Word: fellers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fresh off a Van Meter, Iowa farm when he gangled out to begin his major-league pitching career against the St. Louis Cardinals' Gas House Gang. First man up in the exhibition game in Cleveland was a scrappy shortstop named Leo Durocher. Robert William Andrew Feller took a couple of warmup tosses, then reared back and fired. Leo heard two strikes whistle past so fast that he could not see the ball, then dropped his bat and headed for the dugout. "Hey," the umpire called, "you've got a strike left." "You can have it," Durocher replied...
...three innings, that July night in 1936, righthanded Bob Feller faced nine Cardinals and struck out eight. He had as much control, one sportswriter reported, as a drunken swallow-one wild pitch shattered a grandstand chair. But the Cleveland Indians knew they had a natural. In August of that year Feller made his first official start. He fanned 15 St. Louis Browns, just one short of Rube Waddell's record for a single game...
...Records. From that day on Bob Feller never stopped breaking records. In 1937 he tied Waddell's mark by striking out 16 Red Sox; in 1938 he fanned 18 Tigers for a new major-league record. His 1-to-0 victory over the White Sox in 1940 is the only opening-game no-hitter on record. He pitched two more no-hitters-against the Yanks in 1946 and the Tigers in 1951. In 1946 he struck out 348 batters, smashing Waddell's 42-year-old record...
Just two days after Pearl Harbor, Feller joined the Navy, lost nearly four years of his career. Returning to Cleveland in 1945, he was wise enough to know that it was time to substitute control, sharp-breaking curves and sneaky sliders for his fading speed, and he worked incessantly to stay in shape. Through it all he wore the relaxed and happy look of a man who likes his work, and for whom the great game was indeed a great game...
Small Voices. In Miami, caught making white lightning while free on bail after an earlier arrest, Moonshiner Lonnie Hastings mourned: "They is so much noise about a still, what with rats rustling around in the bushes and birds singing in the trees, that a feller can't hear them federal agents when they come around...