Luckiest Man: the Life and Death of Lou Gehrig.(Brief Article)(Book Review)

LUCKIEST MAN: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig JONATHAN EIG. Simon & Schuster, $26 (432p) ISBN 0-7432-4591-1

Although his record of playing in 2,130 consecutive Major League baseball games (from 1925 to 1939) was eventually broken in 1995, Gehrig is still remembered as one of the sport's greatest figures. But Eig, a Wall Street Journal special correspondent, shows that the life of the "Iron Horse" wasn't quite as squeaky clean as Gary Cooper portrayed it to be in the 1943 film Pride of the Yankees. Still, the blemishes are strikingly minor in comparison to those of today's star athletes: the worst anyone can really say about Gehrig is that he didn't like spending …