09/04/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1C8MVMHdFB/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Bob Feller heard about Pearl Harbor on a car radio while driving from Iowa to Chicago. He enlisted within two days, the first major leaguer to volunteer for service after the attack. ⚾
He was 23 and already the best pitcher alive. He had won 76 games over the previous three seasons and led the American League in strikeouts four years running. He also had an easy way out. His father was dying of brain cancer, which qualified him for a deferment, and the Navy made him a chief petty officer and put him to work running physical training programs well behind any shooting. He asked out of that and requested a combat assignment instead.
Feller spent most of the war as a gun captain aboard the USS Alabama, running a 40 millimeter anti aircraft crew through the North Atlantic and then across the Pacific. He was at the Marianas. He was at Leyte Gulf. He came home with eight battle stars and close to four full seasons gone out of the middle of his prime. Then he went out in 1946, threw a no-hitter in April, won 26 games and struck out 348 men. 🇺🇸
Run the arithmetic and he probably left something like a hundred wins somewhere in the Pacific. People asked him about it for the next sixty years and the answer never really changed. He said he was proud of the service, that the missing numbers were nobody's tragedy, and that plenty of men on that ship did not come home to a pitching career or to anything else at all.
Most ballplayers who served spent the war on service teams playing exhibitions for the troops, which was real work and kept morale up. Feller went to a gun mount, and he asked for it.
