Buying McFarlane Toys MLB Cooperstown Series 6 Action Figure Lou Gehrig (New York Yankees)

I was really looking forward to getting this action figure of Lou Gehrig, not just because I collect all McFarlane's New York Yankees figures but because I am a rhetorician and could show this one to my students in rhetorical criticism as the first (to my knowledge) action figure of a public speaker. That is because Gehrig is depicted giving his famous speech on July 4, 1939, when they held "Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day" at Yankee Stadium, and declared: "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" (Note: the famous line comes at the beginning of his speech and not at the end, as depicted in "The Pride of the Yankees").

The good news is that this figure looks great. Obviously the pose of Gehrig standing before a microphone with his head bowed, recieving the thunderous applause from the Yankee Stadium crowd, is the most unique McFarlane has produced of the hundreds of baseball figures issued to date. The sculpture of Gehrig's face is pretty decent, although sometimes I detect a hint of Gary Cooper and even Ronald Reagan when I look at it. The pinstripping is also excelelnt. The patch on Gehrig's left sleeve is for the 1939 Baseball Centennial, the first patch to be worn on the sleeve of all Major League uniforms (1939 was also the year that baseball's Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown, New York). There is some slight flexibility with the two lower arms, but not enough to significantly alter the historic pose. You could not ask for more for the first public speaking action figure.

However, the bad news is that the 2009 series of McFarlane's MLB Cooperstown figures are smaller than its predecessors. My intention was to put my Gehrig figure wearing #4 on top of the bookcase where I display my Yankees Hall of Famers, in between Babe Ruth (who is not wearing his famous #3) and Joe DiMaggio with his #5 jersey. Both Ruth and DiMaggio are shown at the end of their swings, so it would have made a nice little tableau with Gehrig standing in between them, but his five-inch tall figure looks like a skinny little kid next to their six-inch figures. The pitching figure released this year of Babe Ruth--which I picked up with the Yankee variant but which makes more historical sense as the Boston Red Sox version--is also done on the five-inch scale, so the entire series is done this way. To say I am disappointed is an understatemtn, but they frown on profanity in these reviews. Consequently, I have my Gehrig figure sitting on top of my computer rather than in its proper place with the figures of the other Yankees immortals.


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