One of baseball’s all-time greats, right hander Bob Feller, has died at 92. The New York Times obituary has some great lines about Feller’s smoking fastball (“That last one sounded a little low,” Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez once said.) and about facing Ted Williams (“Trying to sneak a fastball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster in the morning,” Feller later said.)
Like many athletes of his era, Feller lost several years of his prime to World War II, when he was a chief petty officer aboard the USS Alabama. Our reporter Eric Lach, a big baseball fan, just remarked to me: “Sometimes I imagine how’d we’d feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if LeBron and Derek Jeter were riding Humvees.”
