Stellar Feller

A year ago Bob Feller had the baseball experts stumped. The Iowa schoolboy, who had startled the baseball world in 1936 by striking out 76 men in his first 62 innings of major-league play and was thereupon hailed as the greatest pitching prodigy of the decade, had apparently lost his stuff in his second year as a regular pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.

Some said "The Kid" had been overworked by the turnstile-wooing Indians; others said he had become quaky on his pinnacle of fame. Some said he was bat-shy because one of his wild speedballs had almost killed Hank Leiber; others said Feller was just a flash in the pan. Even at the end of the season, when the Cleveland papoose wound up in a blaze of glory--fanning 18 Detroit Tigers in one game for a new major-league record and topping both leagues with a total of 241 strikeouts--the experts still hesitated to call Feller great.

Last week, however, when the sun had set on the seventh annual All-Star game between the American League and the National League, baseball writers were ready to agree that their boy wonder, now 20, was all they had predicted. Chosen as one of the 25 players to represent the American League in the sport's mid-season classic, young Feller, suddenly waved into the game in the middle of the sixth inning to replace Tiger Tommy Bridges, found himself in a tough spot. The score was 3-to-1. The National Leaguers had the bases loaded--and only one man was out. Two runs would tie the score. But the Iowa farm boy, playing in his first All-Star game, ambled out to the mound as nonchalantly as if he were going to feed the chickens, took a quick look at the 63,000 faces staring at him from the packed stands in Yankee Stadium, took a quick look at the bases and then wound up--without even a nervous hitch at his trousers. The ball was a low, fast one and Pirate Arky Vaughan smacked it--right into a double play (Yankee Gordon to Red Sock Cronin to Tiger Greenberg).

But the Cleveland star had only started to shine. For the rest of the game he held the crowd spellbound with his masterful control, his baffling change of pace. Not until the ninth inning did a National Leaguer get another hit. And that one Feller swiftly brought to naught by striking out Cardinal Mize and Cub Hack and winning the ball game for the American League 3-to-1.

Tapping out their stories, the baseball writers applauded Yankee Di Maggie's homerun and Yankee Gordon's seemingly impossible one-handed catch of hard-hitting Cardinal Medwick's line drive, but the headlines were all for Bob Feller. The dimple-chinned kid, who still sleeps in a nightgown, pouts when he is dissatisfied and goes to zoos for amusement, was at last recognized as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. With paternal pride the experts pointed to the youngster's record so far this season: 14 victories and only three defeats (better than any other major-leaguer), 119 strikeouts in 149 innings (36 more than his nearest rival). Last year Feller won 17 games and lost eleven. Last week even the most conservative prognosticator predicted that the 20-year-old, $20,000-a-year Indian, who has only recently stopped calling his teammates "Mister," will win 25 games this year (some say 30).

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