PART I
BEGINNINGS
1
The Duel
On October 5, 1936, thousands of people packed the unpaved roads of Van Meter, Iowa. Farmers interrupted their harvesting, schools across Dallas County closed, even Iowa governor Clyde L. Herring made the trip from Des Moines. They descended in droves on a nondescript farm town smack in the middle of the state to pay tribute to a native son whose legend had sprouted suddenly that summer.
Bob Feller’s ascent from the cow pastures of Iowa to national prominence had been as breathtaking as it was baffling. No player had ever stormed into Major League Baseball with such startling force. How could someone who’d never apprenticed in the minors throw a fastball that some major leaguers deemed the swiftest they’d ever encountered? The sound of the pitch smacking into a catcher’s mitt was enough to make baseball veterans—some of whom were more than twice Feller’s age—gape at the round-cheeked wunderkind on the mound.
He was a figure straight out of a dime-store novel, an adolescent dream come to life. In his very first start with the Cleveland Indians, he’d tied the American League record of fifteen strikeouts in a single game. Columnist Gordon Cobbledick of The Plain Dealer called it probably “the greatest major league pitching debut in all history.” Four starts later, he’d tied the major-league record of seventeen strikeouts. Feller was seventeen years old.
Now he was back in his hometown, roughly five months after he’d departed for Cleveland. On a hastily erected stage, a string of dignitaries took turns singing Feller’s praises. The mayor awarded him a key to the city, others gifted him a trunk for his travels. Later, Feller suited up for an exhibition game on the rain-drenched field of the high school he’d yet to graduate from. He fanned eleven of thirteen batters to dig in against him.
His next turn on the mound, however, wouldn’t be such a breeze. Crossing the heartland that October was a barnstorming squad fronted by Rogers Hornsby, a seven-time National League batting champion who now was the aging player-manager for the St. Louis Browns. In the decades before television had penetrated American households, barnstorming took players to places farther afield than the Midwestern and Northeastern cities where all sixteen major-league clubs were clustered, to fans who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to see them. Feller himself, who’d grown up hundreds of miles from the nearest major-league city, had watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play in Des Moines on a barnstorming tour years earlier. These tours were mostly slapdash ventures, stitched together by promoters and headed by superstars like Hornsby and St. Louis Cardinals pitching ace Dizzy Dean. For players, they offered one final payday before the cold weather settled in—a means of augmenting salaries kept in check by organized baseball’s reserve clause, which tied players to the clubs that had originally signed them. The style of baseball was often loose and flashy, with room for vaudevillian interludes. Sometimes, to ramp up attendance and heighten the drama, all-white teams competed against rosters of players from the Negro Leagues—a rare spectacle during an era when baseball and segregation went hand in hand.
Hornsby’s barnstorming squad was scheduled to pass through Des Moines on October 7. Ray Doan, the tour’s coordinator, knew just who to call to guarantee a packed house. The announcement that Bob Feller would start that evening triggered a scrum for tickets. His father, Bill, snatched up four hundred of them—enough for the entire town of Van Meter. More than an exhibition game, this would be a matchup with stakes, one that would pit the local white prodigy against a Black pitcher already shrouded in myth.
Squaring off against Feller in Des Moines would be Leroy “Satchel” Paige.
* * *
From spring training to the World Series, an entrenched color line separated Feller and Paige. That had been the case since the end of the nineteenth century, when white players like Adrian “Cap” Anson, an Iowa native who starred on the Chicago White Stockings, objected to playing against interracial competition, and Black players like Moses Fleetwood Walker and John “Bud” Fowler were released or drummed out of organized baseball. Eventually, owners in the major and minor leagues forged a so-called gentlemen’s agreement not to sign players of Black African descent. Though never formalized, the agreement kept rosters all-white for decades.
This Jim Crow system spurred the development of professional Black baseball circuits across the country. Even the most successful of these Negro Leagues were long on talent but short on funds, and thriving in them required both endurance and improvisation by players and clubs alike. In between league games, cash-strapped teams often competed anywhere they could make a buck. Sometimes, players would sweat through a doubleheader, pile into a beaten-down bus, drive through the night, and awaken sore and stiff in a distant town for nine more frames on fields that were frequently rock-strewn and hard as brick. “It was just a continuous scuffle,” remembered Johnny Davis, an outfielder for the Newark Eagles. “Play here this afternoon, another game tonight, ride six hundred miles, play somewhere else. Sometimes you put on the uniform, it was still wet.” Black boardinghouses offered temporary but unreliable relief. In some, bedbugs, scratchy sheets, and firm mattresses robbed players of essential rest. Often, no restaurants would serve them, so players passed around sleeves of crackers and tins of sardines, or searched for diners that would sneak them sandwiches through the back door.
The grinding pace of life in the Negro Leagues could be a strain on players’ muscles and minds, but they competed on the diamond with hunger and creativity, developing a more kinetic style of baseball than their major-league contemporaries. During the Depression, when the unemployment rate for Black workers periodically hovered at 50 percent, playing in the Negro Leagues, veteran player Ted Page would assert, was “the way I had to keep from washing the windows in a downtown store or sweeping the floor.” Not only did baseball lift some players, at least temporarily, out of backbreaking or menial labor, but it turned them into idols in their communities and beyond. Negro League teams formed the beating hearts of metropolitan Black districts across the country; their games were places where fans, often decked out in their finest garments, reveled in rooting collectively for players whose talents and feats sparked ardent communal pride. Through regular write-ups in Black newspapers, figures like Josh Gibson, James “Cool Papa” Bell, and Buck Leonard became familiar names among Black Americans in the 1930s. And there was one star who outshone them all.
On days Satchel Paige pitched, Negro League fans rushed to their seats early. They didn’t want to miss perhaps the most curiously electrifying spectacle in sports: that first glimpse of Paige, tall and lean and stoic, walking measuredly toward the mound. Toeing the rubber, he stood as straight as a weather vane on a windless afternoon. His arms were long and sinewy, his calves so slender Paige padded them with multiple pairs of socks. When the leadoff batter dug in, Paige would windmill his right arm, hike his left leg skyward, and let go a fastball that some opponents swore would hum as it zipped past. His pitching was athleticism blended with theater—the complementary poles of every Paige performance, though Paige made it clear he favored one over the other. “I ain’t no clown. I ain’t no end man in no vaudeville show,” he avowed time and again. “I’m a baseball pitcher, and winning baseball games is serious business.”
By the time he was to face Feller in October 1936, Paige had become the go-to player for white barnstormers seeking a formidable foe on the mound and a reliable crowd magnet whose name alone attracted thousands of Black fans to the ballpark. The appeal of a Feller-Paige matchup, however, extended beyond simple gate receipts. In addition to speed, charisma, and self-confidence, each had a narrative and a persona wholly attuned to the times. As deeply as Bob Feller’s story was beginning to resonate with white Americans during the Depression, so too had Satchel Paige’s fed the imagination of millions of Black Americans.
* * *
The roots of Feller’s legend took hold a decade earlier alongside his family’s barn, an archetypal dark-red wooden structure a few miles northeast of Van Meter. Baseball and farm work were the knotted strands of Feller’s childhood. From an early age, he helped his father, Bill, milk the cows, muck the barn, and lug water from the nearby Raccoon River. At lunchtime and “almost every night after chores were done, they would be out playing catch in the barnyard,” remembered Bob’s younger sister, Marguerite Goodson.
Bill Feller had taken over the family farm as an adolescent. As a result, Goodson said of her father, “He didn’t get to do the fun things like playing baseball and all that. So he was going to be sure that his son didn’t have to miss out on that, too.” Just as he stocked the farm with cutting-edge machinery, he sought out top-line gear for Bob: spiked shoes, major-league-caliber gloves, a pinstriped uniform. To aid his son’s development, he hung a wire loop on a tree for Bob to use as a throwing target. He hammered together a batting cage and squatted behind a sawed-off board to catch Bob’s tosses. In winter, when snow piled high in the pasture, Bill strung lights through the rafters of the barn so that his son could continue throwing indoors.
As his son came of age, Bill could sense a rare ability in his form, rhythm, and follow-through—even in the way Bob stood on the mound and glared into the mitt. So in the spring of 1932, when Bob was thirteen, Bill leveled a patch of rutted terrain at the western edge of the farm. With his son’s help, he sawed down some trees and with the lumber erected a backstop, a scoreboard, outhouses, a concession stand, and a chicken-wire fence. From home plate, one could see a grove of oak trees in the distance, so they dubbed the field “Oak View Park.” Building the baseball diamond was as much a grand gesture of confidence in Bob’s potential as a gift to fast-track his son’s development.
Recruiting some local players, Bill outfitted them in baggy gray uniforms with “Oak View” emblazoned across their chests. At that time, nearly every town and many industries across Iowa fielded baseball teams. Entire communities would turn out for weekend games, no matter that they were staged on diamonds carved into farmland. “People would drive their cars up and park and watch from their cars,” Goodson recalled. To continue to make money on the land he sacrificed, Bill charged a quarter for admission, thirty-five cents for a doubleheader.
At first, Bob played mostly at shortstop and in the outfield for the Oak Views and local American Legion teams. It wasn’t until 1934 that Bob first took the mound. Even though he was only fifteen years old, his blazing speed proved too much for grown men. He struck out fifteen batters in his first start, twenty in his second, and fifteen more in his third. Just like that, Bob was the talk of the central Iowa baseball circuit.
In October, Bill and Bob drove to St. Louis to attend the middle games of the 1934 World Series, which pitted the Detroit Tigers against a down-and-dirty Cardinals squad known as the Gashouse Gang. Bill had worried that seeing major-league pitching at its finest would intimidate his son, but as they watched from the stands, a different thought flashed through Bob’s mind: “I can do that.”
That winter, Bob shot up several inches. Years of hauling water and tossing hay bales had thickened his shoulders and thighs. When he stood on the mound in 1935, he no longer looked like a kid playing dress-up. His speed was so overwhelming—and his control so unreliable—that, according to his high school catcher, “it got so the high school teams wouldn’t schedule [Van Meter]. Said to wait till Bob graduated.” In addition to the Oak Views, Feller suited up for a club organized by the farmers’ union in Des Moines. While leading the team to the Iowa state championship, he allegedly struck out 361 batters over 157 innings that summer. Other semiprofessional teams clamored for his services, which he doled out for gas money and a hefty fee on the side.
At some point, word of Bob’s feats reached Cleveland Indians executive Cy Slapnicka, who also hailed from Iowa. Arriving unannounced at Oak View Park one day in July, Slapnicka perched on the bumper of a car parked behind the backstop. After watching a few of Bob’s pitches, he sensed that this was the sort of prospect scouts spent their lives trying to unearth. “His fastball,” Slapnicka remembered, “was fast and fuzzy; it didn’t go in a straight line; it wiggled and shot around.” Afterward, Slapnicka and Bill Feller hashed out a modest contract that would ship Bob to a Class-D club in Fargo-Moorhead the next season, setting him on a traditional path to the Indians through the minor leagues.
Months later, Slapnicka attended a luncheon in Cleveland with his fellow Indians executives. When asked about the signing, Slapnicka, who was not usually prone to embellishment, announced: “Gentlemen, I’ve found the greatest young pitcher I ever saw … I suppose this sounds like the same old stuff to you, but I want you to believe me. This boy that I found out in Iowa will be the greatest pitcher the world has ever known.”
In the spring of 1936, however, Bob strained his pitching arm. Because of the injury, Slapnicka instructed Bob to skip Fargo-Moorhead and report to Cleveland for rehabilitation after his junior year of high school concluded. On the day of his departure, Bob and his father strolled past the barn and over to dormant Oak View Park, where they paced around the bases in silence. The field had been built partly on a dream they’d shared, and now that it was on the verge of coming true, there seemed to be little more to say.
In Cleveland, Bob rehabbed quickly. Soon he was starting for a local amateur club, then was given a three-inning assignment with the Indians during an exhibition game against the St. Louis Cardinals over the All-Star break. These were still the Gashouse Gang Cardinals, the same core group of players that Bob had watched in the World Series two years earlier. He’d thought then that he could’ve held his own on the mound. Now, improbably, he was about to find out.
More than 10,000 spectators filed into Cleveland’s League Park on July 6, 1936. Before the game, Frankie Frisch, the Cardinals player-manager whose dashing feats in college athletics had earned him the nickname the “Fordham Flash,” was shooting the breeze with sportswriter Harry Grayson when the sound of a ball smacking into a catcher’s mitt jolted them both upright. “Who in the hell is that fireballer?” Frisch reportedly asked, peering out of the dugout at the fresh-faced pitcher warming up on the sidelines.
Grayson, repeating an untrue rumor, explained that he was some prospect Slapnicka had signed who hawked peanuts in the stands during his downtime.
“Peanuts,” Frisch bellowed. “That kid’s the fastest pitcher I ever saw.” Frisch motioned to rookie infielder Stu Martin. “Stu, how’d you like to play second base tonight?” he asked with mock innocence. Turning back to Grayson, Frisch quipped, “They’re not gonna get the old Flash out there against that kid.”
Feller entered the game in the fourth inning, with the score deadlocked at 1-all. His first throw thumped into the catcher’s mitt with such a loud crack that the batter, Bruce Ogrodowski, backed off the plate in disbelief. Seemingly wanting nothing to do with the unknown pitcher, the slow-footed Ogrodowski bunted weakly to third for the out. Cardinals shortstop Leo Durocher approached the plate next. Feller greeted him with a bewildering mix of fastballs down the middle and well outside the zone. Durocher swung through a third strike far off the plate, then nearly burst out laughing. It was absurd, this supposed peanut vendor showing up the first-place club in the National League.
Feller struck out two in the fourth, then three more in the fifth. Coming to bat once again in the sixth, Durocher told the umpire, “I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery,” as he went down on strikes. In the end, Feller struck out eight batters over three innings.
In the clubhouse afterward, Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean, rarely at a loss for words, seemed tongue-tied at what he’d just witnessed. “The kid’s a natural,” he declared, “he can’t miss.” Emmet Ormsby, the home plate umpire, echoed Dean’s praise: “The best pitcher I have ever seen come into the American League in all my experience,” he said, adding: “I don’t care if [Feller] is only 17. He showed me more speed than I have ever seen uncorked by an American League slabster.”
Any plans that the Indians might have had for delaying Feller’s entrance into the majors no longer seemed reasonable. So, on July 14, Feller boarded an overnight train to Philadelphia, where the Indians would play the Athletics. From his Pullman berth that evening, Feller gazed out at the Allegheny Plateau. A faint sliver of moon hung in the sky, and the dim lights of small farming communities blinked in the distance. As he lowered his head to the pillow, the pulsing clackety-clack of the train wheels blurred into an echoing refrain: “You’re on your way, you’re on your way, you’re on your way.”
* * *
A month of mop-up duty in the Indians’ bullpen ensued. It wasn’t until August 23, after the club had fallen out of pennant contention, that Feller got the call for his first start against the St. Louis Browns. On that scorching Sunday afternoon in Cleveland, with the players’ flannel uniforms clinging to their skin like damp washrags, Feller set a fittingly scorching pace, striking out ten batters through five innings. His fastball looked “like a white streak,” his curveball “broke over the plate like a rabbit turning a sudden corner.” In the dugout he wolfed down salt tablets while the trainer fanned him with a bath towel—whatever it took to find relief from the late-summer sun. While he did surrender a run, Feller managed to close out the contest with fifteen strikeouts, equaling the American League record in his first ever complete game.
Word of the outing rocketed across the country. It was unprecedented, astonishing, impossible. Reporters wasted no time in hailing Feller as the sport’s next icon. “Feller’s magical feat of fanning 15 St. Louis Browns Sunday caused more ebullition among baseball followers than any happening since [Babe] Ruth’s withdrawal from the big time [in 1935],” crowed Franklin Lewis of the Cleveland Press.
Copyright © 2021 by Luke Epplin
