Crack of the Bat
By David Rawnsley
A Historical Perspective: Bob Feller
On most Saturday afternoons over the past two months, I could be found watching young 16 and 17 year old prospects pitching and hitting in Florida or Arkansas or Georgia.
This past Saturday afternoon found me in a somewhat different location but not without a common thread: The Bob Feller Museum in Van Meter, Iowa
The opportunity was courtesy of my wife, who was taking advantage of a rare summer weekend for my being home to tour around the covered bridges, county fairs and unusual museums of rural Iowa. I’ve driven by the exit on I-80 just west of Des Moines with the “Bob Feller Museum: This Exit” sign untold dozens of times but have never stopped.
She said, “I know you need your baseball fix sometime this weekend, let’s make sure to stop.” That’s all I needed.
Because he threw his last pitch 50 years ago, Bob Feller is probably a bit unknown to many reading this. Certainly very under appreciated and unrecognized. I’ll summarize where I think Bob Feller stands in the history of pitchers of the baseball and check for your reactions before defending myself
Bob Feller is one of the 10, if not 5, greatest pitchers of all-time. Nolan Ryan is the best comparison in talent, although Ryan’s record on the field seems small in many ways compared to Feller. Feller is certainly the most qualified player in baseball history to be labeled as a prodigy.
The idea of Feller being a prodigy is important in this perspective. He was born on a farm near Van Meter in late 1918. Van Meter is still a town of 366 people with no stop light today, one can only imagine what it was like then. Yet when Bob Feller turned 18 years old in 1936, he had pitched 62 Major League innings and held the American League single game strike out record with 17 (he struck out 15 in his first start).
Our job at Perfect Game revolves around evaluating young players, many of them 17 years old. The pitching class of 2007 is one of the more impressive in memory and I’ve seen prospects such as Michael Main, Madison Bumgarner, Matt Harvey and Josh Smoker do great things. This year I watched an all-time PG favorite, Scott Kazmir, pitch in the All-Star Game as a 22 year old.
But when Feller was Michael Main’s age he struck out 17 hitters in a big league game. When he was Scott Kazmir’s age, he’d already won 109 Major League games and had struck out well over 1,000 big league hitters.
Then, like a whole generation of Major League players, he lost a huge piece of his baseball career to military service and World War II. Feller didn’t pitch competitively from 1942 until late in the 1945 season.
Given that Feller won 24, 27 and 25 games the three years before leaving for military service and 26 games the year he came back, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that he lost about 100 wins during WWII. Even with those 4 years taken away, Feller won 266 Major League games. If you move that total to 366 it would surpass any pitcher who played during the second half of the 20th century.
It should be noted that unlike many famous baseball players, Feller actually saw extensive combat action during the war. He served as an anti-aircraft crew leader on the USS Alabama, earning 8 battle ribbons for different campaigns among his other decorations.
The comparisons to Ryan are natural because of Feller’s pure stuff. In an era when striking out was much more frowned upon than it is today, Feller, in addition to his single game strikeout records, fanned 348 hitters in 1946. He also walked a career high 208 hitters as a 19 year old in 1938. Compare to Ryan’s career highs of 383 K’s and 204 walks. Feller, like Ryan, was equally feared for his curveball as for the sheer velocity of his sometimes not so finely controlled fastball.
There were, of course, no radar guns back in those days but there were many ingenious attempts to measure Feller’s peerless fastball velocity, ranging from measuring it by high speed photographs and having him throw as a speeding motorcyclist raced past. The “official” velocity for Feller was recorded as 98.3 mph. Anyone who doesn’t believe that Feller threw 100+ mph on occasion isn’t being realistic.
The big difference between Feller and Ryan is that Feller was a great pitcher in that all important area of wins vs. loses. Feller’s 266-162 record could have as easily been 366-210 given his four war years. Ryan was barely a .500 pitcher during his 27 year career, finishing 32 games over .500 at 324-292.
But it’s Feller’s incredible young age that really makes him stand out for me. After his debut in 1936, Feller went back to Van Meter to finish his high school diploma! Think of that for a second, especially in context to a 17 year old pitcher of today. It will obviously never happen again.
This column represents the thoughts and opinions of the author and are not necessarily those of Perfect Game.