The Chris Moeller Archives

Bob Feller

I met Bob Feller for the first time when I was about 9 years old. My aunt, a college student in Cedar Falls at the time, took my brother and me to a nearby K-Mart to get the baseball Hall-of-Famer's autograph. Truth be known, I was not yet aware of Feller at that time in my young baseball-obsessed life, and my aunt didn't know who he was either. She knew that Aaron and I were baseball fans--that's why we were there, but she was not a sports fan herself, and she had a rather low opinion of athletes in general. I don't recall the specifics of the encounter, but I remember that meeting Bob Feller that day didn't change her opinion.

The obituaries for Feller today have described him rather accurately according to my experience. He was gruff to the point of seemingly perpetual anger. The definition of "rude" is in the eye of the beholder, and his biographer, Bill Gilbert, described Feller as "not intentionally rude or anything," only "candid," but The Register's sports columnist Sean Keeler recalled an interview today he once had with Feller that pivoted mid-way on Feller's implementation of the phrase, "What are you? Stupid?"

I suspect that I encountered Feller on maybe four more occasions after the first meeting. On my very first day at WHO Radio in 1996, I got to go to the State Capitol and meet the governor of Iowa, Feller, and Feller's guest, Stan Musial, another Cooperstown grad, but one with a disposition as sunny as Feller's was surly. (Together, they are exhibits A & B on why people should live their lives with open minds and tolerance.) When I hosted "The Baseball Show on KXNO," my partner and I missed an opportunity to get a recorded interview with Rapid Robert, but we got a roughly-hour-long private tour of the pitcher's museum in Van Meter, just west of Des Moines. When Hall of Fame favorites Ozzie Smith and Whitey Herzog visited the museum, I would venture out there, and it was easy to strike up a conversation with Feller while the visiting luminaries were signing autographs. He was very accessible in these situations, but never what you would call "warm." Naturally he liked to talk about his own life and career with a young man who showed an interest. He wasn't prickly or irritated, but then the topic of our conversations was never my radical political affiliations. Or his.

In 1965, Feller, then a small business owner in Cleveland, campaigned "like a man obsessed" to be the first Executive Director of the Players Association, according to Marvin Miller's book. Miller eventually took the position, and that's fortunate of course. Feller would have been shitty at it. (To give you an idea of what the job was thought to be at that time, the other leading candidates to lead the union were team executives like Giants Vice President Chub Feeney.) Feller had always been and continued to be, throughout his life, a member of the baseball, military, and American conservative establishments. He was a "champion of common sense," Keeler writes, but only if you accept the premise that reactionary cultural opinions constitute sense. (And why is it exactly that a progressive, culture-altering figure like Miller or Curt Flood is never described as being a "champion of common sense"?)

As one of baseball's all-time great pitchers, Feller had a captive audience for his opinions, no matter how absurd they might be. He went on record before integration as saying that Jackie Robinson would not make it in the Majors, and that no players from the Negro Leagues were skillful enough to succeed in an integrated game. In 1969, he was quoted as saying, "I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything either." In 2004, he called Major League Baseball's decision to honor Muhammad Ali at the All-Star Game in Houston "disgusting." Ali, he said, "changed his name and changed his religion so he wouldn't have to serve his country."

In 2005, Feller told the audience of a St. Louis sports radio station that Latino ballplayers "don't know the rules of the game," eventually hanging up the phone on his bewildered interviewer. During the broadcast of an Indians game in 2006, he remarked strangely that catcher Victor Martinez reminded him of minstrel star Stepin Fetchit. In his elderly years, he would rarely concede that any current players rose to his same level of talent or that of his mid-century contemporaries. He seemed to be almost tortured by the fact that latter day players made a better living on the field than he ever did. He was an outspoken critic of steroid users, but then something seemingly innocuous like the expanded use of bullpens pissed him off too. His voting absence won't be missed on the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee. The official votes are kept secret, but judging by his public comments, I'm confident that Bob Feller cast more ridiculous Hall ballots than any man in history, and he was a living member of the Hall of Fame for a remarkable 48 years.

Feller did have one hell of a pitching career. Playing all of his 18 years with the Cleveland Indians, he posted a career 3.25 ERA and struck out 2,581. He was selected to eight All-Star teams, pitched three no-hitters, 12 one-hitters, and 218 times over the course of his life going to ballgames reminded the guy standing next to him to remove his cap for the National Anthem. He threw the second-fastest pitch ever officially recorded-- 107.6 mph-- in a game against the Washington Senators in 1946.

Feller was a tireless promoter of the game, a great competitor, and his loss on Earth will be felt, but his death is being mourned today most deeply by those who shared Feller's faulty view that the world was a black and white place. We won't miss that type when we're finally rid of it. There were no shades of gray in Bob Feller's world, and there certainly isn't today. He's dead.

posted by CM @ 8:34 PM