I doubt any of my faithful readers know much about Bobby Feller. He was born in Van Meter, Iowa (which I reported just so I could say “Van Meter, Iowa”, which cracks me up) and, after a long career as a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, was voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. His fast ball was extremely fast; he pitched before the era of radar guns, but people who understood these things back then said he probably exceeded 100 miles per hour. He played from the 30’s through the 50’s, and took time out for World War II.
Of all things, he may be most famous for, in the 1948 World Series against the Boston Braves, trying and failing to pick Phil Masi off of second base; you can look at the film and the guy looks out. Bill Stewart, the umpire, called him safe. Later Feller said, in typical Feller fashion, “Stewart was the only guy in the park who thought he was safe." Feller’s Indians lost 1-0 when the next batter singled. The Indians did win the World Series, so Feller can just shut up about it.
By the summer of 1967, I was a couple of years into living in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I pitched. More on this later, but it’s one of the two things I did well. We had moved to Ft. Lauderdale in time for me to play my last year of little league, and to eschew any humility at all, I was astounding, a West Virginia boy striking out over two Floridians an inning on average (for those of you untutored in baseball, that is excessive.) Then I moved up a league, was OK at 13, and then the summer after that year, I went to a baseball camp just up the street from me.
The hosts were a place called Florida Air Academy, and what a a depressing place that was. Little boys as young as 6 had been sent off to this weird boarding school where the kids wore stiff-looking blue uniforms. They looked resigned and sad. The school grounds were flat and hot. Looking back, I can’t imagine that the academics were any good. I recently Googled the school, and the website staunchly affirms that they’ve always been in Melbourne, Florida, and they crow about their academic brilliance. No mention of Ft. Lauderdale. Who knows.
So my parents bought me a couple of weeks at a baseball camp that the school hosted in the summer—good revenue for them, I assume. It was great for me; it was nonstop baseball, though, to be frank, there wasn’t a lot of instruction that I can recall. (I struck out a young college kid coach with a change up curve and thought, wha??? Who are these guys?) It was run by a couple of former major league players/aspirants, big thick men with big thick fingers. Ever noticed that? Baseball players have very thick fingers. No wonder I wasn’t going to make the major leagues with my delicate little digits, far better suited to a computer keyboard than the seams of a baseball.
I wasn’t supposed to start my two weeks till the next Monday, but the owners were kind enough to call and invite me to come out on the previous Friday to be instructed by Bobby Feller, Hall of Famer. It was pretty much at the last minute, so I ran up the street to the Florida Air Academy in my jeans and sneakers.
So I waited in line patiently till it was my turn to be instructed by Bobby Feller himself. I struggled a little, as I hadn’t really warmed up, and he watched in silence for a few minutes until he asked, “What was that?”
I explained, “That’s my knuckle curve.” It hadn’t broken much. Dad had taught me the pitch; I spun the ball out of my hand off of my knuckles. That made the ball curve without my having to twist my elbow in the way that I did a year later to extremely painful effect. Little kids shouldn’t throw curves. I allowed, “Sometimes it takes me an inning to get it working.”
“Well, you may not be around for the next inning then,” Hall of Famer Bobby Feller counseled a 13 year old while everyone laughed.
My cheeks burned, but I kept throwing. I didn’t say anything. After a few more pitches, Bobby Feller said, “OK, thanks. Who’s next?”
I managed to work myself to the back of the crowd without any real instruction from Mr. Feller, not knowing then that, at that very moment, no one was paying any attention to me, hadn’t been paying much attention anyway, and never would again, which was a good thing.
But I was a 13 year old who thought everything I did was a walking judgment on me as a person. And Bobby Feller, Hall of Famer, had just made clear how worthless I was. Of course, he’s in the Hall of Fame, and it doesn’t appear that I will be. By the way, he wasn’t all the impressive as a person, except that he had really thick lips. And thick eyelids. Maybe all the excess flesh pumped up his fastball.
Why are some of the most accomplished people assholes and some aren’t? Bobby Feller, even to my 13 year old mind, was making people laugh at me to make himself feel good. Why? He was in the Hall of Fame, for chrissakes. What else did he need to prove?
I hear Roger Clemens is also a horrible human being, Tom Glavine as well (his will requires his daughter to stay at home and take care of the kids or she won't be a beneficiary). Trevor Bauer is a huge sonuvabitch. So was Chris Carpenter, a pitcher for the Cardinals. Those are all pitchers, but a lot of hitters are mean guys too.
It makes me think that to accomplish that much, to be the best, you maybe have to be an asshole: combine pride, extreme competitiveness, and attention to personal achievements, and, really, you end up with a politician.
My shrink has said that we have no idea who the person we are meeting is: her traumas, her education, her in-born prejudices—we have no idea why people act as they do. That’s probably the best shrugging-shoulders explanation I can imagine. It makes you wonder what Bobby Feller put up with in the cornfields of Van Meter, Iowa. Because he sure was one cold sonuvabitch.
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