As published in The County Times (http://countytimes.somd.com) in Jan 2011
By Ronald N. Guy Jr.
Years ago I had the pleasure of meeting former Cleveland
Indians pitcher and Hall of Famer, Bob Feller.
In his 18 seasons with Cleveland between 1936 and 1956, Feller won 266
games, was an 8-time all-star and led the league in wins 6 times, innings
pitched 5 times and strikeouts 7 times.
Feller was best known for his fastball, for which he earned the nickname
“Rapid Robert”. In an age before radar
guns, Feller once participated in a quirky stunt with a speeding motorcycle to
calculate just how much heat he had on his heater. The result, 104 M.P.H., may or may not have been accurate but his
2,581 career strikeouts and 0.67 average strikeouts per inning, prove this:
Feller threw serious smoke. In fact,
Feller’s strikeouts/inning ratio was superior to Walter Johnson’s (0.59) and
Lefty Grove’s (0.57), perhaps the two most heralded flamethrowers until
Feller’s arrival.
With all due respect to the Cleveland Indians franchise (but
hey, there’s a reason the Indians were chosen for the goof-ball “Major League”
movie series), had Feller played in Boston or New York, his legacy likely would
have been even more significant and his place among the games greatest all-time
hurlers further solidified.
Nevertheless, meeting Feller, a member of baseball’s royal court, left
me awestruck. I certainly didn’t need a
cardiologist to tell me that my heart rate and blood pressure had spiked. And so, as a thousand creative questions
rattled around in my mind, all I managed to verbalize was, “Who was the
toughest batter you faced?” The answer
wasn’t Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams, as expected, but Tommy Henrich, an
outfielder for the Yankees from the late 30’s through the 40’s. Curious about Feller’s more famous
contemporaries, I asked him what it was like to face DiMaggio. Feller said that earlier in their careers
DiMaggio worked him over pretty good, but “after the war, I got the better of
him.”
For a time, I was focused on Feller’s interesting
identification of Henrich as the deepest thorn in his side. As the years have gone by, the lasting
memory of my encounter became a phrase he used: “ after the war”. He was, of course, referring to World War
II. Feller volunteered for the Navy the
day after Pearl Harbor. He was the
first of many major leaguers to trade a glove for a weapon. Like many of his contemporaries – DiMaggio
and Williams included – the war cost him several years in the prime of his
career. Yet, there wasn’t even a trace
of bitterness or regret in Feller’s war reference. To the contrary, the casual, matter-of-fact way in which Feller
referred to his heroic military service spoke to his and his generation’s
perspective on their call to arms: it was their responsibility to serve.
Feller’s generation is often called America’s greatest and
while our country has had many challenging periods, it just might be. Personally, I wonder whether my generation
and those subsequent would have been as selfless and aware of a greater cause
beyond the individual (and certainly the game of baseball) as Feller’s was in
answering the country’s call and mobilizing and sacrificing on a national
level. Certainly times have
changed. As a people we question our
Government more now, a product of the information age, and the bad guys aren’t
as definable as the Axis powers were.
Still, if there was a serious global threat to democracy, an attack on
American soil and a declaration of war, would Tom Brady so willingly and
without reservation volunteer for war?
Would LeBron James? Would
I?
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