IT WAS UNFORTUNATE HOW EMBITTERED AND DISMISSIVE OF MODERN PLAYERS HE BECAME...:

Bob Feller: 1918-2010 (Drew Silva, Dec 15, 2010, NBC Hardball Talk)

Born November 3, 1918 in Van Meter Iowa, he went on to win 266 games over 18 big league seasons and retired after 1956 with a sparkling 3.25 career ERA and 2,581 strikeouts.

Feller struck out 348 batters and turned in a 2.18 ERA over 371.1 innings in 1946, his finest season.

But it was in 1941 that he made his biggest splash. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Feller became the first Major League Baseball player to enlist in the armed forces, joining the NAVY and serving as a gun captain on the USS Alabama during what might have been the prime of his baseball career. He served four years.

He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

...but you can't beat the film of his fastball being clocked vs. a motorcycle.

MORE:
Rapid Robert Can Still Bring It: Like his legendary heater, Bob Feller comes at you fast and hard--and he's got a lot on his mind (Frank Deford, 8/08/05, Sports Illustrated)

It is difficult to imagine now what a marvel Feller was when he burst upon the scene in 1936, a callow youth of 17. Many athletes are great. Bob Feller was seminal. In that long-ago time, unlike nowadays, it was unheard of for teenagers to succeed in the big top of athletics. Children politely waited for their turn in the sunshine. Perhaps in all the world only Sonja Henie had previously excelled at so young an age in any sport that mattered, and, after all, she was but a little girl wearing tights and fur trim, performing dainty figure eights. Feller dressed in the uniform of the major league Cleveland Indians, striking out--fanning!--American demigods. In his first start Bobby Feller struck out 15, one short of the league record. Then, later in the season, he broke the mark, fanning 17, one for each year of his life, in the only professional team sport that mattered then in the United States.

He led the league with 240 strikeouts when he was still a teenager, in 1938. The next year he was best with 24 wins when he was still not old enough to drink. Six times he had the most wins, seven times the most strikeouts, and both of those totals might well have been in double figures had he not spent the heart of his career on a battleship. In 1940 he threw baseball's only Opening Day no-hitter, then went on to earn the pitchers' triple crown: most wins, most strikeouts, best ERA.

Cleveland, of course, took him to its bosom. "I don't think anything had ever happened like Feller," says Bob August, his contemporary and a native of the city who grew up to be a distinguished journalist there. "It was the Depression, and things were pretty bad here, and then this amazing kid came along. What a lift it gave us all. People today who don't know exactly what he did still seem to sense how special Bob Feller was to Cleveland."

To the nation, he was as much a sensation as a curiosity. The press called him Master Feller, and General Mills hired the phenomenon to endorse its cereals in tandem with the only minor more famous than he, Shirley Temple. Dutifully he went back to high school after his rookie season. The next spring he made the cover of Time magazine, and at a time when radio meant as much as television does now, NBC radio covered live, in its entirety, his graduation from Van Meter ( Iowa) High.

The boy was also the first athlete to be raised by his father to be a star. Bill Feller was a no-nonsense farmer, working 360 acres by the Raccoon River, but before little Bobby could walk, the father would sit on the davenport, roll a rubber ball to him and then hold up a pillow to catch the infant's return tosses. Bill Feller switched to growing wheat instead of corn because that took less labor, allowing more time for Bobby to play ball. In the winter they threw together on the second floor of the three-story barn, so that the boy could keep that magic appendage of his in shape. Bobby could throw a curve at the age of eight (and it never did any harm to his arm). He was beating whiskered high school teenagers when he was still in grade school. When the boy was 13, prefiguring that fictional Iowa field of dreams, father and son cut down about 20 big oak trees and carved out an actual diamond right there on the farm. Of course, they built a real mound. And a scoreboard and a refreshment stand, too, for the wide-eyed visitors who flocked to the farm and paid to see the boy wonder set men down.

Feller was raised Roman Catholic. One day the parish priest upbraided Bill for allowing his son to play on Sabbath afternoons. Bob still remembers. His father said this to the priest: "I'll never see you again." Thereupon he turned heel, and the Fellers started worshipping on Sunday mornings as Methodists, so that Bob might play on Sunday afternoons without sanctimonious censure from the clergy.

The bidding for Feller's services began. The family chose the Indians mostly because they were comfortable with Cleveland's scout, Cy Slapnicka, a no-nonsense Iowan like themselves. The following year, when there was some dispute about whether the Indians had observed the legal arcana in signing the prodigy, Judge Landis, the commissioner, was inclined to void the contract and put the lad on the open market. Now understand: Aided by the fact that he even looked like a wrathful Jehovah, Kennesaw Mountain Landis had put the fear of God into everybody in baseball for 15 years. Well, to his face, the farmer from the Raccoon River told the commissioner: Do that, mister, take my boy away from where he wants to play, and I'll haul baseball into court. Landis backed down. Feller never played with anybody but the Indians all his life. His statue now stands outside the team's park. "Bill Feller was one smart Iowa farmer," Bob Feller declares.

MORE:
-TRIBUTE: Bob Feller lived a proud life: Outspoken Hall of Famer defended impressive pitching record and his country (Tim Kurkjian, 12/08/10, ESPN The Magazine)

Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and two days later, Feller -- the best pitcher in the game, and one of the highest paid players at $30,000 a year -- enlisted in the Navy; he was sworn in by former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney. Feller didn't have to enlist. He had a deferment, he was caring for his ailing father, but he went to war anyway. Can you imagine a star baseball player doing that today?

Fifty-seven years later, I asked Feller why he enlisted. He screamed into the phone, "We were losing a war, a big war, we were losing big in the Pacific … any red-blooded American with a gut in his body would have gotten busy.'' Feller, an anti-aircraft gunner, screamed again, "We took back the Pacific. I can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I was there.' "

Feller earned eight battle stars as part of the chief gun crew of the USS Alabama, but he missed nearly four prime seasons due to military service. It cost him around 75 victories, which would have placed him near 350 wins, not to mention all the lost strikeouts, shutouts and complete games. And yet, he told me in 1997, without screaming, "I've never once thought about all the prime years that I missed, I did what I had to do for my country. We won that war. I'm as proud of serving as anything I've ever done in my life.''

-OBIT: Passing of an Iowa legend: Baseball Hall of Famer Bob Feller dies (Des Moines Register, 12/15/10)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2010 10:29 PM