Blazing Pitcher - Fastball Dazzled

2 obituaries, in the Times and the Journal.

Associated Press-Bob Feller hurled his third no-hitter July 1, 1950 with a 2-1 win over the Detroit Tigers in the opener of a twin bill at Cleveland.

Bob Feller, who died Wednesday at age 92, had one of the great fastballs in the history of baseball and at the time perhaps the sport's biggest star after Babe Ruth.

Whether apocryphal or not, one story has it that In the 1940 no-hitter, the story goes, White Sox center fielder Mike Kreevich protested a called strike, telling the umpire, "It sounded a little high."

And: As Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was said to have remarked after three Feller pitches blew by him, “That last one sounded a little low.”

In 1956, as Mr. Feller was preparing to retire, he was elected president of baseball's Players' Association, where he advocated for higher minimum salaries and against the reserve clause binding a player to his team for life. The clause wasn't lifted until 1975, effectively creating the free-agent market. "They call baseball the great American pastime but what is more un-American than tying a player to a club against his will?" he said after testifying before Congress in 1957.

Times:  When he returned from the war, he was better than ever, developing a sinker to go with his fastball and curve. He threw his second no-hitter, at Yankee Stadium, in April 1946, and struck out 348 batters that season, listed at the time as a major league record, eclipsing Rube Waddell’s 343 for the Athletics in 1904. (Waddell’s total was subsequently revised to 349.) 

Journal: He led the league in wins three more times after the war, but was perhaps a bit less dominant than before it. A favorite game among cognoscenti is to debate how many games he might have won if he had never gone to war. Mr. Feller often said he would easily have cracked 300 total wins. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility. 

Curiously, the Journal obit makes no mention of Jackie Robinson. The Times does:
Back in 1945, Feller, always outspoken, had created a controversy involving Robinson soon after Robinson had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers organization to break baseball’s color barrier. After pitching against Robinson in California on a postseason barnstorming tour, Feller told a reporter in Los Angeles that Robinson was too muscle-bound to handle major league pitching and expressed doubt that Robinson would be considered for the big leagues if he were white. Feller eventually acknowledged that he had been mistaken, but it appears he never expressed regrets directly to Robinson. He did say that he had taken pride in giving black players exposure through his barnstorming tours. And in his memoir, “Now Pitching, Bob Feller,” written with Bill Gilbert, he said it had been “extra meaningful” for him go into the Hall of Fame “with major league baseball’s first black player.” Robinson, in turn, said it was a pleasure to be inducted with Feller.