Ty Webb;604592 wrote:"He's tied up in the shoulders and can't hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man, I doubt if they would even consider him big league material, except perhaps as a bat boy."
Quoted from SI about Jackie Robinson
Feller said Gehrig's speech grew more powerful as the years passed. Regarding Gehrig saying he was the "luckiest man," Feller bluntly said: "He's wrong. I am. I'm still alive."
Just before the 1946 World Series between the Red Sox and Cardinals started early that October, what would prove to be a historically more significant baseball tournament opened in Pittsburgh. It featured competing teams of all-stars. One was from the all-white major leagues. The other was from the Negro Leagues, where white baseball men forced the relegation of black players after instituting an unwritten racist policy over half a century earlier.
The black vs. white all-star tournament was the idea of star major league pitcher Bob Feller.
In the immediate wake of his death Wednesday at 92, Feller was remembered for a lot of things, most notably being the hardest-throwing pitcher anyone had ever seen and for being the first major leaguer to volunteer for the armed services after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He missed four seasons as a gun captain aboard the Alabama, where he earned eight medals.
But what I thought was most remarkable about him was his brainstorm to provide an opportunity to a generation of athletes who hadn't been allowed to prove themselves simply because of the color of their skin.
"It [Feller's all-star tournament] kind of helped convince people that the Negro Leagues' players were as good as the major league players, but that they needed to be given a fair shot," the baseball historian John Sickels -- who six years ago wrote the most-recent biography of Feller, Bob Feller: Ace of The Greatest Generation -- told me Thursday evening.
Indeed, Sickels noted that the first contest on Sept. 30, 1946, between Feller's side and one comprised by legendary black pitcher Satchel Paige ended with the white team on the short end of a 3-1 score.
How many more games were played between the white all-stars and black all-stars, and which side won, was not well documented. It was a barnstorming tour. They played doubleheaders. They may have played more than 20 games or as few as 11. The white all-stars by one account won 17 games and by another count won just seven games against six victories by the black all-stars.
But the point was proven. Black players could keep up with, and even best, their white peers. A season later, the major leagues allowed Jackie Robinson to re-integrate its game.
