Yankees History: Five memorable Fourth of July moments

On July 4, 1939, Yankees first baseman, Lou Gehrig, stood on the field at Yankee Stadium for the final time and read these words to the assembled crowd of stunned fans and teammates:

"“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. “Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky. “So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.”"

From what we know about Gehrig, those words are more than he might speak in a week, but the emotion that swelled in the crowd that day left echoes in the old Yankee Stadium for years to come.

For Gehrig, the irony of the disease that afflicted him, literally bringing him to his knees at the end, when juxtaposed against his Iron Horse career, is something that leaves all fans of baseball with an emptied feeling from the first time Gehrig stepped on a ballfield at Columbia University.

For the sellout crowd that packed Stadium on the Fourth of July in 1939, as well as for all fans of baseball, the cause for celebration was hidden in the very words that Gehrig spoke that day.

Because on the day that our country was born, we all should feel like we “have an awful lot to live for.”