Lou Gehrig had the worst season of his career in 1938.

He finished the year with 29 home runs and drove in 114 runs, in the American League’s top 10 in both categories. And, of course, he played every game. Those were great numbers for most people. But Gehrig wasn’t most people.

He was The Iron Horse. He was Larrupin’ Lou. Since 1927, he had averaged .350 with almost 40 homers and more than 150 RBIs. These 1938 totals were just not good enough. Not for Gehrig.

He found himself mired in a season-long slump, where the ball just didn’t jump off his bat with the usual thunder he was accustomed to.

A few months into 1939, it became obvious to everyone what was wrong.

In May, Gehrig took himself out of the lineup, his famous streak over after 2,130 consecutive games. In June, he was diagnosed with the fatal disease ALS. In July, he was honored by the Yankees and delivered one of the greatest speeches in American history. He died less than two years later on June 2, 1941. MLB holds a league-wide remembrance of the Iron Horse on Lou Gehrig Day every June 2.

The demise was so sudden, so tragic.

And in that context, it makes what Gehrig did in August 1938 so much more remarkable. For an entire month, he pushed his body through an intense month of baseball that was reminiscent of the old Iron Horse. Gehrig knew his powerful body was beginning to betray him — even if he didn’t yet know why — yet he somehow found the strength to keep going.

It turned out to be Gehrig’s last stand.

“I make the argument that in 1938, Lou Gehrig had the best season in baseball history,” said Jonathan Eig, author of “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig,” in a 2019 interview.

“I can tell you for a fact that he had ALS almost that entire season, maybe even going back to Spring Training,” Eig said. “He played every game, he led his team to the World Series, he put up incredibly strong numbers and every day of that season he was getting weaker from this disease. To me, that’s the greatest individual accomplishment in the history of American sports.”

Gehrig began the season with just five hits in his first 46 at-bats, his average sitting at .109 at the end of play on May 1, exactly 13 years after the first game of his famous streak.

Familiar with rough starts to a season, but never one quite like this, Gehrig began to tinker with his batting stance. Manager Joe McCarthy dropped his famous cleanup hitter (he wore No. 4 because of his standard place in the batting order) down to the five and even the six-hole.

In perhaps the most noticeable sign of just how much Gehrig was aware that his strength was not the same as it had been all those years, he ordered bats a full ounce lighter than the 36- to 37-ounce lumber he’d swung his entire career. By season’s end, he was swinging even lighter bats.

For the next month, the Gehrig of old appeared to be back. He hit .381 and hit safely in 20 of the next 24 games.

The consecutive games streak reached what most thought to be an unimpeachable milestone when he played in his 2,000th consecutive game on May 31. On the morning before the game, Lou’s wife, Eleanor, unsuccessfully tried to convince him to end the streak, knowing the physical toll the season had already taken on him.

Still, there were flashes of the old Gehrig from time to time. By the end of June, he was batting a respectable .289. He smashed eight home runs over a 20-game span.

But Gehrig had known since the season began that something wasn’t right. Fly balls that used to be easy home runs were now dying at the warning track. Even his occasional good spurts like the one in May didn’t quite resemble the Gehrig opposing pitchers feared over the previous decade.

Despite playing with a broken thumb, Gehrig’s average was still in the .280s in mid-July when he got what seemed to be a literal gift from the heavens. It rained for four straight days.

There was just one catch. The Yankees would be forced to play multiple doubleheaders in August — beyond the ones that were scheduled regularly every Sunday back then — in order to make up for the rainouts.

Gehrig appeared to benefit from the rest. He homered in back-to-back games on July 27-28, then a few days later helped rally the Yankees in the 15th inning in the back end of a doubleheader against the White Sox.

It was still not enough to convince those who were used to a more prolific hitter.

“It’s my conviction that Gehrig is a very tired man,” Dan Daniel wrote in The Sporting News.

And then came August, the month that tests even the young and the strong, let alone the aging and the ill.

The normal scheduling combined with the earlier rainouts forced the Yankees to play 10 doubleheaders in August. In all, the Yankees played 36 games that month, including 12 games over the final eight days.

Gehrig played every inning of every game during this stretch, including three extra-innings games, with one exception. He was replaced in the field by Babe Dahlgren (the same man who would take his place in the lineup when the streak ended for good the following year) in the eighth inning of the first game of the Aug. 16 doubleheader. It was a humid 90-degree day in Washington, D.C., and the Yankees had a 15-0 lead. That was Gehrig’s only break in this dog days of summer baseball marathon.

How did he perform? Like Lou Gehrig.

He slashed .329/.434/.621 (1.055 OPS) in 36 games with 32 runs scored and 38 RBIs.

In comparison, 23-year-old superstar Joe DiMaggio also played all 36 games that month and slashed .335/.401/.613 (1.014 OPS). Gehrig had performed on par with the newest, brightest star in the game, despite being 12 years his senior and trudging through the hot summer with early symptoms of a disease that would take him from the game entirely just eight months later.

The Yankees went 28-8 in August, and though they started the month with a slim 1 1/2-game lead in the American League, by the time the calendar was flipped to September, they had opened up a 14-game cushion, rolling along toward their third straight AL pennant.

Because nobody, not even Gehrig himself, knew what he was dealing with, it might have been easy for observers to think Gehrig had found his stroke again at last, just in time for a run to the World Series. But Gehrig’s power slowly began to fade again, the brutal August schedule — and the progression of ALS — taking their toll.

When Gehrig homered on Sept. 18 in the first game of a doubleheader, he snapped a 22-game homerless drought, his longest of the season by far. The next day Gehrig played only one inning in the field before taking himself out of the game, then did it again 10 days later. With the pennant clinched, Gehrig was playing just enough to keep the streak alive.

He had managed to lift his batting average to .301 on Sept. 22, but managed only seven hits in his final 35 at-bats to finish at .295.

The Yankees swept the Cubs four straight to win their third straight World Series, their sixth overall with Gehrig. It hardly mattered that their captain managed only four hits, all singles, in 14 at-bats.

The following spring, Gehrig fought to get his body into baseball shape the same way he had done for 16 springs before that. Only this time, his body wasn’t listening.

First came reports of leg stiffness, then pain in his calves. He appeared to be much leaner, and his reflexes had slowed to the point he looked clumsy during routine fielding drills. And then there was his batting.

Eight games into the 1939 season, Gehrig was 4-for-28, all singles. The end had come. Gehrig sat on the bench for the entire game on May 2 and never played again.

Gehrig had certainly had more prolific seasons. Whether it was anchoring the famed Murderers’ Row 1927 Yankees alongside Babe Ruth, his 185-RBI season of 1931, or the Triple Crown-winning year of 1934, all of them feature more eye-popping numbers than he put up in ’38.

However, given what is both known and theorized about the progression of his ALS, it’s hard to imagine a greater feat of strength and determination than what Gehrig displayed in those grueling August days of 1938.

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