First there was Neil Young’s “ditch trilogy.” Now we have Chris Jaffe’s “morbid trilogy.”
First, he looked at who lived the longest time after playing in a World Series. Then he looked at the last surviving men to have played for some important managers. Now he’s looking at who were the last surviving teammates of some of the game’s all-time greats:
The most recent all-time great to have no living teammates is the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig. The disease that killed him forced him to retire in 1939. An outfielder for that club was Tommy Henrich, who died on Dec. 1, 2009. He was the last Yankee left who heard Gehrig say that he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. The day Gehrig gave his famous speech, Henrich appeared as a pinch-hitter for the Yankees and made an out.
Beyond that factoid there are all kinds of neat ones that make one realize (a) how long baseball has been played; and (b) how long a human life is, even if we all tend to blow off things that happen in our day-to-day existence with phrases like “life’s too short to ...”
