Roxbury — As part of the Roxbury Sidewalk Festival, the Roxbury Nine will square off with the Bovina Dairymen in Roxbury’s Kirkside Park on Saturday, July 4 at 11 a.m.
But, there will be something very different about this particular vintage match. In fact, in the seventh-inning stretch, the clocks will fast forward from 1898 to July 4th 1939—the year Lou Gehrig delivered his history making speech to the world. It was the early summer of that year that Gehrig, the stoic Yankee first baseman was diagnosed with ALS —amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—a disease that was unknown at the time, but would ultimately bear his name.