Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Bob Feller sits in his basement in front of a collage painting. The collage includes Navy and Indians logos, the USS Alabama, where Feller served, and Feller wearing a Navy Uniform and an Indians uniform.
7/25/2007
GATES MILLS, Ohio — Seventy-one years after leaving Iowa to begin his pro baseball career, Bob Feller relives his boyhood farm days on a wooded driveway in a quaint Cleveland suburb.
Wearing jeans, sneakers and polo shirt, Feller spreads a bucket of ground corn outside the barn for the wild turkeys. Rabbits and squirrels scurry in the grass and a woodpecker eats at a feeder. Feller greets a deer: "How are you this morning, Bambi? It's good to see you, Bambi."
Then, Feller tosses a rubber ball against a basketball backboard, one he made from junk-pile lumber and nailed 9 feet high on a tree. He throws several pitches and catches the ball on its return.
"This is how I keep my arm in shape so that I can be ready for a first-pitch ceremony whenever somebody needs me to do it," Feller says.
At 88, Feller is an American folk hero whose story is soaked in baseball, patriotism, family and farming. He's also the longest-tenured living Baseball Hall of Famer, having been inducted in 1962. This weekend — as he does around this time every year — he'll go to Cooperstown, N.Y., for the Hall's induction ceremonies. This year's honorees, Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr., will be the 113th and 114th to be inducted since Feller joined the Hall 45 years ago.
Feller learned to pitch by throwing a ball against the hog barn on his dad's farm near Van Meter, Iowa. In 1936, at age 17, between his junior and senior years of high school, he captivated the country by striking out 15 St. Louis Browns in his first game for the Cleveland Indians.
He won 25 games in 1941, but two days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy and spent three of his prime pitching years fighting in World War II.
In Cooperstown this weekend, Feller will sign autographs, talk baseball and push the Hall credentials of players whose careers were interrupted by the war. He gets frustrated when players like Hal Trosky and Cecil Travis aren't elected. "There's no money in dead men," Feller says.
Except for long speeches, Feller likes the Cooperstown festivities: "The best speech was by Bill Mazeroski (in 2001), who said nothing. Most speeches are too long. Maybe mine was too. You want to thank everybody that you met in your whole life. There's no sense going on in great lengths. Nobody cares."
Bob Feller, middle, poses with Bob Lemon, left, and Early Wynn during the Indians' 1951 spring training.Feller was an insurance salesman in 1962 and sitting at his desk in a downtown Cleveland office when he got the phone call telling him that he was going in with three others, including Jackie Robinson.
The text of Feller's induction speech runs three paragraphs. He thanked his parents and the scout who signed him. He marveled at what baseball meant to the country. He said he had no regrets about volunteering for the war and missing three prime seasons and a chance at 300 wins. "You can't saw sawdust," he said in the speech. "I didn't lose a thing physically during the war."
In his first full season after returning from the war, Feller had one of the best of his career: 26 wins, a 2.18 ERA and 348 strikeouts in 3711/3 innings for a team that was 18 games under .500.
Even with his military service, he finished his career with impressive numbers: 266 wins and three no-hitters, including the only opening-day no-hitter. He had 12 one-hitters, 2,581 strikeouts, and 279 complete games in 484 starts. He pitched in two World Series and led the AL in wins six times and led in strikeouts seven times.
Feller is as proud of his military career as he is his baseball career. A gunboat captain on the USS Alabama, he has a wall-sized world map, and shows visitors where he and his crew traveled the Pacific Ocean.
But he doesn't view himself as a war hero. "Heroes don't return from war," he says. "It's a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you're a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you're a survivor. There are millions of survivors."
Keeping busy
As an octogenarian, Feller is as amazing as he was when he was a teenage pitcher. He speaks at area nursing homes, attends card shows, Indians functions, makes appearances with fellow Hall of Famers at his museum in Van Meter. All told, he spends 100 nights a year on the road.
"I've signed more autographs, thrown more first pitches, flown more miles and been in more countries than any other player in history," Feller says. "There's no contest."
Except for a sore knee and few cavities, he's healthy. He has gray hair, a firm handshake, a resonant voice, a curious mind and sharp memory. When he tells stories from way back, he cites pertinent addresses. And he's known for his candor; he says he learned from former baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis a long time ago that the best thing to do is state an opinion and not worry about reaction.
For example, on a trip to the White House with other Hall of Famers last year, he told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice what had to be done in the Iraq war: He thought 450,000 troops should go take over the oil and establish a curfew in Iraq.
"I told her, 'I've never seen a war won by talking,' " Feller says.
On baseball topics, Feller likes interleague play but questions the financial motive: "It's green, green, green." He said he never played for money, "because I've never seen a Brink's truck following a hearse."
He thinks the New York Yankees' Roger Clemens is a great pitcher, "but anyone who pitches on the day he buries his mom is no friend of mine." He doesn't say whether he thinks Barry Bonds used steroids, but because he believes in "innocent until proven guilty," he has no problem with Bonds breaking Henry Aaron's career record of 755 home runs.
Good life
Feller drives a blue-gray Jaguar — he's made a good living being a Hall of Famer — but he's a farmer at heart. He loves tractors and other farm machines. Sometimes, he drives his tractors just to hear them run. He keeps a weather radio with him, and watches the wildlife to help him get a handle on what's in store for the weather.
"I'm a farmer, and farmers always know the weather," he says. "If you follow the animals, they know the weather 24 hours in advance of a storm. Flies start to fight. Rabbits go out and hunt."
He loves farm life and thinks that every kid should grow up on a farm. Farm work, he says, teaches kids responsibility and "allows families a chance to work and be together."
Bob and Anne — his second wife, whom he met at church — live in a house designed by the oldest of his three sons, Steve, 62, an architect in Winter Haven, Fla. It sits on five wooded acres about a half-hour from Jacobs Field in Cleveland. The yard has a deck, a gazebo and a rain gauge. There's a garden with sweet corn, petunias and hollyhocks. The hollyhocks are a homage to his father's garden back in Iowa. "I love hollyhocks," he says.
He likes to wear polo shirts with a Hall of Fame logo. He hops into a dusty pickup and drives on a gravel road back to his barn, where he stores four tractors and a motorcycle. The barn is loaded with shelves of tools and equipment: There's a gooseneck oilcan, a rolling toolbox, propane tanks, a drill press, a socket set and replica World War II military phone.
On one end stands a 1930s Caterpillar Ten, "the smallest Caterpillar ever made," Feller says. There's a gray Massey-Ferguson tractor that Feller says "has all the attachments." He sits on, and pats, the highway-yellow 1940 Cletrac tractor that he likes because it was "built in Cleveland."
Feller is known as being crusty, but he's sentimental, too. He has a 1930 bulldozer-tractor that he says was used to build airports during World War II, the same model that he says his father used in building a baseball field on their farm in Iowa.
"That's why I bought it," he says. "It's like a toy. I like to hear the noise, the chugging. I use it to push logs, haul away trees that fall. Trees are like people — they are not immortal."
In the basement of his house, he has a pool table surrounded by baseball memorabilia. The box score from his 1940 opening-day no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park is framed. With two outs in the eighth inning, he walked Luke Appling "because I had a feeling he was going to get a hit," he says. Then, Feller retired Taft Wright.
There are baseball pictures on the stairwell walls. In his office, the desk faces two big windows. On the outside, he has a ladder that his cat, Felix, once a stray, climbs to sit on the ledge.
He's got piles of books, with topics ranging from Caterpillar machines, to combat, to baseball's greatest pitchers. (He figures his hero, Hall of Famer Walter Johnson, was the best pitcher of all-time: "He didn't have much of a curveball. He threw the ball by batters. He was a one-pitch pitcher, but I think he was the greatest.")
There's an atlas of the oceans. There's also an autographed copy of the Dowd Report from John Dowd, who investigated Pete Rose for gambling. (Feller says Rose should not be the Hall of Fame, adding Rose knew baseball's rules against gambling on the game and broke them.)
Still in the game
Feller's personal knowledge of baseball spans a century, from Cy Young to Grady Sizemore. He was good friends with Ronald Reagan. He flew to Pennsylvania to attend Young's funeral. As a 19-year-old, he was selected for the 1938 All-Star Game with Bill Dickey, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg as teammates. He pitched to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, barnstormed with Robinson and exchanged war stories with Warren Spahn.
He lunched with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Ruth, in his classic farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1948, is leaning on Feller's bat, one Ruth took just before he went to home plate.
Feller also still attends games, primarily at Jacobs Field. He gets there in time to eat in the media room, and then sits in the top row of the press box, reading newspapers as he watches the game.
Sometimes, he signs postcard-size pictures of his statue outside Jacobs Field — always in blue ink. "Blue is the American League color; black is the National League," Feller says.
Feller says he appreciates the statue, which shows him pitching, although he did ask for a couple of refinements while it was being fashioned. He wanted his grip on the ball changed from that for a two-seam fastball to that for a four-seamer — "I always threw a four-seamer," he says — and he asked that the snuff can be removed from his pocket. "I never used that stuff," he says.
As he watches the game, he says he's impressed with the Indians' chances to win a World Series. He says Sizemore, the Indians' center fielder, has a chance to be one of the best in the game, and "he's a very pleasant kid." Feller also likes first baseman Ryan Garko, who befriended Feller's grandson, Daniel, 16, during spring training.
The Indians haven't won the World Series since 1948. Feller remains a fan and he wants them to win one for the city. He's concerned about the city: "It's only half of what it once was," he says. "We've lost lots of infrastructure and industry."
Feller stays until the final out. Then, he and his friend and driver, Lou Gmeindl, leave the ballpark, time to go home. It's a routine Feller loves.
Posted ('7/25/2007 8:25 PM'));
1d 17h ago
1d 17h ago
Updated ('7/27/2007 9:57 AM'));
3h 58m ago
FELLER KEEPS IN TOP SHAPE
By Mel Antonen
GATES MILLS, Ohio - Bob Feller doesn't know for sure why he's lived such a long and healthy life, but he takes precautions.
He swims, chops wood, drives tractors, hauls logs and runs a lawn trimmer. He's strong enough to pitch against 30-something players at the Cleveland Indians fantasy camp each spring.
"Bob Feller isn't going to die," says Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. "He's not going to let it happen."
How does Feller stay fit? He believes in getting a good night's sleep and says 99% of the time he gets it. When he doesn't, he sleeps until noon or takes a long nap. When he chops wood, he does 10 to 20 chops from the left and then the right.
He eats plenty of fruit, oatmeal, cereal, fish, liver and "not too much steak." He drinks a lot of milk and decaffeinated coffee. And he stays active.
"You have to have something to do," Feller says. "You have to learn something every day. I don't watch soap operas on TV."
He watches the Discovery, History and Weather channels. He watches news on Fox News Channel and CNN, and he's constantly updating himself on the Indians. He reads three newspapers a day, plus Time, Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News.
And, he says, life is a lot of luck. He's not sure of the spiritual aspect behind his long life: "Sometimes people live too long or die too soon. And religion is something people have never figured out."
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