Me and Bob Feller

I watched an interview of legendary Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller on the MLB Network the other night. Feller is in the Hall of Fame, won nearly 250 games during a career that went from the mid-'30s to the mid-'50s, and would have had even more impressive statistics had he not lost four years to World War II, when he served on a battleship in the Navy.

He's over 90 now, still remarkably sharp, and talked about how he grew to love baseball as a kid in a small Iowa farm town. He read The Sporting News every week, listened to ball games on the radio, and read whatever newspapers he could get his hands on.

And it hit me: Bob Feller and I had a remarkably similar way of following baseball as a child, even though we grew up a half-century apart.

The papers we received at the Finger farm had few or no box scores, so I subscribed to The Sporting News. That magazine was a "luxury" I gave myself with money I earned from the humble wages we earned working on the farm. Along with the magazine, I would buy the baseball guides and player registers from The Sporting News. I absorbed those box scores as if there was going to be a test on them some day, reading accounts of games that might as well have been played on Mars.

Sure, we had a television, but games were on the air once a week - on Saturday afternoons. That was the same as not being on the TV at all. Saturday afternoons were always filled with work somewhere on the farm, no matter what time of year it was. The radio was my primary source for "live" baseball: The Royals on KVGB out of Great Bend, the Twins on KSTP in the Twin Cities on clear summer nights, or the Rangers in Texas on WBAP in Fort Worth.

Mind you, I was a fan of the Indians even then (blame Sudden Sam McDowell, not Bob Feller), so as I tuned in whatever game I could get on a scratchy AM radio, I had one ear listening for the Tribe score. Most of the time, they seemed to lose. But it's funny how the next day you'd find yourself hoping they'd nab a win somehow. Youth is remarkably resilient that way...and if you're lucky, you never lose that.

It would have been great to see Rapid Robert Feller pitch in his heyday. His fastball was clocked at nearly 108 in the 1940s. That's faster than Nolan Ryan, widely considered the hardest thrower of his era. I dare say it's faster than any pitcher in history.

I guess I'll have to ask my friends on the online Indians fan chat group who have seen a few more summers than I have what it was like to see Feller pitch. It'll be fun to hear their stories.