Wayne Isbister

On July 4, 2023, the New York Yankees honored a woman at Yankee Stadium who has never played an inning of baseball. They picked that date on purpose. July 4 is the anniversary of Lou Gehrig standing at a microphone in that stadium in 1939 and calling himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, two years before the disease that now carries his name killed him. The woman they honored is Sarah Langs. She has ALS. She is also the person who knows more about baseball statistics than almost anyone alive. Langs grew up in New York City watching the Mets, and rooting for the San Francisco Giants because her mother did. She went to the University of Chicago, wrote for the student paper, interned everywhere that would take her, and got hired by ESPN as a researcher. In 2019 she went to MLB, where she became the person the entire sport quietly relies on. When you see a note during a broadcast that says a player is the first to do something since 1954, somebody had to find that. Often it is her. She noticed something was wrong in 2019. She was diagnosed with ALS in July 2021. She told the public just before the 2022 postseason. She kept working. She still works. ALS takes the body and leaves the mind completely intact, which is the cruelty of it. As of last year Langs uses a cloned version of her own voice, built from recordings, so she can still appear on podcasts and still talk about baseball. She has been named to the first all female broadcast crew in the sport's history. The Baseball Writers Association of America gave her its Casey Stengel award. She started a campaign called FistBumps4ALS that raised more than 25,000 dollars for research. Major League Baseball honored her on Lou Gehrig Day. The Philadelphia Phillies honored her the next year. Last year ALS United gave her the Iron Horse Award. Gerrit Cole called her a magnetic personality and one of the smartest people in the industry. David Cone called her nothing short of a hero. And here is what she says about all of it. "The best way for me personally to raise awareness is simply by being me." Then this, about Gehrig. "From what I've read about Gehrig, that's what he would want, to be known for his work first, not his disease." She is asking to be known for the work. So know her for the work. The next time you are watching a game and a graphic comes up telling you something nobody in the building knew five seconds ago, somebody found that, and loved doing it, and wanted you to have it. Baseball has kept its own records for 150 years. Right now one of the people keeping them is fighting the disease named after the man who gave the most famous speech in the sport's history, in the same stadium, on the same date. @SlangsOnSports For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap