At 88, a Hall of Famer Is Still in There Pitching

Bob Feller, right, and his grandson, Daniel Feller, with Yogi Berra at Tuesday’s Indians-Yankees game.

By TYLER KEPNER
The New York Times
Published: March 7, 2007

WINTER HAVEN, Fla., March 6 — The driver’s door of the white Buick LaCrosse opened, and one of the senior members of the Baseball Hall of Fame stepped out briskly Tuesday morning. He was wearing the official Cleveland Indians uniform, buttoned to the top, with red-and-white-striped stirrups tucked into cleats that had his No. 19 inked in black on the side. He was ready for another day of starring as himself.

“His title,” said Bart Swain, the Indians’ media relations director, “is Bob Feller: Legend.”

It is a role Feller plays to perfection. He is perhaps the most accessible Hall of Famer, besides being the living member with the longest service. Feller was inducted in 1962, and he has been in the Hall of Fame more than half his life.

He is 88 years old. Each morning in spring training, whenever the Indians play here, his routine is the same. He dresses at a hotel, eats breakfast and drives to Chain of Lakes Park. This week, he is with his grandson, Daniel Feller, a 15-year-old sophomore pitcher on the varsity team at Pomfret School in Connecticut.

“All my teachers know who he is,” said Daniel, who is Feller’s only grandchild. Daniel said he interviewed his grandfather, who enlisted in the Navy in December 1941 and was an antiaircraft gunner aboard the battleship Alabama, for a 10-page term paper on World War II. He got an A.
“My bibliography was ‘Bob Feller: Conversation with Dan Feller,’ ” he said.

Feller still pitches at the Indians’ fantasy camp, and he played catch with his grandson on the field before Tuesday’s game. The public-address announcer introduced him, and Feller lifted his cap and waved. Then he headed to his position.

While the Indians play, Feller sits beneath an umbrella at a picnic table behind the aluminum bleachers down the left-field line. For a $5 donation to his museum in Van Meter, Iowa, Feller signs autographs and answers questions. He will not sign his name as Rapid Robert — “I like Bob,” he said — but almost anything else is fair game.

A fan asked Feller what Kenny Rogers was doing in the last World Series when umpires noticed a brown smudge on his palm. Feller replied that Rogers was applying more spin to the ball.

“He was trying to cheat,” Feller said. “It’s not the first time anyone’s ever done it. They’ve been doing it from Day 1.”

The fan thanked Feller and added that he had just been to Dodgertown, in Vero Beach, where the former pitchers Ralph Branca and Carl Erskine had named Feller as the hardest thrower ever. Feller thanked the man for the compliment.

It went on and on like this. A fan in a Yankees cap asked Feller what he remembered about Phil Rizzuto, who, at 89, is the oldest living Hall of Famer. Feller shared some memories but added, “He was no Lou Boudreau.” Boudreau was Feller’s manager and shortstop on the Indians.

On the table beside Feller were 16 pens. He used ballpoints to sign the baseballs, Sharpies for the photos. There were stacks of those, including one of the Alabama. Feller seemed to know the circumstances of all the baseball shots.

“Yankee Stadium, 1937, my sophomore year,” Feller said, examining one. He pitched his first game the previous July, before he graduated from high school. “This was a posed picture. Supposed to look dramatic, overemphasizing the high leg kick.”

He signed it, “To Dewey, From Bob Feller, HOF 62.” He added “07” at the bottom of the picture and thanked the fan.

“He’s almost like a grandfather to people,” said Godfrey Holzbach, 61, a fan from Newcomerstown, Ohio. “He’s been around so much that he knows who the people are. He makes you feel like one of the family.”

Feller started doing this in the spring of 1995, during the players’ strike, when replacement players took part in games. The fans were angry, Feller said, and the Indians asked him to sign autographs to placate them.

“It worked so well, I’m still doing it,” he said.

The conversation bounces all over the place, because Feller has seen so much and knows so many. He mentioned that Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins, was once a bat boy for a team he played on. He said he remembers George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, as a kid in Cleveland.

“I knew him when he could walk under this table standing up,” Feller said, adding that Steinbrenner gives an annual donation to the museum.

The fans are delighted. They beam at Feller, take his photo, and he shakes everybody’s hand. He asked a boy how old he was, and the boy said 9. Feller replied that Babe Ruth gave him an autographed ball at that age, and the ball is on display at his museum.

So, he added, is the bat he lent a dying Ruth at Yankee Stadium in 1948. Ruth leaned on it for a famous photo. Feller remembers the date as June 13, and he noted that Ruth died two months and three days later. Feller never faced Ruth, but he did face Lou Gehrig.

“Great fastball hitter, that upper-body strength was real good,” Feller said. “He was not a good curveball hitter. I threw that overhand, epileptic snake, and he did not like it. He was a great fastball hitter, better high-ball hitter than low-ball hitter.”

Feller added that his father had been treated by Gehrig’s doctor, Paul O’Leary of the Mayo Clinic. Feller’s father died of brain cancer while Feller was aboard the Alabama in the North Atlantic.

Feller’s grandson said his war service was more important to Feller than his baseball career. Players know about both. Jeremy Sowers, the young Indians left-hander whose work Feller praised, wants to hear the war stories.

“I would certainly like to sit down with him and talk about World War II,” said Sowers, a political science major in college. “Not even about pitching.”

Feller has strong opinions about the war in Iraq, and he bemoaned what he called a lack of leadership.

“We should have gone in there with 450,000 troops and declared a military dictatorship or martial law, have a curfew, taken over all the oil and given them the going price, same as we did with Japan when the war was over, and then given the country back to them when it was over,” Feller said.

“It would have been over years ago. The last good general we had, in my opinion, was Schwarzkopf,” he said, referring to Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. “We haven’t had a lot of good leaders anywhere in our nation. I’m really concerned.”

Feller said he sees more good people than bad, but the bad ones bother him, in baseball and out. An outspoken critic of steroid use, Feller said he did not worry about steroid users joining him in the Hall of Fame. “They’re not going to get the votes, anyway,” he said.

Feller, for sure, is an original. Told that he was also a hero for his war service, Feller turned serious and insisted he was not.

“Heroes don’t come home; survivors come home,” he said. “But I thank you.”

INSIDE PITCH

The Yankees lost for the first time this spring, 6-5, to the Indians. Chien-Ming Wang allowed five hits, including a leadoff homer to Grady Sizemore, over three innings. Phil Hughes, who worked two scoreless innings, said Manager Joe Torre had told him he would not make the opening-day roster. That was expected, because Hughes, 20, has never pitched in Class AAA. “He said right now, there were really no plans for me, but what you’ve done here hasn’t gone unnoticed,” Hughes said. “It’s good, and it kind of takes a little weight off your shoulders.”