Tag: baseball

Two Fellers have played major league baseball.  The most recent was Jack Feller, who caught for an inning in 1958 for the Detroit Tigers.  He had a putout and did not bat.  He is somewhat less well known than his namesake Bob Feller, who is in the Hall of Fame.

Bob Feller led the league in wins six times, in innings pitched five times, and in strikeouts seven times.  Each of those accomplishments was in consecutive years if you don’t consider seasons missed while Feller took time off from baseball to serve in the Navy during WWII.  Feller missed seasons when he was 23-26 years old, prime years for a baseball player.  Even so, he won 266 games and struck out over 2,500 batters.  Only three pitchers since 1900 have won more games while pitching fewer seasons.[1]

Feller threw three no-hitters, only two pitchers have thrown more.[2]  Bob Feller was a fantastic pitcher, who well-deserves his plaque in Cooperstown.  Based on the book Bob Feller’s Little Blue Book of Baseball Wisdom, he was not a fantastic baseball commentator.

The book contains a fair amount of Feller touting his considerable achievements.  I have no problem with that.  My sixth-grade teacher Mr. Gray used to say:  if it’s the truth, it ain’t braggin’.  When Feller writes “I threw 36 complete games in 1946,[3] the most complete games hurled in a single season since 1916,” I yell “fair.”  But when he writes “I know that this ability came from all the farm work I did as a youth,” I scream “foul.”  Many pitchers from Feller’s era grew up on farms; they didn’t throw 36 complete games.  The book is full of similarly simplistic and unsubstantiated conclusions.

When Feller writes about loyalty, he describes a one-way street.  He decries players for not having loyalty because they chase free-agent contracts.  But he never mentions the teams.  They show no more nor less loyalty than the players without attracting the opprobrium that Feller hurls at the players.

Feller believes that regular throwing is an important way, perhaps the only way (other than farm work), to build arm strength.  I happen to agree with him, but along the way, he gratuitously chastises modern pitchers for not throwing batting practice.  On the same topic, Feller offered the following non-sequitur:  “In Japan, a pitcher starts his warm-up 100 feet from the catcher and comes closer.  In the United States, the opposite is true:  pitchers warm up about 10 to 15 feet in front of the mound and then make their way back to regulation distance as the warm-up intensifies.”  Feller, who is not shy at any other time about his opinions, wrote nothing to indicate which approach is better or even whether they are the same.

Much of Feller’s writing is anecdotal.  Not the end of the world really, but not particularly useful in support of broad conclusions.  When talking about the importance of making contact, he referred to Nellie Fox, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr as “tough outs.”  Perhaps they were — they didn’t strike out a lot.  They were also middle infielders, who (in aggregate) were approximately league average hitters.  That necessarily means that most players were tough outs.

The right field foul pole in Fenway is known as “Pesky’s Pole” because Pesky’s former teammate turned broadcaster Mel Parnell called it that.  It’s not certain that any of the six home runs that Pesky hit at Fenway in his career were aided by the pole.  Nevertheless, Feller wrote that Pesky “was known for his craft of being able to hit drives to right field that, by God, hooked around that little pole for home runs.”  Feller knew about the name of the pole and, apparently, decided to create a myth instead of learning the real story.

Feller described Stan Spence as a “guy who could make you sick to your stomach because he came through in the clutch quite a bit.”  Sure, maybe.  Spence had his best seasons during WWII when Feller and many other good players were in the military.  (Spence served the military as well, but he missed only one season.)  In three of the five seasons that Feller and Spence both played approximately full time, Spence hit .240 or worse.  He may have given Feller indigestion, but the rest of the league seems to have handled him just fine.

Here is a classic Feller conclusion:  “Some call errors ‘lapses in judgment.’  I call it not knowing the fundamentals of the game.”  Huh?  I’m pretty sure neither applies with regularity.  When a third baseman overthrows the first baseman, it has nothing to do with judgment or fundamentals.  His conclusion doesn’t make sense and it isn’t supported by a single example.

Here’s one last gem, this time about Andy Pettitte:  he “has a sensational pickoff move.  He manages to get the runner caught in the open, about 15 paces off first base.  He’s a darn good pitcher and a gamer, competitive and honest to a fault.”  A standard pace is 30 inches.  A lead of 15 paces is 37.5 feet, almost half way between the bases.  I could pick off a guy with a lead like that.  As for “honest to a fault,” there is no example, just a conclusion.  I’m not even sure whether it’s good or bad; “honest” is good, but “to a fault” doesn’t sound good.

This book is a great example of an “expert” believing that because he is an expert, pretty much anything he says about his field of expertise is real and valuable.  It isn’t.  It rarely is.  One of the great things about Bill James, the forefather of modern sports analysis is that he repeatedly admonishes people to believe him because of what he says, not because he is saying it.  He wants people to test his conclusions, not simply to believe them.  Testing Feller’s conclusions leads to a lot of failures.  He was much better at playing the game than at explaining it.  But don’t take my word for it, read the book and see for yourself.

[1]  Christy Mathewson (373), Eddie Plank (326), and Lefty Grove (300).

[2]  Nolan Ryan (7) and Sandy Koufax (4).  Larry Corcoran and Cy Young each threw three no-hitters.

[3]  In the history of MLB, a pitcher has had 43 or more complete games in a season 208 times.  Only three times did it occur after 1900, Jack Chesbro threw 48 in 1903, Vic Willis threw 46 in 1902, and Joe McGinnity threw 43 in 1903.