Description
Oris has revived its classic 40 mm Big Crown Pointer Date as the Lou Gehrig Limited Edition, a baseball-themed tribute released on 2 June — the date marked across Major League Baseball as Lou Gehrig Day — in support of the Lou and Eleanor Gehrig Family Foundation and ALS awareness. It is the third entry in Oris' run of charitable, baseball-linked Big Crowns, following the Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron editions.
Limited to 2,130 pieces — a number that directly references Gehrig's then-record streak of consecutive games — it is a value-driven steel watch whose meaning lives in its details rather than its spec sheet. Priced at CHF 2,400 (US$2,850 / £2,250), it is pitched as an accessible collector's piece and a quiet, dignified homage rather than a loud sports collaboration.
Design
The 40 mm stainless-steel case (12.2 mm thick, 48.2 mm lug-to-lug, 50 m water resistance) keeps the Big Crown signatures: an oversized screw-in crown, a knurled bezel and alternating brushed and polished surfaces, under a domed sapphire crystal with internal anti-reflective coating. The colourway echoes the New York Yankees uniform: a vertically brushed silver dial that evokes both the team's grey road kit and Gehrig's "Iron Horse" nickname, with blue-outlined numerals and indices filled with white, green-emission Super-LumiNova, and a blue minutes track.
The tribute is encoded in small touches that only fans will fully decode: the tip of the pointer-date hand is blue, and the number 4 on the black peripheral date track is picked out in blue — a nod to Gehrig's jersey number 4, the first ever retired in Major League Baseball, in 1940. The solid, screwed caseback is engraved in relief with an image of Gehrig delivering his 1939 farewell speech. It ships on a brown suede strap with white, baseball-glove-style double stitching, plus a striped NATO in Yankees colours, with a strap-change tool included.
Specifications
- Reference: 01 754 7785 4091-Set (754 7785 4091)
- Case diameter: 40 mm
- Case thickness: 12.2 mm
- Lug-to-lug: 48.2 mm
- Case material: multi-piece stainless steel, brushed and polished
- Bezel: knurled steel
- Crown: oversized screw-in
- Crystal: domed sapphire with internal AR coating
- Caseback: solid, screwed; relief engraving of Gehrig's 1939 farewell speech; numbered
- Water resistance: 50 m (5 bar)
- Dial: vertically brushed silver with grey/blue/white accents; blue-outlined Arabic numerals and indices with white SLN (green emission); blue minutes track; black peripheral date track with blue number 4; cathedral hands; blue-tipped pointer-date hand
- Movement: Oris Calibre 754 (Sellita SW200-1 base), automatic, signature red rotor — NOT in-house
- Complications: pointer date
- Frequency: 28,800 vph (4 Hz)
- Winding: automatic
- Power reserve: 41 hours
- Straps: brown suede with white double stitching + striped NATO in Yankees colours; steel buckles; strap-change tool supplied
- Limited edition: 2,130 pieces
- Price: CHF 2,400 / US$2,850 / £2,250
- Availability: June 2026; partial proceeds to the Lou and Eleanor Gehrig Family Foundation
What's Exciting
Oris has a long, credible record of awareness and charity limited editions, and this is one of its more tastefully restrained. There are no team logos splashed across the dial; instead the story is built from quiet signals — the brushed-steel "Iron Horse" dial, the lone blue number 4, the engraved farewell speech on the back — that reward the people who know what they mean. It is a piece of Americana done with a watchmaker's discipline.
The honest caveat is the engine: Calibre 754 is a Sellita SW200-1 with Oris' pointer-date module and red rotor, not an in-house movement, and 41 hours of power reserve is ordinary. But that is the point of these editions — the value sits in the design, the cause and the 2,130-piece tie to Gehrig's record, not in horological fireworks. As an affordable, meaningful tribute that gives back, it lands.
History
The Oris Big Crown was born in 1938 as a pilot's watch, defined by a large crown that could be operated with gloves and a red-tipped pointer hand reading the date around the dial's edge. The Big Crown Pointer Date has remained one of Oris' most recognisable models ever since, and the independent Hölstein brand has repeatedly used it as the canvas for cause-driven baseball editions — first the Roberto Clemente, then the Hank Aaron, and now Lou Gehrig.
Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig (1903–1941), the New York Yankees first baseman nicknamed the "Iron Horse," played a then-record 2,130 consecutive games across 15 seasons. After being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he delivered his famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939 and died on 2 June 1941, aged 37 — the disease is still widely known as "Lou Gehrig's disease." His number 4 was the first retired in Major League Baseball, in 1940, and decades later MLB established Lou Gehrig Day on 2 June. Oris' edition channels that legacy into a fundraising piece for the Lou and Eleanor Gehrig Family Foundation.
