Everett Scott

May 6, 1925. Yankee Stadium. Everett Scott isn't in the lineup for the first time since June 20, 1916 -- 1,307 straight games, nine seasons, two franchises, and not a single day off in between. Manager Miller Huggins made the call himself. A rookie named Pee-Wee Wanninger takes over at shortstop instead, and nobody in the ballpark that afternoon has any idea they've just watched the sport's most durable record die. Three and a half weeks later, a 21-year-old first baseman named Lou Gehrig pinch-hits for Wanninger. He never sits down again.

That's the whole tragedy of Everett Scott in one sentence -- he set the bar Gehrig became immortal chasing, and baseball barely remembers his name for it.

The Best Shortstop Nobody Talks About

Lewis Everett Scott was born November 19, 1892, in Bluffton, Indiana, a 5-foot-8, 148-pound infielder who broke into the majors with the Boston Red Sox in 1914. He wasn't much of a hitter -- he never would be -- but he could field like nobody else in the American League, and for a decade that was worth more than a batting title. Scott led AL shortstops in fielding percentage year after year through the back half of the 1910s and into the early '20s, the surest glove at the position in the game (contemporaries called him the finest defensive shortstop of his era, and nobody seriously argued the point).

He also started showing up every single day. The streak began June 20, 1916, and by the time it reached 900 games, the Washington Post had a name for him: the "Iron Man." Boston won three World Series with Scott at short -- 1915, 1916, and 1918 -- and made him team captain. He was already a champion three times over before he ever put on pinstripes.

Ed Barrow's Heist

By December 1921, Boston's ownership had turned into New York's personal supply closet (the Yankees just kept shopping there, and Boston just kept selling). Babe Ruth had already come over. Now general manager Ed Barrow went back for more. On December 20, 1921, the New York Yankees sent Roger Peckinpaugh, pitchers Jack Quinn and Rip Collins, infielder Bill Piercy, and $100,000 cash to Boston. In return, New York got two starting pitchers -- Bullet Joe Bush and Sad Sam Jones -- and a shortstop who'd been playing every day for six straight years. It was one more entry in a pipeline that would also bring Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt to the Bronx before the decade was out.

Scott stepped in at short and simply kept doing what he'd always done. He never missed a game in 1922 or 1924, and he barely missed one in 1923 either. The 1922 pennant race with the Browns went down to the final day, and Scott's glove was part of the reason the Yankees survived it. He was never going to hit like the men around him. He didn't need to.

A Ring, and the Worst Season of His Career

The 1923 season should have been Scott's crowning moment -- the Yankees opened the new Stadium, won the pennant, and finally beat the Giants for the franchise's first championship. Instead, it was the worst year of his career at the plate: .247/.265/.328, a line so light for a regular on a championship roster that it's been called the weakest offensive season by any everyday player on a Yankees World Series winner. Nobody cared. Scott's job had never been the bat.

He showed up when it mattered. In the 1923 World Series, the Yankees beat the Giants four games to two, and Scott played every inning of every game -- 7-for-22, all singles, 3 RBI in all, two of them coming on a Game 4 single. A year earlier, in the 1922 World Series, he'd gone just 2-for-14 as the Giants swept New York in five games (four wins, one tie). The difference between those two Octobers is the difference between a team that hadn't figured out how to win yet and one that finally had. Scott was on the field for both lessons.

The Streak, and How It Ended

Nine years without a day off wears on a man, even one built like Scott (no offseason surgery, no maintenance days, just show up and play short). By 1925, at 32, his bat had all but disappeared -- he was hitting a shade over .200 through his first 22 games -- and Huggins was rebuilding a lineup that had just won three straight pennants and needed fresh legs. On May 6, 1925, Huggins benched him. The streak stopped at 1,307, a major-league record that had stood since Scott passed George Pinkney's 577 back in the 1910s.

Reporters at the time noted Scott had been fighting a stomach ailment. Maybe that's true. Maybe Huggins just needed the at-bats to go somewhere else. Either way, the timing turned out to be an odd historical footnote -- because the man who replaced him, Wanninger, would himself get pinch-hit for less than a month later, on June 1, by a young first baseman named Gehrig, who started at first in place of Wally Pipp the very next day. The streak that would eventually reach 2,130 games began at a different position entirely -- but it started that same week Scott's own streak had just ended, two records passing each other in the same infield.

Scott didn't finish the season in New York. The Yankees waived him to the Washington Senators on June 17, 1925, and he closed out the year there before brief stops with the White Sox and Reds in 1926 ended his career. New York, without him, without a healthy Ruth, collapsed to seventh place that summer -- a stunning fall for a team that had just won three consecutive pennants.

His record didn't fall quietly, either. It took Gehrig until August 17, 1933 -- Scott's own game 1,308, seven years and change later -- to actually pass it, and even Gehrig's eventual 2,130 still leaves Scott's 1,307 as the third-longest streak in major-league history, behind only Gehrig and Cal Ripken Jr.

After the Games Ended

Scott never got a serious Cooperstown look -- a .249 lifetime average and 20 home runs across 1,654 games just doesn't move a Hall of Fame voter, whatever the glove work says. Indiana didn't forget him, though: he went into the Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame in 1986. After baseball, he took up ten-pin bowling, good enough to compete against professional champion Hank Marino, and eventually owned bowling alleys back home in Fort Wayne. He died there on November 2, 1960, at 67.

Baseball has a cruel sense of timing sometimes. The man who built a nine-year monument to showing up got benched three weeks before the sport handed the monument to somebody else. Gehrig got the plaque, the nickname that stuck forever, and 823 more games on top of it. Scott got a footnote in a Yankee shortstop's story that isn't his.

He still doesn't sit down in the record books, though. Not for 1,307 games. Not since.