[3] Twenty-eight winners of the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award are members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

[7][8] Mike Timlin won the award in 2007 for his efforts in raising awareness and finding a cure for ALS, which took his mother's life in 2002.

Many winners, including Rick Sutcliffe,[10] Barry Larkin,[11] Mark McGwire,[12] Todd Stottlemyre[13] and Derek Jeter,[14] worked with children in need.

Jeter assisted children and teenagers in avoiding drug and alcohol addiction[14] through his Turn 2 Foundation,[15] while Sutcliffe visited disabled children in hospitals[10] and bestowed college scholarships to underprivileged juveniles through his foundation.

[16] Other winners devoted their work to aiding individuals who had a specific illness, such as Albert Pujols, whose daughter suffers from Down syndrome, and who devoted the Pujols Family Foundation to helping those with the disorder,[17] and Ryan Zimmerman, who established the ziMS Foundation to raise money for multiple sclerosis, the disease which afflicts his mother.