.

So Neal and I'll be on the back end teeing up not only the next show, but the rest of Yankee Week.

We start off with Jim Reisler talking about the Babe, Babe Ruth, and also followed up by the great author Jonathan Eig.

"Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig."

For Neal Shapiro, myself, and all the great Yankee fans in the New York- New Jersey metropolitan region, this is Yankee Week.

I'm not gonna have Met Week.

That would probably be a half a show.

That was not called for, Neal.

I apologize.

Edit that out.

This is Yankee Week.

(upbeat music) - For those of you who don't know, Babe Ruth was a terrific pitcher for about three or four years, I guess, with the Red Sox.

He won like 20 games, 18 games, 16 games, all these games and then all of a sudden they say, in 1915, he was 18 and eight with a 2.44 ERA, ridiculous.

In 1920, something happens.

What happens and why is it so significant?

- Babe Ruth is sold by Boston to the Yankees.

- [Steve] Harry.

- Harry Frazee.

- Harry Frazee was the owner of the Red Sox.

He the finance, some entertainment activities, - Right, he was a Broadway.

He was actually a New Yorker, and he was a Broadway film producer.

He'd had a lot of success.

He'd owned the team for three, four years, he'd been to three World Series, probably a little bored by baseball, more interested in the Broadway scene, a New Yorker, not a Bostonian.

- Well, then why not keep the Babe?

He was a character.

He was an entertainer.

He was a showman.

- Well, he was also in constant need of money to produce a show you needed quick.

- [Steve] Harry was.

- Harry was, he needed quick infusions of cash.

And he considered Ruth, at least this was according to the Harry spin control.

- [Steve] There was spin control back then?

- There, there really was, believe it or not, he considered Ruth, he called him an incorrigible.

Isn't that a great word.

- [Steve] Incorrigible.

- He probably was, but he figured this guy was a flash in the pan.

He was a little rowdy.

I need the money.

We'll send him to the Yankees.

- So in 1920, he hits 54 home runs, - [Jim] Right.

- I mean, what are we talking about here?

The most home runs that had been hit in a season before that was?

- 29.

- Do you get what we're talking about here, folks?

- Yeah.

- When someone says someone revolutionized the game, it's often overused.

He revolutionized the game.

- Oh, absolutely and all by himself.

And really in a couple of years, I mean, when he went to the Yankees, people said, well, he hit 29 for the Red Sox.

You think he can hit 30?

And his manager at the time, Miller Huggins, the manager of the Yankees, said, nonsense, I think he can hit 35, - Do you want to go to the curse right now?

- [Jim] Sure.

- Let's deal with it.

- There's a lot of other stuff we'll talk about.

So he gets sold, 1920.

Does Harry take a lot of heat up in Boston for it?

- Harry takes a lot of heat, but Harry says, don't worry, I'm bringing in a lot of new ball players.

We'll be respectable again in a couple of years.

We're rebuilding.

- Okay, so how is Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built?

- Well, actually, Yankee Stadium didn't open until 1923.

At the time, the Yankees played at the Polo Grounds.

They were tenants of the New York Giants.

- [Steve] That's right.

- And they were the first team in 1920 to draw a million people, which doesn't sound like much today.

- [Steve] Big, back then.

- But back then it was enormous, it was huge.

It was, drawing a million people for the first time, was arguably as big a milestone as 714 or whatever.

- So they build Yankee Stadium around Ruth.

- [Jim] Yes.

- Because they expect great things from him.

- [Jim] Right.

- Who else is playing with Ruth in the early 1920s?

- Well, the Yankees had a nucleus of a pretty good team.

Lou Gehrig wasn't quite there yet.

- [Steve] Nope.

- Who else did they have?

They had, well, Miller Huggins was their manager, a Hall of Famer.

- [Steve] Did Ruth get along with Huggins?

- Yeah and nah.

He didn't listen to Huggins.

- [Steve] Did he listen to anyone?

- No, but he did eventually.

He realized really late in Huggins life, he died tragically at the age of 50 in 1929, that Miller Huggins was really an extraordinary manager who was a real disciplinarian, but he was a little man, a little man, probably five-four, and I don't think Ruth looked up to him until it was almost too late.

- You know, a lot of people focus on the Babe beyond the home runs, they focus on the lifestyle, the drinking, the hot dogs, the overeating, as we talked about, the women.

(Jim laughs) - [Jim] Yes.

- Right?

He loved the hot dogs, but he loved the overeating.

He loved women, he loved everything about life, you know?

- [Jim] Yep.

- But what we're missing here, and what I should have talked about early on is that, he was in an orphanage as a kid.

- [Jim] Um-hmm.

- St. Mary's, was it?

- [Jim] Um-hmm.

- [Steve] An orphan, because?

- Well, he wasn't an orphan, he was in an orphanage, but his parents, his father was a bartender, was a night owl.

His mother was very sick, had a lot of kids in a very short amount of time.

- [Steve] Right.

- And he basically was a little rowdy when he was a kid, sent off as almost a way station.

Not an orphan, but grew up in what was called a workhouse, which was basically an orphanage.

- So the Babe, for whatever reasons, becomes a larger than life figure.

- Um-hmm.

- Did he party as much as most people believed he did.

- Well, the amazing thing to me about Babe Ruth is, it's all true.

You hear stories about him, it's all true.

- [Steve] Partied through the night, drank through the night.

Eat through the night, be with women through the night who were not his wife.

- Right.

- And go out the next day and play well.

- Right.

- Come on, I mean, we just did a series on youth sportsmanship and I don't wanna make light of it, but- - [Jim] Yeah.

From what I can see and the media was a lot different in those days, it was all true.

And that in itself is the fact that he could basically put his uniform on the next day and hit two home runs, is what makes him extraordinary.

But the other thing about Ruth was, and you mentioned it just now, he did grow up in an orphanage.

He grew up basically without parents.

The stories you read about Ruth and the movie, the Babe Ruth story, which is a terrible movie, where they have him visiting sick children.

- [Steve] I saw that.

- That's true too.

- [Steve] That's true too.

- I mean, in his own way, he was a role model.

He really did go out of his way with very little publicity to visit orphanages, to visit sick kids.

There's a story about Ruth, people say, well, it's not really true, where he goes, during the World Series to visit a sick little boy during the St. Louis World series.

He did that.

- There's the Babe's swing.

Now move over here.

Okay, the classic quote, Ruthian pose, right?

Did he have a classic home run swing?

- He had his, as near as I can make, out sort of, an upper cut swing.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And it was a classic home run swing.

The thing was, nobody did anything like him before that.

They didn't play for home runs.

The game was different then.

- [Steve] Totally different.

- It was known as the Dead Ball Era.

The ball was different.

Spitballs were allowed.

- The advantage was to the pitcher.

- [Steve] Pitcher always had the advantage.

- And they played for doubles and singles and they liked triples.

They went for triples more than home runs.

- [Steve] The ball's in the gap.

- Yeah, exactly.

The fences were much further back.

- [Steve] So wait a minute, he hit all his home runs with the fences really far back.

- Well, they started moving them in around 1920.

They built a few new ballparks.

The advantage in 1920 was that Ruth went from Fenway Park to the Polo Grounds, he was a left-handed hitter, the Polo Grounds was, I think right field was 257 feet, which is shorter than right field at Yankee Stadium.

- Ruth had a tremendous impact, not just on baseball, but on this country, how so?

- Well, I think you have to put it in context.

- [Steve] Black Sox scandal happened in when?

- Right, 1919.

- For everybody knows White Sox, a lot of the players, hey, listen, they threw the series for a few bucks, some mob guys are involved, whatever, organized crime, they throw the thing.

So baseball, now its reputation is really, well, we're kind of close today.

- [Jim] Right.

- Bottom line is Ruth comes in, we need a hero, right?

- After the war, here he is.

- [Jim] Right, exactly.

And you just put your finger on him, after the war.

America had been outta World War I for about a year and a half.

When you read the histories of World War I, they're usually written by Europeans.

- [Steve] Yep.

- They sort of say, well, the Americans came in at the end.

We lost more than 50,000 soldiers in World War I.

There also was in 1919, a flu epidemic that killed and I'm not making this up, 600,000 people.

We were coming off a very, very- - [Steve] 600,000 people were killed in the United States?

- 600,000 people, yes.

So World War I, flu epidemic, Black Sox, it was coming off, a time, a bad time, America wanted to let loose, they wanted to forget their troubles, this guy sort of comes storming in and- - Help us, distract us from our problems?

- Absolutely, just tailor-made for the time.

- I’ll tell you folks, the book is called Babe Ruth: Launching the Legend.

The Author is Jim Reisler.

The publisher is McGraw Hill.

Do yourself a favor.

Go out there and get it.

who's the author of the book over my left shoulder, "Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig".

- Hardcore Yankee fan on this end, but you don't have to be a Yankee fan or a baseball fan to appreciate and respect who Lou Gehrig was and why we remember him.

Why do we remember Lou Gehrig, please?

- Gehrig was not only the greatest first baseman of all time, and is ridiculously talented hitter who played in 2,130 consecutive games.

Led with Babe Ruth, maybe the greatest baseball team of all time.

But I think what really makes him important is the way he handled his hardship, the way he responded when he found out he was dying of ALS, the disease that now bears his name.

And I think that that's why he's become something bigger than a baseball player in American lore.

- You know, it's interesting in reading the book, it's not just the 2,130 consecutive games, wow, from 1925 to 1939, but it's also his relationships with key players in his life.

His relationship with his parents mattered a lot.

We'll talk about Gehrig's relationship with Babe Ruth.

Complicated, but let's talk about Gehrig and his parents.

Great influence on him, please.

- Yeah, Gehrig was a child of immigrants.

You know, his parents came from Germany.

They spoke German in the home.

English was a little rough.

They were poor.

His father was an iron worker.

His mother was a housekeeper and worked as a maid, a cook in fraternity at Columbia actually, where Lou ended up going to school.

And Lou was the only one of four children to survive.

And we forget sometimes how a century ago, it was not uncommon for parents to lose one or more children in infancy because we didn't have the kind of healthcare we have now.

So, Gehrig as the only survivor, was really coddled by his parents and expected to be strong, expected to take care of his family.

And he had this incredible sense of responsibility that he owed his parents.

And I think that's one of the reasons he grows up to be so big and strong, is that he feels like he cannot let his mother get disappointed again.

He has to eat for four really, and has to help out around the house with her chores.

So he's this incredibly sheltered kid, really shy, really afraid to do anything that might upset his parents and a real mama's boy, like attached at the hip to his mom.

- So you got Lou Gehrig trying to do the right thing, the right way.

Trained physically.

He was extraordinary.

His body was extraordinary in large part because of his conditioning and also trying to do the right thing.

Did not party and drink, did not carouse, if you will, the word from back in the day.

Lou Gehrig.

Babe Ruth.

(Jonathan laughs) You laugh because?

- They're the original odd couple.

You know, Babe Ruth is this Bacchanalian figure.

It's the Roaring Twenties, and Babe comes to symbolize it in a way.

You know, drinking, sleeping around, missing games all the time because he's hung over or because he's got a sexually transmitted disease.

And Gehrig is this choir boy.

He goes back to his room and reads every night rather than going out with Babe and the boys.

And Lou is single.

He's probably the handsomest guy in baseball, the most eligible bachelor in New York, perhaps.

And he just doesn't have any interest in it.

He goes home to mom after the ball games.

When they're on the road, he goes back to his hotel room.

It's fascinating, and yet, they become buddies.

Lou and Babe are just one of the great pairs.

And they're the two greatest home run hitters in the game, so the world just can't get enough of them.

- First of all, the Yankees, those of us who love the Yankees in 2024, it's hard to appreciate how often they won in the 1920s.

Gehrig begins to, while he's playing extraordinarily well, he and Babe Ruth are third and fourth in the lineup, right?

- Yep.

- Babe Ruth hits all these home runs.

Gehrig plays every day.

Can you do the Wally Pip thing for real quick?

Just gimme 30 seconds of Wally Pip and why that matters.

Wally Pip was the first baseman for the Yankees, please.

- Yeah, Wally Pip was the starting first baseman for the Yankees.

Gehrig was this kid just out of college, sitting on the bench.

And one day, Pip got pulled from the lineup.

The story goes, the myth is that he had a complaint.

He had a headache and wanted the day off and never got back in the lineup 'cause Gehrig took over and just killed it.

That's not exactly true.

Pip was really slumping and was nearing the end of his career.

And the manager, Miller Huggins wanted to shake up the lineup.

The Yankees weren't playing that well at the time.

So it wasn't the headache that really doomed him, but the important thing is that Gehrig, when he got the opportunity, seized it.

He made sure that he was never going to be out of that lineup again because he played so well and went on to play 2,130 consecutive games.

And Pip had to find a new team.

- Put in perspective the speech, in Yankee Stadium, what year?

- 1939, July 4th.

- July 4th, 1939.

But ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, known later because of Gehrig's fame, when did he begin to physically feel that something was wrong?

- It's really interesting.

And my research showed that Gehrig probably played the entire 1938 season with ALS.

That you can see in spring training even, he's complaining about cramps in his hands and in his legs.

And he starts ordering lighter bats.

He starts adjusting his batting stance.

You can look at the statistics and see how he's off that year.

He plays every day, doesn't miss a game.

Ends up hitting 29 home runs, 114 RBIs, a 295 batting average.

A terrific season by anyone else's standards, but he knows that something's wrong with his body because this, for him, is by far, the worst season he's ever had.

And by the end of the season, you can even see in pictures how much weight he's lost, how much muscle he's lost.

And ALS is a disease that melts your muscles away.

And Gehrig was so strong and had so much strength that he was able to carry on reasonably well, even as the disease sapped him.

But by 1939, he couldn't play anymore, and played just a few games before giving up, and then going to the Mayo Clinic where he got his diagnosis.

- Talk about July 4th, 1939.

- This is the day that the Yankees decided to honor Lou with Lou Gehrig Day at Yankee Stadium in between games of a double header against Washington.

And what's so special about it is that Gehrig was shy and everybody knew it.

And for him to stand up there in front of 61,000 people, and he didn't wanna speak.

He actually tried to get out of it at the last minute, and his manager pushed him up to the microphone and made him speak.

And for him to stand up there and to find the courage and to find the words, words that even people who aren't sports fans know today, where he said... - Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Crowd cheers and applause.

-Where he said, "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

That just changed everything for Lou Gehrig and for our perception of him and for what it means to be a sports hero.

Because he basically said, "Yes, I'm dying, but I've been lucky to have such a great life."

And he gave people, everybody goes through tragedy in their life, he gave us a way of looking at it.

It's focusing on the good and not the bad break, as he called it.

- A bad break.

Yeah, he thanked the ball boys, he thanked his manager, he thanked the players, he thanked the fans.

- Even thanked his mother-in-law.

- So when we talk about grit, an overused word.

Class in the face of adversity, he's known, again, as Jonathan said, he knew he was dying.

What do we take from Lou Gehrig's career, the way he lived, the way he played, and the way he died?

- Well, he just showed such enormous strength and dignity and unselfishness.

You know, that's the thing.

When he found out he was dying, he said, "It's not about me.

I wanna help others.

I want to do research on ALS.

I wanna make sure my family's okay."

You know, in my research with this book, I found 200 pages of letters that Gehrig wrote as he was dying.

And they had never been published before.

And what's so extraordinary about these letters is that first of all he's talking to the doctors about what he can do to try to find a cure.

And then at a certain point he says, "Okay, it's not working for me, but maybe we can learn something from these experiments that will help the next person who's diagnosed with ALS."

And he's also asking doctors to take care of his wife and to maybe hide the truth from her a little bit.

Don't let her know that there's no chance of me beating this thing.

So he just continues in these letters to show us his real character.

Lou Gehrig, again, don't have to be a Yankee fan, a baseball fan to appreciate everything he meant.

Not just to baseball, but to American culture and to people, so many people who are facing ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease and other tragedies in their lives that have to do with their health or declining health.

Just an extraordinary, iconic figure in the 1920s and thirties in American history.

That's why we remember Lou Gehrig.

Jonathan, thank you so much.

That was Jonathan Eig talking about Lou Gehrig.

Neal, let's tee up this next show in Yankee Week for "One-on-One."

By the way, catch us all this week.

We're gonna be featuring the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto, and Yogi Berra.

Really close friends.

Why is that an important Yankee show to watch tomorrow night?

- First, because they probably encapsulate the greatness of the Yankees in the '50s.

But second, maybe there are not two guys who got more of their physical talents.

They weren't Adonises, but they were great baseball players.

- Great baseball players.

And Neal, also, check out our website, steveadubato.org.

Neal did a feature for us on our series, "Remember Them," talking about the Scooter, Phil Rizzuto from New Jersey, Yogi Berra from New Jersey.

But great Yankees.

This is Yankee Week.

That is the greatest Yankee fan, at least in this region and probably in the country.

Neal Shapiro, the president of the WNE... President-CEO of the WNET Group.

I'm Steve Adubato.

For everyone who loves the Yankees, catch every Yankee show here on Yankee Week on "One-on-One."

See you tomorrow night.

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Funding has been provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

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