Mamaroneck and Larchmont notable athletes
A number of professional athletes have lived in Mamaroneck and Larchmont. Below, read about one homegrown World Series hero, Scott Leius, Mamaroneck HIgh School class of 1983, and Lou Gehrig, New York Yankees’ “Iron Man,” who lived in Larchmont during a tragic turning point in his life.
More Mamaroneck and Larchmont notables: Read the other parts of the series
This is one of a series of pages on notable residents of Mamaroneck and Larchmont.
Here are the other parts. Tap the links to go to those pages:
Actors, entertainers, singers: Matt and Kevin Dillon, Joan Rivers, Carly Rose Sonenclar and many more.
Directors and writers: Ang Lee, D.W. Griffith, Robert Ripley ('Believe It or Not'), Edward Albee ('Virginia Woolf'), Gail Sheehy ('Passages') and more.
Artists including Norman Rockwell.
Community-builders including the man behind Mamaroneck’s ‘Friendly Village” motto.
List: Local trail blazers - people who achieved local firsts for their gender, race, or ethnicity
At a glance: 50 celebrities from Mamaroneck and Larchmont, past and present.
Plus
Street names: The notable people behind Mamaroneck’s street names.
Scott Leius: Ex-Mamaroneck High star hit World Series game-winning homer
Scott Leius (born 1965) earned All-County honors in baseball and football at Mamaroneck High School, then became a World Series hero with a pivotal homer for the Minnesota Twins.
In the 1991 World Series, he batted .357 and, leading off in the eighth inning, hit the game-winning home run off Tom Glavine in Games 2 as the Twins defeated the Atlanta Braves 3-2. The Twins went on to take the Series 4-3. Mamaroneck Village honored Leius after the Series.
Watch below: Scott Leius hits game-winning homer off Atlanta’s Tom Glavine in Game 2 of the 1991 World Series.
After graduating from Mamaroneck in 1983, Leius has played shortstop for Concordia College in Bronxville, then was drafted in 1986 by the Twins.
A third baseman mainly, he spent nine season in the major leagues with the Twins (6 seasons), Cleveland (1), and Kansas City (2) between 1990 and 1999.
Sources:
"Concordia's Leius drafted by Twins," The Daily Times, June 9, 1986.
"A hometown homer: Mamaroneck's Leius lifts Twins to 3-2 Series win," The Daily Times, Oct. 21, 1991
'Village plans to tip cap to hero of World Series," The Daily Times, Nov. 24, 1991.
Scott Leius' major league statistics: Baseball-reference.com.
Mamaroneck High School class of 1983, The Daily Times, June 14, 1983.
Lou Gehrig: Yankees’ ‘Iron Man’ spent some of his final years in Larchmont
Lou Gehrig (1903-1941) set a Major League Baseball record for consecutive games played, but the Yankees’ legendary first baseman was felled by the devastating progressive neurological disorder that would come to bear his name: Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He and his wife, Eleanor, were living in Larchmont as the disease set in and at the time he gave his “Luckiest Man” farewell speech.
The New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig, 1930 (Library of Congress)
The couple moved from a New Rochelle apartment into a “swankier” one at Stonecrest, 21 N. Chatsworth Aveue in Larchmont, in mid-March 1938, according to Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig by Jonathan Eig. Yankees then-President Ed Barrow also lived in Larchmont. In New Rochelle, Lou and Eleanor had lived in a 7-story apartment building at 5 Circuit Road since marrying in 1933. The New Rochelle apartment was near Gehrig’s parents’ home on Meadow Lane. Gehrig had a small fishing boat, The Water Wagon, on Long Island Sound.
The year of the move to Larchmont, 1938 was when the disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, started to take hold in Gehrig. “It might have been around the time of his thirty-fifth birthday (June 19), when his wife noticed he was having trouble with his balance. Or it might have been a bit deeper into the summer, when his manager detected a change in the way his star slugger was swinging the bat. But it was almost certainly no later than that,” Eig wrote.
On May 3, 1939, Gehrig benched himself after playing 2,130 consecutive games. On July 4 of that year, with Gehrig’s diagnosis now public, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. Gehrig told the crowd at Yankee Stadium, “Today I consider myself the luckest man on the face of the earth.” He finished, “I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot of live for. Thank you.”
His baseball career over, Gehrig looked for other work. New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia offered him a position as a commissioner with the city’s parole board. Gehrig jumped at the opportunity, but he would have to live in New York City. So, he and Eleanor found a house in Riverdale and moved there from Larchmont a few days before Christmas 1939. Gehrig’s condition continued to deteriorate. He died June 2, 1941. He was 37.
His consecutive-game record would endure until 1995, when it was broken by Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles.
Sources:
Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig by Jonathan Eig. Simon & Schuster, 2005.
“Lou Gehrig Named to Parole Board,” The New York Times, Oct. 12, 1939.
“Gehrig Signed by Yanks at Estimated Salary of $35,000: Veteran Accepts $4,000 Pay Slash,” The New York Times, Jan. 26, 1939.
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The Mamaroneck-Larchmont Notables project is ongoing. Share suggestions for others to include by emailing the Mamaroneck Historical Society at MamaroneckHistory@gmail.com.