Lou Gehrig: Rediscovering the mysterious “Lou Long”

In 1922, the Morristown Colonials boasted a slugger named "Lou Long" – in reality he was Lou Gehrig, and for the second summer in a row he was violating college rules by playing pro ball for money...

IN THE SPRING of 1922, a strapping young man stepped off the Manhattan train and into the streets of Morristown, New Jersey. The city-slicker shouldered his bag of baseball equipment and hoofed it the one mile or so down Evergreen Avenue to the Collinsville Oval ballpark where he had been hired to play for the local ball club.

In those days before radio and television brought big league baseball into everyone’s living room, semipro town baseball was the big-time summer entertainment for most Americans. While many towns across the country fielded teams for the sheer enjoyment of the game, many hired ringers to give their boys the extra edge in order to win bragging rights against other local towns.

Morristown, New Jersey, located about 30 miles west of New York City, was no different. While the town and surrounding region was home to many amateur baseball clubs, Morristown wanted to up their ball game by fielding a paid team to represent the town. In the spring of 1922, Morristown joined with the towns of Boonton and Madison to form a three-club league. Besides competing against themselves, the New Jersey-New York area had many semipro, Negro League, and barnstorming teams against which Morristown could play in non-league games.

Instead of recruiting a team from scratch, Morristown simply contracted the Westinghouse Electric factory team, which was already using the town’s Collinsville Oval ballpark as their home field. Rechristened the Morristown Colonials, the team was manned by veteran baseball mercenaries, most of whom spent time in the minor leagues and were veterans of the highly competitive New York-New Jersey semipro circuit.

Second Baseman John Kull had a cup of coffee with the World Champion 1910 Philadelphia A’s and spent half a dozen years in the minors. Pitcher “Rags” Faircloth made it to the majors with the 1919 Phillies and spent almost two decades in the minors. Left fielder Walt Walsh went directly from the semipros to the Phillies in 1920, and pitcher Bill Mortimer spent time in the Blue Ridge League. Westinghouse’s manager was Joe Sachs, a semipro lifer and former member of the Paterson Silk Sox, a highly respected factory team that was so talented it had racked up an impressive number of victories over major league teams.

One new member of the Morristown team was a 19-year-old first baseman named “Lou Long.” Whether or not anyone in Morristown knew this was not his real name is not known, but it seems that the press played along, saying only that he came to town with the reputation of being “the Babe Ruth of the semi-pro’s.”

In fact, it was the teen’s second playing season under an alias – the summer before he’d played for the Hartford Senators in the Eastern League as “Lou Lewis.” The first baseman needed the false name because he had an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. If it was revealed he was playing baseball for money, he would be ineligible to compete in collegiate sports. That’s exactly what had happened the year before after his ruse was uncovered in Hartford. The flagrant violation earned him a year’s suspension from college sports and a rare second chance. The question now was why he would risk another and likely more severe punishment by playing semipro ball for pay just as his suspension was ending?

HEINRICH LUDWIG GEHRIG Jr. was the only child of Christina and Heinrich, a poor immigrant couple from Germany. Americanizing his name to Louis Henry Gehrig, he learned to play baseball on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood and excelled at both pitching and hitting. But Gehrig’s parents insisted that their boy concentrate on school and pursue a practical career, preferably in the engineering field.

Despite his parents’ wishes, Gehrig continued to play ball. He had achieved national acclaim in 1920 when his High School of Commerce team played Chicago’s Lane Tech in the National Schoolboy Championship game at Cubs Park. The then 17-year-old hit a towering grand slam home run completely out of the ballpark, leading sports pages coast-to-coast to compare him to Babe Ruth. Christened “Babe” Gehrig by the New York Daily News, his reputation around Manhattan earned him a prized scholarship to play football at Columbia University.

Gehrig received his high school diploma in January of 1921 and enrolled in Columbia’s special extension course in the spring semester. Because he was not yet considered a full-time student, he was not eligible to participate in inter-collegiate games. None-the-less, Columbia’s baseball coach Andy Coakley allowed Gehrig to play with his varsity squad in exhibition games against non-college clubs. One of these non-collegiate games was against the Hartford Senators of the Eastern League on April 5, 1921. Though the Senators beat the Ivy Leaguers 4-3, Columbia’s freshman first baseman stole the spotlight by belting two tape-measure home runs off Alton Durgin. A story in the next day’s Hartford Times offered up another comparison between Gehrig and the Bambino: “It was a mighty clout and worthy of Babe Ruth’s best handiwork.”

Among those impressed by Columbia’s freshman phenom was Hartford’s manager, Arthur Irwin. Besides his job as skipper of the Senators, Irwin also moonlighted as a scout for the New York Giants. According to James Lincoln Ray’s biography of Gehrig for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Biography Project, Irwin wooed the teen by telling him the Giants manager John McGraw had seen him play and was interested in signing him. A tryout was set up, and Gehrig reported to the Polo Grounds expecting to end the afternoon with a Giants contract. While his mother and father would surely be disappointed their son was choosing baseball over college, a big league contract would go a long way to alleviate his parents’ financial struggles. In reality, Irwin hoodwinked the eager teen – McGraw had never seen Gehrig play. However, after belting six consecutive balls into the Polo Grounds bleachers, he had McGraw’s attention. His fielding was another story; when he let a grounder go through his legs, McGraw called an end to the tryout, and Gehrig was ushered out of the Polo Grounds without a contract.

Arthur Irwin offered the disappointed Gehrig another option: a contract to play for the Hartford Senators. It wasn’t big league money, but it would be much more than what the odd jobs he worked at were paying. There was just one rub – to keep his Columbia scholarship and remain eligible for collegiate athletics, he would need to play under another name.

Since the turn-of-the-century, this ruse had been the easy fix for college athletes who wanted to make an easy buck playing summer ball while retaining their amateur status. Most of the time, the practice was met with a wink and a nod, with officials recognizing a student’s need to make a living. But other times, the rules were rigorously enforced, particularly in the Ivy League where the ideal of being an amateur athlete and a gentleman was supposed to mean something. By signing with Hartford, Gehrig was playing with fire, and he was about to get burned.

THE TWO CONSPIRATORS selected the nom-de-baseball of “Lou Lewis.” Yet, despite the alias, sports fans opened the June 2 Hartford Times and read, “Lefty Gahrig [sic], New Clouter, To Be in Local Lineup To-Day Against Pittsfield.” Despite the misspelling of his surname, details in the article such as his two homers against the Senators at Columbia and his grand slam at Cubs Park back in 1920 made it obvious who the new first baseman was.

Although subsequent box scores and stories carried the name “Lou Lewis,” the cat had been out of the bag. After playing in a dozen games for the Senators (and hitting a lack-luster .261), word reached Columbia’s baseball coach Andy Coakley that “Lou Lewis” was really freshman Lou Gehrig. Coakley convinced the kid to leave the team, and Gehrig reluctantly gave up a steady paycheck he sorely needed. Coakley then got in contact with the coaches of Cornell, Dartmouth, Middlebury, and Amherst to convince them that the kid had made an innocent mistake. The admission successfully limited Gehrig’s suspension to just one year.

Meanwhile, Gehrig kept his skills sharp on the city’s sandlots. He spent July and August up in Yonkers pitching and playing first base for the Mapleton Parks. Since he played under his own name and was already in Dutch with the Ivy League athletics officials, one can assume Gehrig was not playing for pay at this time. However, this would soon change.

Lou Gehrig spent his freshman year at Columbia attending classes and biding his time until the clock ran out on his athletic suspension. Gehrig’s time at Columbia was far from the racoon-fur-coat-wearing and good-time 23-skidoo stereotype one thinks of being the 1920s Ivy league experience. His abrasive New York accent and second-hand wardrobe made his background painfully obvious for everyone to see at a glance. Though he pledged Phi Delta Theta, it did nothing to help improve Gehrig’s social standing. His financial needs forced him to take a side job waiting on and cleaning up after his frat brothers. Gehrig found this work humiliating and further alienated him from his affluent classmates. When you take all this into account, it makes Gehrig’s decision to risk his scholarship a second time for an easy paycheck a bit easier to understand.

HOW MORRISTOWN secured the services of Lou Gehrig is not known. As I wrote in the beginning of this story, the Morristown Colonials were essentially the rebranded Westinghouse Electric factory team that already had a solid roster. Gehrig spent his entire life in Manhattan and had no personal connections to the Morristown area.

One clue as to how Gehrig found his way to the Colonials may lay with Morristown’s center fielder, Arthur Carroll. Carroll was a semipro player from Brooklyn and had been scouted by the Yankees two seasons earlier. The scout who found Carroll? Andy Coakley. That’s right, the same Andy Coakley who was Columbia’s baseball coach and who had stood up for Gehrig when he was caught playing for Hartford the summer before. Coincidence – or maybe the coach agreed to get Gehrig the Morristown gig to help out the cash-strapped kid. Morristown was a little more out of the way than Hartford, and the Colonials were not part of organized professional baseball. While Hartford had played a full minor league schedule with games almost every afternoon, Morristown competed only on Sundays, so the odds of “Lou Long” being unmasked as Lou Gehrig were significantly lower.

The Colonials’ season began in May. In their first game, “Lou Long” got a double and two singles as Morristown defeated the Panama Red Caps. He collected another double in the following Sunday’s win against Danbury. But it was the Colonials’ third game against Bayonne that he finally made his presence felt.

The game started off a real cooker. Bayonne started off the game by plating a run on a walk, passed ball, error, and a single. A second run was nipped when a Bayonne runner was thrown out at the plate. Bayonne went down quietly to start off the second, but Morristown evened the score with a pair of singles and an error in their half of the inning. Bayonne began the third with a single. An error and another single moved the runner to third, where he scored on a second Morristown error. Another tally was squashed when the runner was thrown out at the plate.

Morristown kicked off their half of the third with a single. “Lou Long” then bunted towards the pitcher who dislocated a bone in his leg trying to field the ball. A relief pitcher was rushed in and another single followed, but the rally died with yet another play at the plate.

All was quiet and tied 2-2 until the bottom of the sixth when a walk and three singles gave Morristown the lead. Now “Lou Long’s” bat finally came alive. With two swinging strikes on him and the crowd hollering, “What’re you waving at!” Gehrig hit a screaming home run to right-center that cleared the fence and the cars parked behind it. Morristown scored twice more to make it 6-2.

In the eighth, “Lou Long” again delivered with a two-run shot to the same place he socked his first one. The visitors slinked back to Bayonne with an 8-2 loss, and Morristown won their third straight game.

The next morning’s Morristown Daily Record wrote, “Lou Long, the lanky local first sacker, who came here with a reputation of being the Babe Ruth of the semi-pros, did his stuff yesterday.” The same paper featured a large photograph of the team in that Saturday’s edition. “Lou Long” is found in the center of the back row, younger looking than his teammates but much larger in size. His cap is pulled low over his eyes, but a slightly bemused smile can be found on his lips.

In his fourth game as a Colonial, Gehrig’s triple and double helped send Hoboken away with a 3-0 loss. Morristown won their next two to make it six straight. In the latter game, “Lou Long” was held to just one hit, but boy, it sure made an impression. As the Daily Record proclaimed, “Lou Long hit the longest drive ever walloped into right-field in the fifth. The ball fell into a cherry tree behind the sheds for a homer.”

Morristown’s undefeated record was flushed down the tubes when Boonton came out on top of a six-game series against the Colonials. “Long” had a few hits, but none of the prodigious homers expected from “the Babe Ruth of the semi-pros.”

Fortunately, Madison was a much easier foe who Morristown beat twice. In this series, “Lou Long” hit his fourth and last homer of the season. The Colonials season ended with Replogle Steel Company taking a three-game series. Morristown posted a decent 12-6 record, but the biggest take away was the stats put up by newcomer “Lou Long.” In the 18 games, he hit .450 with seven doubles, four triples, and four homers. At the conclusion of the season, “Lou Long” got on a Manhattan-bound train and disappeared forever.

THE NEWLY REINSTATED Lou Gehrig made his collegiate athletic debut a few weeks later as a fullback for the Columbia Lions football team. That spring, Gehrig tore up the 19 game Ivy League baseball circuit, batting a school record .444 with a .937 slugging percentage, and seven home runs, earning him the new title: “Babe Ruth of the Ivy Leagues.” He was also Columbia’s most effective pitcher with a 6-4 record that included a 17 strike out game; a record that still stands at the University.

After the college season ended, New York Yankees superscout Paul Krichell signed the young phenom, and he was farmed out to the Hartford Senators – this time under his own name – and made his debut as a Yankee before the summer was out. Gehrig would team up with the man he was so often compared to, Babe Ruth, and form one of the most powerful one-two hitting combos in baseball history. He’d help the Yankees win six World Championships, bat his way to a Triple Crown and two MVP Awards while being held up as a hero to millions of American boys for his clean-living and honest sportsmanship.

SO, DID THIS research into Gehrig’s Morristown sojourn result in any kind of earth-shattering reveal about one of the game’s most beloved figures?

On the surface, not really. The teenage Gehrig did very well in this semipro league, so that wasn’t much of a surprise. But, when “Lou Lewis” and “Lou Long” manage to creep out from the dusty corners of history, the carefully curated legend of Lou Gehrig hits an inconvenient wall.

Some Lou Gehrig biographies make it appear as though the teenager was not cognizant that his college eligibility could be forfeited by playing pro ball for money. A few even chalk it up to his being duped by the wily New York Giants manager John McGraw, all part of an evil plan to get the kid kicked out of college and into the waiting arms of the Giants. Over the decades, Gehrig’s quiet demeanor and stoic strength in the face of the illness that would eventually take his life have given the slugger an almost saintly reputation. A hundred years later, it is hard to imagine Lou Gehrig breaking the rules. Yet, that’s exactly what he did.

In my opinion, since he willingly played under a false name, I believe Gehrig knew exactly what he was doing all along. And that he did it again the next summer in Morristown only serves to reinforce my belief. Does this make him a bad guy? No – but it does make the life of Lou Gehrig a bit more interesting than the sanitized Gary Cooper version we were brought up on.

Today, the only reminder that “Lou Long” ever existed are the half-believed stories told by long passed grandfathers, a few yellowed newspaper clippings, and a faded team picture of a forgotten New Jersey town baseball team from 1922 that once hung in a long-gone tavern.

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This story first appeared in an abbreviated version in my book, The League of Outsider Baseball. I had grown up in North Jersey hearing stories of Lou Gehrig playing ball under an assumed name in a small New Jersey town before he began his career with the Yankees. There was even talk of a faded photo of this mythical team that hung in a tavern in Morristown – though several attempts at bar-hopping my way through town led me to assume that whatever establishment where it once hung was no longer around.

Several Gehrig biographers briefly note the Hall of Famer’s appearance in semipro lineups under assumed names, and one or two even mention “Morristown” as one of those places, yet no one had really taken a good look at this interesting part of Gehrig’s early career.

New Jersey writer Joe Connor did some great digging into the Gehrig-Morristown legend, and we traded information back in 2012. After we talked, Joe was able to find the former owner of the long-gone tavern and get a snapshot of the fabled team photograph. With the help of Cheryl at the Morristown Library, I tracked down some local newspaper coverage from 1922 that included game reports and box scores featuring “Lou Long” at first base for Morristown.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Gehrig biographer Jonathan Eig shared with me a few of Gehrig’s 1921 Yonkers semipro box scores which show what he was up to after his “Lou Lewis” Hartford cover was blown.

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