The Surprising Lesson Baseball Teaches About Embracing Failure and Finding Grace
Almost to the day, 75 years before Kershaw’s no-hitter, the world of sports witnessed the catastrophic reality of paralysis. In June 1939, after a week of extensive testing at the Mayo Clinic, Lou Gehrig announced to the world that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This announcement happened to fall on his 36th birthday. This represented the end of Gehrig’s illustrious baseball career. But 75 years later, what is remembered about this man is not his career batting average of .340, seven-time All-Star appearances, six-time World Series championships, winning of the Triple Crown or two-time league MVP. Sabermetrics could not possibly explain Gehrig’s value to the sport. What endures is what no statistic can capture: his grace. His humility. His courage in the face of loss. What is remembered and honored is his response to the ultimate “failure”: a failure of upper and lower motor neurons to make necessary connections that ultimately leads to rapidly progressive muscle weakness and atrophy. In defiance to an illness that is uniformly fatal, Gehrig paid homage to his teammates, professional members of the MLB and its fans by proclaiming himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
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