Too bad Gary Cooper will never know the truth.

The worlds of baseball and medicine collided on the infield this week when it was revealed that New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig probably didn’t die from Lou Gehrig’s Disease after all. This certainly must be a shock and disappointment to the ghost of egomaniac actor Gary Cooper (who starred in the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic “Pride of the Yankees”) and the tens of thousands of people who died from — and currently have — what they thought was a famous disease named for a famous first baseman. Now everybody has to learn to pronounce amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Good luck with THAT.

According to the article I read on the Los Angeles Times’ website, only 5% of patients diagnosed with ALS actually have the distinctive gene mutation known to cause the disease. New medical evidence suggests that Lou Gehrig’s symptoms most likely resulted from his long-standing record of 2,130 consecutive games, during which he frequently played with injuries and concussions. The neurodegenerative disease related to this kind of brain trauma can mimic the symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other brain diseases as well, such as depression, dementia and Parkinson’s.

Since there’s really no clever way to sum this up, I’ll swing around to a whole new subject and let everybody know that we finally got six minutes of light rain this morning — our first rain in THREE WEEKS — just in time for my Schwan’s delivery guy to track sloppy footprints all over the stone floor my maids just finished mopping. I wanted to slap him. Thank you for reading this.