Free High Heat by Tim Wendel Page B

given up a game-winning home run to Joe DiMaggio when he went with a breaking pitch instead of his high heat. Afterward his father told him to stay with the fastball the next time he was in a tight situation.
    So, on this day, with the hometown crowd behind him, Feller didn’t make the same mistake again. He went with another fastball low at Laabs’s knees. Home plate umpire Cal Hubbard decided it caught enough of the inside corner of the plate and called Laabs out on strikes. Feller had his 18-strikeout game and a career destined to one day land him in the Hall of Fame.
    â€œI was lucky, too, because I threw in the American League,” Feller tells the crowd in the conference room at Jacobs Field.
“I really believe that because the ball in the American League had blue seams. That’s why I only use a pen with blue ink to this day. But I believe the American League model, with those blue stitches, was aerodynamically better for speed, for guys like me. Some of you may scoff at that, but I always believed it.”
    Whether it was the blue seams or his farm upbringing that so closely paralleled Johnson’s, Feller retained his high-octane fastball. He returned from four years in the U.S. Navy in World War II, the longest tenure of any big-league superstar, to strike out 348 in 1946, one away from Rube Waddell’s modern record. Yet the following season, his left leg came down awkwardly during that high leg kick of his at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, ironically on Friday the 13th. He injured a muscle in his back, and he claims his fastball was never the same. That didn’t stop Feller from being a winner at the major-league level, though. From 1948 to 1956, he won 108 games and helped lead the Cleveland Indians to their last World Series championship in 1948.
    â€œThree days before he pitched I would start thinking about Robert Feller, Bob Feller,” Ted Williams once said. “I’d sit in my room thinking about him all the time. God, I loved it . . . Allie Reynolds of the Yankees was tough, and I might think about him for 24 hours before a game, but Robert Feller; I’d think about him for three days.”
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    T he only way the motorcycle test worked was by Feller hitting the cantaloupe-sized target with his first and only pitch. “I did it on the first try and you know something?” he tells the assembled crowd in Cleveland. “I’m as proud of that as anything I ever did in my career.”
    That includes three no-hitters and a dozen one-hitters.
    At one level, the motorcycle test was inconsequential. There is no mention of it alongside his records in the Hall of Fame or The Baseball Encyclopedia . By now we’ve watched footage of the motorcycle test many times through, the room falling silent every time. Even though Bob DiBiasio, the ballclub’s vice president for public relations,
has seen the film many times before, he cannot resist watching it again.
    â€œNow that’s old school,” he says. “You don’t see a ball thrown like that anymore. It’s remarkable.”
    Feller smiles and lets the film play through for a final time. Previously, he has stopped the tape here and rewound it, but now he lets it continue to roll. The motorcycle footage ends, sharp and ragged like the conclusion of a silent movie, to be suddenly replaced by the old comedy team of Abbott and Costello doing their famous routine “Who’s on First?”
    As the room breaks into laughter, Feller leans over and tells me that he often puts the two segments together. For decades, from the Little League annual dinners to his speaking engagements aboard cruise ships, he’s rolled the two out as a twin bill, his own doubleheader.
    â€œIt makes sense, in an odd way,” he says. “Me throwing against a motorcycle and then these two funnymen. I don’t know which one I get a bigger chuckle out of these days.”

The Pivot

    Nolan