Farewell to a Mariners legend. 6-keys: media/spln/mlb/reg/free/stories, at He’ll stand up to defend that mark. Feller accepts compliments as comfortably as he accepts paid autograph sessions. In a film biography of Bob Feller it is said in 1941 his fast ball was estimated at … We won't be … Remember back when there wasn't a radar gun and we just had to guess how fast pitchers threw? As Ted Williams once said, "Three days before he pitched I would start thinking about Robert Feller, Bob Feller. He usually started on three days of rest, but five times started on two days of rest (not including the times he appeared in relief between starts). At 90 mph, a bit faster than the 87 mph of the average big-league fastball, the hitter has 0.42 seconds to get his bat on the ball. Consider that great fastball pitchers are tiny increments ahead of one another, and that the great Koufax was never timed faster than 93.2; the notion that Feller threw more than 7 mph faster than Ryan is dazzling. The best fastballs are risers, usually at the chest and climbing out of the strike zone. Gerrit Cole's approach bringing Cy Young results, Mookie Betts vs. Bryce Harper -- and other pressing baseball debates, Real or not? He popped it up for the final out. He probably had the second-best fastball of that era. At 107.9 mph, the hitter has 0.35 seconds. © 2004-2020 CBS Interactive. Feller was known as Rapid Robert and Bullet Bob at the time. We finished in the second division, 18 games below .500 in sixth place. I can't vouch, so we'll just have to trust this excellent YouTube video of Hall of Famer Bob Feller having his legendary heater measured by Army ordnance equipment: As the video says, Feller's fastball was measured at 98.6 mph in the above footage. Feller pitched three no-hitters and 12 one-hitters. “It just exploded,” Yastrzemski said. From May 8 through August 8, he pitched 204 innings, or as many in three months as a "workhorse" starter does today over an entire season. At Griffith Stadium on Aug. 20, the machine was set up and Feller would fire in some fastballs. From the mound, he said, he was timed at 98.6, which some lists include as Feller’s mark, but that was terminal velocity, not the average speed of Ryan’s mark.
Feller has also written that he slipped from the mound in a June 13, 1947 game against Philadelphia and injured his back, saying his fastball was never the same after that. In 1940, the Hall of Fame right-hander threw the only Opening Day no-hitter in MLB history. Take Bob Feller, the legendary fireballer of the Cleveland Indians, and owner of maybe the fastest fastball the game has ever seen. The fastest official speed is 98.6 mph, but there are those who believe he once threw a … When Ryan struck out 383 in 1973, it was during the era of the designated hitter and he didn’t get to throw to a single pitcher. Feller didn’t have the average of strikeouts per game Ryan and Gooden have because the game has changed. It is the curve or some other pitch that makes the really good fastball devastating. Ryan’s best is 100.8 mph. Could Mike Trout outproduce a tanking team's entire lineup? Feller’s was 107.9. But maybe he did. Except nobody told Feller about the plan.

You’re going to make $25,000 from this. Somebody got the idea to test Feller's velocity. Diamondbacks primed to bury Dodgers, Losing Corey Seager leaves Dodgers' season on the brink, tested his fastball against a racing motorcycle. “Ryan has us on longevity,” Feller said. That the gap between Ryan and any pitcher could be 7 mph invites some skepticism. Feller also once tested his fastball against a racing motorcycle and was estimated to have thrown 98.6 mph that time as well (or 104 mph by some modern estimates). He struck out at least 10 batters 12 times, which sounds even more impressive when you realize all other major league starters combined to do that just 20 times (nine of those by Hal Newhouser). Feller's second pitch was the fastest one, clocked at 98.6 mph. "That was my best year," he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2006. But when Feller struck out 348 in 1946, a strikeout was still a strikeout. Rarely can a pitcher make a fastball at the knees rise. He started again on July 31 against the Red Sox. Claim is that his fast balls frequently measured over 100 mph during regular games.

Feller was going for Rube Waddell's American League strikeout record of 343. “I gained 13 feet in 60 feet, 6 inches against a motorcycle going 86,” Feller said.

And one time he actually threw some pitches through Army machinery to have his fastball velocity measured. “Today they don’t give a damn if they strike out 150 times in a season,” Feller said. On August 13, in a night game at home against the Tigers, I recorded my 262nd strikeout, breaking my career high of 261 in 1940. Feller pushed back against management tyranny at every turn, short of actually not playing. We had a sixth-place ballclub, but Bill Veeck bought the ballclub and made some trades, and in 1948, we won the World Series.". “Tell them,” McDowell pleaded, “I used to throw like that.”, Key takeaways from the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden. Walter Johnson’s blaze of glory was in the dim age before mass communications.

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Real or Not? In 1946, he started the season with a three-hit, 10-strikeout shutout, kicking off what he called his greatest season. But that's all guesswork and we probably don't need it. He went 26-15 with a 2.18 ERA and 348 strikeouts, but that's not even the fun stuff.
Ryan has a good curveball; Feller had a great one. In 1947, his K's per 9 dropped from 8.4 to 5.9 (although that still led the league). DiMaggio choked the bat two inches when I had two strikes on him.”. Feller was the Strikeout King of the early days when radio and then television told us about the romance of the fastball. Ich-i-ro!' Feller took one of those tests too, in 1940. He started 42 games and completed 36 of them, throwing 10 shutouts. On July 28, he threw a shutout against the Senators, striking out 10. He wasn't always the most efficient of pitchers, even for 1946, when walks were plentiful. In the closing stages of the career that he later admitted he drank away, McDowell was on the Yankees when Ryan missed no-hitting them by inches. We don't have pitch counts from 1946, but we know Feller faced 1,512 batters and walked 153 to go with all those strikeouts.

Griffith brought the check and Feller went to face the timing machine, which he recalls as a triangle about three feet on a side, mounted over the plate. “It would start off back here, behind your head, and it would break over the corner, low and outside,” recalls Bob Lemon, who was in the Cleveland rotation with Feller. Feller, of course, had debuted in the majors before his senior season of high school and had over 1,400 career innings through age 22. There is none, either, for Steve Dalkowski, whose fastball is a wisp of smoke in minor-league memory.

Why? That sounds plausible, but he was averaging 6.6 K's per nine before that game, well below his 1946 figure.

The Popular Science article is called " Two and a Half Miles a Minute: That's the speed at which a pitched ball travels. " Johnson and Smokey Joe Wood were measured against a speeding motorcycle; when do you start the clock and when do you stop it is the great variable.

Calvin Griffith,'the penurious owner of the Washington Senators, advertised for a week that Feller would undergo a speed test before the game on Sunday. The team wasn't going anywhere anyhow. Back to how fast Feller threw. Yeah, I don't either, but apparently it was like that once upon a time. The L.A. Times’ endorsements in the November 2020 election. Kiner thinks Dwight Gooden, whom the Mets have at 98 mph, has lost some of the movement on his fastball. Feller was sitting at 25. Plus, it's hard to know, 70 years later, how precise the Lumiline Chronograph was. “Feller was the best pitcher I ever saw,” said Ralph Kiner, who flew a fighter, hit against Feller and broadcast Ryan.

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