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Who really said it

There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all

Attributed to Lou Gehrig 1903–1941 · New York Yankees first baseman, “the Iron Horse”
Right sentiment, unverified wording: the thought is documented, the sentence is not. Rights unconfirmed

Gehrig is on the record twice — telling Jimmy Powers in February 1933 that he had no objection to Black players, and issuing a pro-integration statement in 1938 — but no interview, column, speech or letter has ever been produced containing this wording. ESPN’s own Gehrig quotes page prints the line and then labels it, in its own words, “widely attributed.”

Last verified 27 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all” attributed to Lou Gehrig (1903–1941). Widely credited to Gehrig, but no primary source has been found for this wording; ESPN's own Gehrig quotes page labels it "widely attributed," and Wikiquote does not carry it. Gehrig did go on record for integration: he told New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers in February 1933 that he would not object to Black players, and a 1938 statement of his was quoted in pro-integration pamphlets when The Pride of the Yankees (1942) reached cinemas. Via Quotle.info.

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We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the world of Lou Gehrig — New York Yankees first baseman · Baseball Hall of Fame, 1939. Theme: "There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail (and where it stops)

Attributed to
Lou Gehrig (1903–1941), New York Yankees
Claimed setting
“His response to segregated baseball” — no date, venue or publication ever given
Typical carrier
ESPN.com Classic’s Gehrig quotes page, which itself labels the line “widely attributed”
What is documented
Gehrig told Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News in February 1933 that he did not object to Black players; a separate 1938 statement of his was quoted in pro-integration pamphlets

There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all. Wording unsourced

There is no fuller context to show. The line always appears exactly this long, in isolation, with no surrounding sentences — a hallmark of a quotation that has circulated through quote collections rather than from a document.

Background: what Gehrig IS documented as saying — Peter Dreier, “Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball’s Civil Rights Movement” (SABR)

How we verified this

  • February 1933 — the Powers poll. After Heywood Broun challenged the colour line at the New York baseball writers’ dinner, Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers asked baseball men whether they would object to Black players. Heydler, Ruppert, Pennock, Gehrig and Frisch said they would not; only John McGraw objected. Powers’s column of 8 February 1933 predicted Black players would one day reach the majors — Peter Dreier, SABR ↗.
  • 1938 statement, 1942 leaflets. When The Pride of the Yankees reached cinemas in 1942, integration campaigners flooded the theatres with pamphlets quoting from Gehrig’s 1938 statement that he was all for integration — Leslie Heaphy, SABR ↗. Neither the date nor the text of that statement is given.
  • The modern line, hedged at source. ESPN’s Classic archive prints the sentence under Gehrig’s name and tags it “His response to segregated baseball, widely attributed” — ESPN.com ↗. That hedge is the strongest sourcing anyone offers.
  • Absent where it should be. The line does not appear on Wikiquote’s Lou Gehrig page ↗, and searches of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper corpus and Internet Archive’s text search return nothing for the phrase.

No status can honestly be asserted. Because the wording has not been tied to any identifiable speech, column, interview or book, there is no work whose first-publication date could be tested — so this page makes no public-domain claim. If the sentence turns out to derive from a Gehrig statement of 1933 or 1938, or from a reporter’s write-up of one, rights would attach to that publication rather than to the aggregator pages now circulating it.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

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Fact-check

Right man, unproven words

This is not a case of the wrong name on a good line. Lou Gehrig plausibly held exactly this view — historians can name the occasions. What no one can name is the interview, column, speech or letter in which he said this.

Lou Gehrig unsourced

No document containing this sentence has been produced. ESPN’s Classic archive prints it and immediately hedges: the tag beneath it reads “His response to segregated baseball, widely attributed” — see the page itself ↗. It is the only one of the three Gehrig quotes on that page ESPN hedges: of the other two, one carries a full citation (to Jack Sher, quoted in Sport, October 1948) and the other only a topic label — but neither is flagged “widely attributed.”

“his response to segregated baseball” vague

No date, no venue, no publication is ever given. Compare Baseball Almanac, which reproduces the line among its Gehrig quotations with no source attached ↗.

Wikiquote and Quote Investigator silent

Wikiquote’s Lou Gehrig page ↗ does not carry the line at all, in any section, and Quote Investigator has published no investigation of it. A line this famous being absent from the sourced reference works is itself a signal.

Lou Gehrig, February 1933 documented

Asked by New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers whether he would object to Black players, Gehrig — along with Herb Pennock, Frankie Frisch, John Heydler and Jacob Ruppert — told Powers he did not object ↗. Powers reported the responses; the surviving accounts paraphrase rather than quote Gehrig.

Gehrig was, for a white star of the 1930s, genuinely on the right side of this — enough that campaigners printed his 1938 statement on leaflets ↗ and handed them out at screenings of The Pride of the Yankees. But a quotation is a claim about words, not about opinions, and this sentence has never been tied to a source.

Context

What Gehrig is actually documented as saying

Baseball in Gehrig’s day had no written colour bar — only what Heywood Broun called a “tacit agreement” among the owners. In February 1933 Broun told the all-white New York Baseball Writers’ Association dinner that if Black athletes were good enough for the Olympics, it was “a little silly” that they could not play between the White Sox and the Browns. That same month, New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers went round asking baseball men whether they would object to Black players on their teams.

National League president John Heydler, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and star players Herb Pennock, Lou Gehrig and Frankie Frisch all told Powers they did not object; only Giants manager John McGraw came out against. Gehrig’s name surfaces again in 1938: a statement he made that year supporting integration was reprinted on leaflets handed out at cinemas showing The Pride of the Yankees. So Gehrig really did lend his name to the cause — which is precisely why an unsourced sentence in his voice slides past most readers unchallenged.

The record shows Gehrig said he had no objection. It does not show him saying this.

What the searches turned up — and did not

The wording returns nothing in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper corpus, nothing in Internet Archive’s text search, and no period book or article. Every carrier that surfaces is a modern quotation aggregator with no citation attached — the classic signature of a line that entered circulation through quote sites rather than through a source.

1938 was also the year of the Jake Powell affair: on 29 July the Yankees outfielder used a racial slur in a live WGN radio interview with Bob Elson, and Commissioner Landis suspended him ten days for “unethical and disparaging remarks.” It is tempting to read Gehrig’s 1938 statement as a reply to his own teammate — but no source consulted here makes that connection, and the sources that mention Gehrig’s 1938 statement give neither its date nor its text.

Two things could still settle this: the text of Powers’s February 1933 Daily News columns, and the wartime pamphlets that quoted Gehrig’s 1938 statement. Neither is freely digitised, and until one of them is read, the honest answer is that the sentiment is Gehrig’s and the sentence is unproven.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Justice Freedom Kindness

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball's Civil Rights Movementsabr.org

Peter Dreier's SABR essay documenting the February 1933 Jimmy Powers poll in which Gehrig, Pennock, Frisch, Heydler and Ruppert said they had no objection to Black players.
The Impact of World War II on the Negro Leaguessabr.org

Leslie Heaphy's SABR essay noting that pamphlets quoting Gehrig's 1938 pro-integration statement were handed out at cinemas showing The Pride of the Yankees.
Quotes by and about Lou Gehrigespn.com

ESPN's Classic archive prints the line and tags it "His response to segregated baseball, widely attributed" — an explicit hedge from the most reputable outlet carrying it.
Lou Gehrig (Wikiquote)en.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's Gehrig page — worth checking precisely because this famous line is absent from it.
Lou Gehrig Quotesbaseball-almanac.com

Baseball Almanac's Gehrig collection, which reproduces the line with no source, date or venue attached.
Lou Gehrigen.wikipedia.org

Biography confirming Gehrig's dates (19 June 1903 – 2 June 1941), his Yankees career and his 1939 Hall of Fame election.

The author

About Lou Gehrig

Lou Gehrig

1903–1941 · New York Yankees first baseman · Baseball Hall of Fame, 1939

Henry Louis Gehrig played seventeen seasons at first base for the New York Yankees and was nicknamed “the Iron Horse” for a consecutive-games streak that stood for more than half a century. He was a seven-time All-Star, a two-time American League MVP and a Triple Crown winner, and the first major leaguer to have his uniform number retired. Diagnosed with ALS, he gave his “luckiest man” farewell at Yankee Stadium in 1939 and died in 1941; he was also, unusually for a white star of his era, on record as having no objection to Black players in the majors.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

No primary source located

No primary source has been located for this wording. The line is carried without citation on ESPN.com Classic, “Quotes by and about Lou Gehrig,” where it is labelled “widely attributed.” For Gehrig’s documented statements on integration, see Peter Dreier, “Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball’s Civil Rights Movement,” in Jackie Robinson: Perspectives on 42 (Society for American Baseball Research, 2021), and Leslie Heaphy, “The Impact of World War II on the Negro Leagues,” in Essays from Who’s on First: Replacement Players in World War II (Society for American Baseball Research, 2015).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-is-no-room-in-baseball-for-discrimination-it-is-our/

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