(The beginning of this memoir goes back to 1949 for those scrolling back)

                                     FACING FELLER WITHOUT A HELMET 

BIG MOE

     When Feller warmed up on the sidelines near the dugout before a game you actually saw his fastball rise about a foot, and the sound it made when it popped into the catcher’s mitt was a sound unlike you heard from any other pitcher, even the hardest throwers in the league, guys like Virgil Trucks, who I played with, and Newhauser and Phil Marchildon. Feller threw harder than the legends old timers talk about, and probably harder than Drysdale and Koufax and Herb Score or anybody around today. The closest to Feller is Nolan Ryan and Satchel Paige, but Paige’s  ball didn’t have the late movement Feller’s had, and nobody cracked the catcher’s mitt like Feller and had it echo all through the stadium…it was like the difference between Marciano or Joe Lewis punching the heavy bag compared to some light heavyweight, like Billy Conn.

     Certain guys got that “green-around-the-gills” look—like they were going into combat the first time—and came up with mysterious ailments on days Feller was scheduled to pitch, and certain guys up at the plate, you saw their knees shaking and knocking from the dugout. They were paralyzed with fear, couldn’t get their bats off their shoulders. Other guys went up there and swung like they were going through the motions and in a hurry to get the hell out of there, because Feller was wild as hell and put the fear of God in you. He had this high leg kick that hid the ball until the last possible second, and his curve ball broke about nine inches to a foot very sharply when it was right on top of you at nearly the same speed as his fastball, making it hard to distinguish what was coming at you, so a lot of guys were bailing out.

     I always felt the advent of batting helmets ended the separation between the men and the boys. Without batting helmets you took your life in your hands when you faced Feller, and Feller knew that, fed off it, fed off the fear. He was cocky and arrogant and ornery on that mound, had a big mouth, which he constantly shot off, even in the Navy, where it was common knowledge nobody popped off unless you wanted the brass to give you the shaft.

     I faced him in service games on the east coast before we all shipped out. We had great players on our Navy team—Hugh Casey, Peewee Reese, Phil Rizzuto. One game we turned six doubleplays. The best ball in the country was probably being played along the east coast among service teams. Once, late in the game, I was up, Feller was pitching, with men on base, and an admiral, who pretty much put his team together and liked to have his say, like they all did, and bet on the games with all the other brass from all branches of the service like they all did, came out to the mound. This admiral tried to get Feller to walk me and load the bases, so he could face a weaker hitter he owned, a guy who couldn’t touch Feller with a paddle.

     I’d had fair success against Feller. I was a dead pull hitter and liked the challenge of hitting off him and you had to be that way or there was no use playing the game. But Feller was as stubborn a sonofabitch as there was in the game, and no goddam officer was going to tell him what to do on a ball field. He chased the guy back to the dugout in no uncertain terms and was so distracted he piped me a fastball down the middle on the first pitch and I sent it on a line right past his ear and drove in the winning run. This felt good, because he’d dusted me a week earlier.

     He stormed off the mound, and that night on Armed Forces Radio he popped off about how no Navy big shot was going to tell him how to pitch and who to pitch to and so on and so forth, and a few days later they shipped him out on a battleship, headed for the South Pacific like the rest of us, and I hear he gave a pretty good account of himself out there, which doesn’t surprise me. He was never short on guts or heart and he always stuck up for the black players during barnstorming days when other guys wouldn’t. He’s what you call a good American, a patriot, and you have to say overall he’s a good man, despite being a goddam mule-headed Republican and as tough to take off the field s he was on it. He was self-righteous as they come, and he could never keep his foot out of his mouth.

     (Next Sunday installment: Baseball Limbo)