RIP Bob Feller, Dead At 92

I don’t mind my FanShot being removed, as it was more a highlight to Eric than anything else. As BDMF notes above, he was one of the last of a lost breed: the WW2 era stars. It was a different kind of ball and a different kind of person,

Just makes me appreciate Kiner all the more.

As I was thinking about the passing of Bob Feller tonight, and going through some of the materials linked above, I had a train of thought that questioned whether the current focus on high school and youth sports was appropriate. I guess to an extent I think things in Feller’s day were more pure: finding the pitcher between the cornfields seems more intuitively pleasing to me than graphing progress of advanced 15 year olds any day. And yet Feller was found, drawing into criticism the idea that the diamonds in the rough are only discovered when the rough is scoured down to the bedrock. Leaving the issue of segregation alone for a moment—if you think baseball was better before the end of segregation please don’t respond, and probably check yourself into therapy—do you think that baseball was a better sport back then, because it showcased pure talent, rather than the machinations of lawyers and other ne’er do-wells that we see today?

Maybe I just miss my grandfather, who was a tough old bird and a WW2 vet, and I sense that when he went to Dodgers games at Ebbets he never dealt with the notion—subconscious or not—that these guys were overpaid. They were, in that era, simply the best at what they do.

A great American and a great baseball player.