Wanted to share this from Jonathan Eig.

With no living players being inducted in the Hall of Fame this year (thanks inventor of steroids), Lou Gehrig will be honored during ceremonies this weekend.

Gehrig wasn’t healthy enough to attend his own Hall of Fame induction in 1939. While it would have been hard to top his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, Eig imagines what the legend might have said at Cooperstown in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Eig, the editor of ChicagoSide, has a good perspective. He wrote the bestselling biography on Gehrig, The Luckiest Man.

Eig envisions Gehrig beginning this way:

It is a wonderful honor to gain induction today to the Baseball Hall of Fame and to join the pantheon of great athletes and great men who have come before me. This game of baseball has meant everything to me, as it has so many boys. It took me and my family out of poverty. It taught me to be a man. I’m proud that I played hard and that the Yankees won a lot of ballgames and our share of World Series with me at the first sack. I’m proud I hit the ball square and sometimes far. I’m proud that I played fair. I’m proud that I showed my opponents the same respect I showed my own teammates. I’m proud I gave it my all every time I grabbed a bat or slipped on a glove.

But I guess if there’s one thing above all else that I’m proud of, one thing that made me who I am today and got me to the Hall of Fame, it would be this: strength.

Regarding his disease:

You probably heard that I gave a speech at Yankee Stadium when I found out I was sick…that I was…dying…I said I considered myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Well, I wasn’t saying I was lucky to get this disease, this amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Nobody’s lucky to get sick. I was saying I was lucky to have had a good life, lucky to have parents and a wife who love me, lucky to have played baseball. Mostly, I guess I was lucky to be strong. But here’s what I’ve learned, now that this disease has got me behind in the count no balls and two strikes: I learned that it’s not really muscles that make you strong. I learned that it’s how you face a challenge—like how my parents faced the challenge of losing three kids, or how my wife is facing the challenge of losing me…

And finally:

To fight on through disaster, to dedicate your final days to the loved ones you will soon leave behind, and to believe in yourself when you have nothing left but that will to believe…that is the greatest strength I know.

If only he could have given that speech.