Baseball lore remembers Wally Clement Pipp as the first-baseman for the New York Yankees who was replaced June 2, 1925, by Lou Gehrig, who then played a remarkable 2,130 consecutive games.
Pipp’s story is much more than being the metaphor “Wally Pipped” for being replaced, however.
Born in Chicago, he grew up in Grand Rapids, graduated from Catholic Central High, played college baseball and studied architecture at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and then played Major League Baseball with great success from 1913 to 1928.
True baseball history regards Pipp as one of the best dead-ball era power hitters. He played with the Detroit Tigers for one season, then from 1915 to 1925 with the Yankees and from 1926 to ’28 with the Cincinnati Reds.
Pipp played 1,872 games in the major leagues, had three seasons with a .300-plus batting average, and two seasons with 100 or more RBI. He finished with a .281 career batting average, and during his career led both the American and National leagues in fielding percentage. He was the first Yankee to lead the American League in homeruns – in 1916 with 12 and 1917 with nine.
Teammates with Babe Ruth and other stars, Pipp was part of the Yankees winning three consecutive pennants (1921-23) and the 1923 World Series. He often batted cleanup, in fact, right after Ruth, in the lineup.
The Gehrig story is baseball lore and has different versions in movies, books and newspaper accounts. Pipp, who authored a book about stock trading and even wrote for Sports Illustrated magazine, often changed the story himself according to his family.
Pipp told various media sources that he was hit in the head with a hockey puck while growing up in Grand Rapids, which resulted in headaches throughout his life. Reportedly, he had such a headache the day he sat out in 1925. Pipp told at least two newspapers he took the two most expensive aspirin in history that day.
Other reports from the time and in later years indicate the manager, Miller Huggins, changed the lineup in several ways that June to bring the Yankees out of a slump. They were in seventh place out of eight teams in the American League at that point.
Wally Pipp Jr., a longtime Grand Rapids resident and one of Pipp’s four children, told Grand Rapids Press sports reporter Greg Johnson that his father was in a slump and took himself out of the lineup.
“He told Huggins to put Gehrig in the lineup and give the kid a chance,” Pipp, Jr., told Johnson. “Dad had worked with Gehrig to get him ready to play. He knew he was going to be great.”
After that season Pipp was put on waivers by the Yankees and the Reds signed him. Pipp played 372 games for the Reds over the next three seasons, and in 1926 hit .291 with 99 RBIs and 15 triples.
In retirement, Pipp invested heavily in the stock market and lost it in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. He worked some as a broadcaster, worked with the National Youth Administration developing youth baseball, and during World War II worked in Ypsilanti building B-24 bombers. Later he worked as a salesman for Rockford Screw Products Corp., and he lived the final two years of his life in a Grand Rapids nursing home. He died in 1965 of a heart attack. He was 71.