But please don’t believe that aspirin story. Not only was Gehrig a better ballplayer than I was, but he was 22 and I was 32. By the time I returned to the Yankees, Gehrig was hitting the ball like crazy and Huggins would have been a complete dope to give me my job back. “I was in that hospital for two solid weeks. Now we have a baseball player taking his place.’ As I was wheeled into the room, the nurse remarked, ‘What’s this - another baseball man? Ring Lardner, the baseball writer, was in this same room yesterday. It’s funny how you remember little things, relatively unimportant trifles. They carted me right off to the hospital. And I’m not trying to make a pun, either. I won’t deny that I had a headache that day. “I realize that its grown to be accepted as the truth. “It’s a very delightful and romantic story,” chucked Pipp the other day. Pipp never returned to the Yankee line-up again after reaching for that aspirin bottle. “I’ll use that big kid, Gehrig, at first base today.”įourteen years and 2,130 consecutive games later, Lou Gehrig called it a career after setting an endurance record which promises to defy all challengers. “Suppose you take the day off,” suggested Hug. “What’s the matter, Wally?” asked the observant Miller Huggins, the Yankee manager. On June 2, 1925, Wally Pipp, the regular Yankee first baseman, reached into his locker and took out an aspirin bottle - so the legend would have everyone believe. The story has grown to be an accepted fact. There is a 1953 article in which Wally Pipp himself misremembered the sequence of events surrounding his injury and his replacement by Gehrig. The beaning actually took place a month later. The problem was that Pipp stated that the head trauma took place the day he was taken out for Gehrig on June 2, 1925. Even Pipp’s own words later misremembers a beaning he received in batting practice from hard-throwing Yankee rookie Charlie Caldwell, almost unconscious. Which leads you to believe that the “headache” story was inserted later on for dramatic effect. Interestingly enough the first mention of Pipp’s having a headache on Jdidn’t appear in the New York Times until 1941, in an article about Lou Gehrig’s death. ( Facts uncovered from Snopes founder David Mikkelson)

“of a schoolboy hockey injury that had also left him with reduced vision in his left eye.”Īlthough the story of Pipp having a specific headache that day makes for a great story it may have been a snapshot into a long stretch of time in which he suffered head pain daily and learned for the most part to play through it. Throughout his life and during his baseball career, Pipp suffered recurring headaches, the result, he later explained,

This “headache story” that Pipp suffered on that famous day in which he was replaced by Lou Gehrig, unfairly characterized Pipp as weak and may have been overblown at best as the actual incident that took him out of the lineup. In addition to his batting success, Pipp was one of the finest defensive first basemen of the Deadball Era in 1915, he led all American League first basemen in putouts, assists, double plays, and fielding percentage.Īaron Judge and Wally Pipp loved the strikeout and the homerun. The left-handed, free-swinging Pipp became the first player in American League history to lead the league in both home runs and strikeouts. “On and off the field, he was a prime favorite.” “was a high-class specimen of the ball player,” New York Times reporter James R. Whether exiting from a train, haggling with management over bonus money, fielding grounders around first base, or belting home runs, Pipp Tall, and broad-shouldered, the 6-foot-2, 180-pound Wally Pipp carried himself with an unmistakable air of confidence and distinction, befitting one of the Dead-ball Era’s premier sluggers. Wally Pipp known for being second at first base for the wrong reasons.Īlthough Pipp is famously known for wimping out regarding a headache and requesting to be taken of the game in 1925, Pipp was anything but.

Wally pipp