Bob Feller was a baseball star who went to war when he had every right and 100,000 reasons not to
There is no consolation in death but when it comes to the passing of baseball's greats there is always the consolation of breaking open the collected work of Red Smith, the Joe DiMaggio of American sportswriters.
Bob Feller, the former Cleveland Indians pitcher and truly one of the game's greats, died yesterday at the age of 92. This is what Smith had to say about him, in a New York Times piece published in September 1956, as Feller's 20-year career in the big leagues was nearing its end:
There is meat enough in Feller's record to feed any man's pride. In 1938, he struck out 13 Tigers in nine innings. In 1946 he fanned 348 batsmen, smashing a record that Rube Waddell had held for 42 years. He pitched three no-hit games. In one four-year span he struck out 1007 batters in 1,238 innings.And then there was this:
One winter a Cleveland newspaperman scoured through the records and then telephoned Feller. "There is," he said, "just one regular player in the league whom you've never struck out. Did you know you have never fanned Birdie Tebbetts?"
"No," Feller said, "but I will."
He did.
So there you have it: Bob Feller the pitcher ? durable, relentless and, at times, unhittable.
And Bob Feller the fella ? a macho man of the old school.
There have been a hundred stories told about Feller over the past 24 hours, the most often repeated being the one about his 1940 duel against a motorcycle ? a clumsily conceived stunt in which his fast ball was "measured" against a speeding Harley Davidson. He was credited with throwing at 104mph. Did he? Feller always boasted he threw harder than that.
He wasn't short of confidence, Rapid Robert (as he was nicknamed), and why should he have been given the career he had after coming into the big leagues in 1936, aged 17? On his debut he struck out 15 against the St Louis Browns. Later that season he had 17 strike-outs in one game ? an American League record at the time. At the end of that season he returned home to Iowa and went back to high school.
Jayson Stark, the baseball analyst for ESPN, wrote this great appreciation of Feller in his 2007 book, The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. Feller was named the sixth "most underrated" ? though not in Cleveland, where they built a statue in his honour.
Yet for all Feller's achievements on the baseball field, he will perhaps be best remembered for his decision, at the age of 23, to walk away from the game in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbour ? a decision he recalled in a piece for the New York Times.
The last thing on my mind right then was playing baseball. I immediately decided to enlist in the United States Navy. I didn't have to ? I was 23 and strong-bodied, you bet, but with my father terminally ill back in Van Meter, Iowa, I was exempt from military service.
It didn't matter to me ? I wanted to join the fight against Hitler and the Japanese. We were losing that war and most young men of my generation wanted to help push them back. People today don't understand, but that's the way we felt in those days. We wanted to join the fighting. So on Dec. 9, I gave up the chance to earn $100,000 with the Indians and became the first professional athlete to join the Navy after Pearl Harbor.
Feller was at war for four years, a chief petty officer on a naval warship. He left his post in August 1945, and pitched for the Indians two days after coming home. He won, of course.
Who knows how many wins Feller would have compiled had he exercised his right to stay at home? At the very least he would have joined the exclusive club of pitchers who won more than 300 games. He himself floated the idea he might have got to 400 wins. We'll never know and, according to Feller, we shouldn't care. He certainly didn't, as he made clear in his Times piece:
I have no regrets. None at all. I did what any American could and should do: serve his country in its time of need. The world's time of need.
I knew then, and I know today, that winning World War II was the most important thing to happen to this country in the last 100 years. I'm just glad I was a part of it. I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this ? heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.
Bob Feller. They don't make them like that any more. But then you probably knew that already.
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