Lou Gehrig Trivia
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49 free Lou Gehrig trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lou Gehrig played 17 seasons at first base for the New York Yankees, drove in 1,995 runs and never missed a game for 14 years. Then, at 36, he benched himself, was diagnosed with ALS on his birthday and gave baseball its most famous speech. This quiz runs from East Harlem and Columbia through Murderers' Row, the Triple Crown and the four-homer game to the farewell at Yankee Stadium, the parole board job and The Pride of the Yankees. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who knows the story, a third are medium and the rest are for Yankees historians. Every answer is checked against Gehrig's biography.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1935, with Babe Ruth gone, manager Joe McCarthy gave Lou Gehrig which role?
Team captain
Team captain. It was as captain that he carried the lineup card to the umpires on May 2, 1939, with his own name missing from it for the first time in 2,130 games.
Q 02Which famous baseball nickname belonged to Lou Gehrig?
The Iron Horse
The Iron Horse. It was old slang for a steam locomotive, and it fit: X-rays later showed fractures that had healed while he kept playing.
Q 03Gehrig's 2,130-game streak began on June 1, 1925, when he entered a game in what role?
Pinch hitter
Pinch hitter. He batted for shortstop Pee Wee Wanninger that day and only afterward took over first base, where he stayed for the next 14 years.
Q 04In 1939 Gehrig became the first MLB player to receive which honor?
Retired number
Retired number: no Yankee has worn No. 4 since, and the gesture caught on so well that the club has now retired every number from 1 through 9.
Q 05Which disease ended Gehrig's career and is now often named after him in the US?
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, destroys the body's motor function but spares the mind. Doctors gave Gehrig three years at best, and he died just under two years later.
Q 06Gehrig gave his 'luckiest man on the face of the earth' speech on which holiday in 1939?
Independence Day
Independence Day. Between games of a July 4 doubleheader, two weeks after his diagnosis, Gehrig told the Yankee Stadium crowd he was the luckiest man alive.
Q 07Why was a 1931 Gehrig home run erased?
Passed runner
Passed runner: Lyn Lary thought the ball had been caught and headed for the dugout, so Gehrig was called out and finished level with Babe Ruth at 46.
Q 08Why couldn't Ruth win Gehrig's 1927 MVP award?
Past winner
Past winners were ineligible, and Ruth had won in 1923. Gehrig still earned it, hitting .373 with 47 homers, more than anyone but Ruth had ever hit in a season.
Q 09Who broke Gehrig's consecutive-games record in 1995?
Cal Ripken Jr.
Cal Ripken Jr. passed him on September 6, 1995, then ran his own streak to 2,632 games before choosing to sit one out near the end of the 1998 season.
Q 10Gehrig held the career grand slam record with 23 until which player broke it?
Alex Rodriguez
Alex Rodriguez hit his record 24th grand slam at Yankee Stadium in September 2013, weeks after returning from hip surgery and while appealing a 211-game doping suspension.
Q 11Why did Lou Gehrig grow up as an only child?
His three siblings died young
His three siblings died young: two sisters and a brother never got past infancy, leaving a mother determined that her one surviving child would get a good education.
Q 12Until he married at age 30, where did Lou Gehrig live?
With his parents
With his parents. His mother, the family's breadwinner, broke up his earlier romances and disapproved of the woman he finally married in 1933.
Q 13In 1933, Lou Gehrig was the American League's first baseman in the first-ever edition of which baseball event?
All-Star Game
Q 21Which Yankees manager first made Gehrig his starting first baseman in 1925?
Miller Huggins
Miller Huggins benched three slumping regulars that day to shake up a losing club. In his farewell speech 14 years later, Gehrig still called him 'that wonderful little fellow'.
Q 22Batting cleanup behind Babe Ruth, Gehrig led the American League five times in which category?
Runs batted in
Runs batted in. Hitting right behind Babe Ruth meant plenty of runners to bring home, and Gehrig drove in 150 or more in seven different seasons.
Q 23What was the nickname of the 1927 Yankees lineup that overshadowed Gehrig's MVP season?
Murderers' Row
All-Star Game. He was chosen for each of the first seven, the last in 1939, when he could no longer play and took part only by carrying out the lineup card.
Q 14Which language did Lou Gehrig's family speak at home when he was a boy?
German
German. It was the language of Babe Ruth's childhood home too, and Ruth would speak some of it when he came to the Gehrigs' for dinner.
Q 15At 17, Gehrig hit a grand slam out of which ballpark as New York's high school champions played Chicago's in 1920?
Wrigley Field
Wrigley Field, then called Cubs Park. More than 10,000 people saw the ninth-inning blast, which first made the New York schoolboy a national name.
Q 16Which university did Gehrig attend before turning pro?
Columbia
Columbia. He studied engineering there for two years, found the coursework hard, and left when the Yankees offered a $1,500 bonus his poor family could not turn down.
Q 17On the day Yankee Stadium hosted its first game in 1923, college pitcher Gehrig set which single-game school record?
Most strikeouts
Most strikeouts: he fanned 17 batters in a game his team still lost. Within two weeks a Yankees scout had signed him, though it was his hitting, far more than his pitching, that won the contract.
Q 18What position did Gehrig play on his college football team?
Fullback
Fullback. Football was his way in: he was recruited on a football scholarship and only later joined the baseball team that made his name.
Q 19Gehrig's only professional team based outside New York City played in which Connecticut city?
Hartford
Hartford. The Yankees sent him to its minor-league club for seasoning, and after he hit .369 there in 1924 he was a Yankee for good.
Q 20In baseball lore, which first baseman sat out with a headache in 1925 and lost his job to Gehrig?
Wally Pipp
Wally Pipp. He is quoted as saying he took the two most expensive aspirins in history, though he was also hitting just .244 for a team stuck near the bottom of the league.
Murderers' Row. Its two sluggers staged a home run race that year: Gehrig was ahead of Babe Ruth as late as August, before Ruth surged to a record 60 and Gehrig finished with 47.
Q 24In 1932 Gehrig became the 20th century's first to do what in a game?
Hit four home runs
Hit four home runs. He nearly had a fifth, but Philadelphia outfielder Al Simmons made a leaping catch of his last drive at the center-field fence.
Q 25Whose retirement announcement stole the headlines from Gehrig's greatest game, in 1932?
John McGraw
John McGraw quit that day after three decades as a big-league manager. It was the same McGraw who in 1923 had refused to let the Yankees add young Gehrig to their World Series roster.
Q 26Who urged Gehrig to sit out a game in 1938 and end his streak at 1,999?
His wife
His wife. She argued that 1,999 would be remembered better than a round number, but he played anyway, got a hit, and kept going for 130 more games.
Q 27Gehrig's 1934 Triple Crown combined home runs, RBIs and which category?
Batting average
Batting average. He hit .363, and it came in Babe Ruth's last season as a Yankee, when the fading Ruth hit 22 home runs to Gehrig's 49.
Q 28In 1936 Gehrig won his second MVP award but lost the headlines to which rookie teammate?
Joe DiMaggio
Joe DiMaggio. Gehrig out-hit the rookie that year, but as with Babe Ruth before him, the headlines went to the more glamorous teammate.
Q 29When Gehrig's Yankees first wore uniform numbers in 1929, what did each starter's number show?
His spot in the batting order
His spot in the batting order. Babe Ruth hit third and wore 3, and Gehrig, the cleanup man behind him, wore 4, which made walking Ruth on purpose a risky idea.
Q 30Gehrig was the first athlete to appear on boxes of which breakfast cereal?
Wheaties
Wheaties. He appeared on the back of the box in 1934, starting a tradition that has since put hundreds of athletes on the cereal's packaging.