Written by Jeff Rich

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This is one installment in a team effort by The Cleveland Fan, highlighting the top local sports figures by jersey number. Please weigh in with your thoughts on the Boards. And as David Letterman would say, “For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering.”

After you hear something, and hear it often, you might start to believe it because you have no reason not to.  I can skip the drumroll and all of the suspense to let you know the most obvious pick this series is going to offer, and yes it is sad that Bernie Kosar doesn’t take home the #19 honors, but Robert Feller would likely be in the Top 2 or 3 on a list of Cleveland’s best athletes, period.  The thing about Feller is that he has this reputation for a less than desirable bedside manner.

Ordinarily, we’d dismiss something like that; we did that with Albert Belle.  I mean, honestly, go out there and hit a ton or win a ton on the bump, and you can swear at busses filled with nuns on the Innerbelt.  That’s how it works with us, we leave morality and decency at the door, if it’s the price for doing business with folks who might help erase the current significance of 1964 (or 1948) in our parts of the world.  With Feller, it’s more of a history lesson than anything else, but he was an ambassador of Cleveland Indians baseball, even if the naysayers claimed that his abrasive side made it easy to forget his accomplishments and accolades.

I take exception to that, from every angle.  First of all, there’s the first ballot Hall of Fame induction in 1962 and the World Series Championship in ’48, but even without that, I’ve never had a problem with Rapid Robert.  Now, I admit that I’m part of the demographic that grew up watching Brett Butler and Pat Tabler struggle to hold up a team of never-will-be’s, so it took a long time for me to come around to what Feller’s star really means.

By 2009, on the day of Indians inaugural Spring Training game at the Goodyear Ballpark, I was on board with what Feller means to this thing we call Cleveland Indians baseball.  Feller threw out the first pitch, fully suited-up in his present-day Indians home whites, with his number 19 and his surname on the back.  He posted up on one of the concourse, and was signing autographs for the price of a small donation to his foundation.  If you Al’s piece for #14, there’s a mention of how Otto Graham used to joke that one of the rarest things you’ll find is a picture of the great pitcher from Van Meter, Iowa, without his signature on it.

As I approached the 90 year-old legend, I had no idea what to say to him, or how he would react to anything that I did say.  I simply said, “thank you”.  I couldn’t really tell you what I was thanking him for at the time, maybe just for the autograph that purchased, but it could have been his time with the Indians as a player that occurred long before my time, his time with the Indians after his playing days, or his time away from baseball, serving with the United States Navy in World War II.  Maybe, I wanted to thank him for not being the jerk that he was supposed to be.  Honestly, it was probably just something to say.

I didn’t to take on the situation as the tentative soup customer from the well-known episode of Seinfeld, but I wanted something out of the first ever Indians game in their Arizona facility that’s west of Phoenix.  He signed the page that says “Autographs” in my game program with his name and the inscription “HOF ‘62” that he used often, and I plopped my rear end down in a chair that sat a few feet from his table.  I told my wife to take a picture of me with him, and that I didn’t expect him to pose.  I was buying into all of the negative about Feller, and I was wrong.  He saw what I was doing, and looked up and smiled.  I look awkward, which is par for the course, but it is one of my favorite pictures.  You could find a lot of Indians to pose for pictures with, and you could do a lot worse than Bob Feller; I only wish I would have asked him if it was okay.  You know what happens when you assume though.

I know everyone’s experience is different, so I asked around.  If he’s a mean bastard, tell me why.  If you think contrary to the reputation, tell me why.  Eventually, I heard some speak ill of the man, the best one cited Feller’s words as, “I can buy lunch for everyone in that goddamn town.”  Others left it a bit more open-ended, and I didn’t feel the need to follow-up and dig for information that I didn’t really want to hear.  However, the overwhelming majority spoke well of their Feller experience.

There’s a story that Bob DiBiasio tells about how, at the 1983 All-Star gathering, where everyone was under strict order not to ask for signatures from all of the living Hall of Fame memebers, who were playing in a Legends Game.  Of course, Feller was walking around gathering signatures on the ball from some of the games greatest, and no was saying anything about it because he was Bob Feller.  When he made it over to DiBiasio, he handed him the ball, suggesting he might like this ball that bore the signatures of Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, among others.  In a story I was just told the other day, he took the time to speak candidly about how soft aspects of the modern game are for 20 minutes with a young Plain Dealer intern/college student at the Stadium in 1990.

The consensus is that you might catch this guy on a bad day, that he has a short leash for children who don’t say please and thank you, and that 20 minutes with Feller might be a great twenty minutes in your life.  I look at it this way; if Feller didn’t enjoy the fans, he wouldn’t do all of the public appearances and he certainly wouldn’t wear the home whites at virtually every appearance.  He could have made his appointments more few and far between, but that wasn’t who Feller was, at least not in my eyes.

Long before man took time out of his day to judge Feller’s social skills, he did also play baseball for quite a while.  He was drafted to the Indians as a teenager, and debuted in glorious fashion, striking out eight hitters in just three innings.  He followed it up with a fifteen strikeout performance in his very next appearance.  Feller was the definition of dominant, right out of the gate.  At the age of 17, he once struck out 17 hitters, and to this day, Kerry Wood and Feller are the only ones who tallied a single game strikeout total that matched their age.  Wood had to do a little more work at the age of 20.  Those 17 K’s broke Dizzy Dean’s records for strikeouts in a game, then Feller broke his own mark when he struck out 18 on the last day of the 1938 season.

One of the things he is especially known for is his no-hitter on Opening Day in 1940.  He walked five during the 2 hour 24 minute game that saw the Indians defeat the White Sox 1-0 on a chilly day on the southside of Chicago.  In fact, Feller and his battery-mate Rollie Helmsley suggested that he didn’t pitch anything near his best game, reminding the media afterward that a 1-hit game and several two-hit games in previous seasons were better performances in the rich portfolio of Feller’s still-young pitching career.  Helmsley drove in the lone run scored that day, which would have made him the hero on any other day, and Feller didn’t recognize how lucky he was to get that run support.  He did, however, mention how lucky he was to get what we might call web gems today out of Ray Mack, Ken Keltner, and Ben Chapman.

What doesn’t appear to be anything that resembles luck on paper is that Feller, with some great defense behind him shut down the White Sox bats from the third inning, right on through to a dramatic ninth inning.  You could have cut the tension with a knife when Mike Kreevich popped out on a 2-2 count for the first out of the game’s final frame.  Former Tribesman Julius Solters grounded out to Lou Boudreau for the second out, which brought future Hall of Famer Luke Appling to the plate.  Appling fouled off four pitches with two strikes, and then walked on the tenth pitch of the at-bat, setting up a “To Be Continued…”

Unfortunately, Taft Wright, who was known as a Feller killer over the recent years, came to the plate representing the winning run, as well as Chicago’s last opportunity to notch their first base knock of the season.  Wright drilled a 1-0 pitch in the hole on the right side, but the second baseman Mack was able to dive to his left to knock the ball down, recover, and throw to first for the 27th out of the game.  That was the first and only time that anyone recorded an Opening Day no-hitter.

Feller was also on two World Series rosters, being credited with both losses in the Indians 4-2 series win over Johnny Sain and the Boston Braves in 1948, but not making an appearance in the 1954 World Series, where Cleveland was swept by the Giants.  When asked in an interview years back, which great moment from his life would he like to re-live, he replied:

"Playing catch with my dad between the red barn and the house."

 

Honorable Mentions

Without question, it was difficult to think that we’d be honoring the Top Cleveland Sports Figures, and not include Bernie Kosar, the long-time Browns fan and unforgettable quarterback for the team in the mid-to-late 80s.  He manipulated the system in such a way that he’d land with the Browns in the 1985 Supplemental Draft.  He led the Browns to the playoff in four different seasons and was 3-1 against teams without John Elway.  His 1993 release fueled plenty of fan controversy, and could have been considered the beginning of the end for the Belichick era Browns.

Lenny Wilkens is best-known in the Cavs history books as the Head Coach of the Price-Daugherty-Nance teams that donned blue and orange in the final years at the Richfield Coliseum.  After playing most of his Hall of Fame career in St. Louis and Seattle, Wilkens wore #19 for the wine and gold for two seasons, beginning in 1972.  He averaged 18.5 points per game in 149 contests as a Cavalier.