Although it goes against the cautious conventional wisdom of the game in limiting starting pitchers' work, Major League Baseball should consider creating the Bob Feller Award for league leaders in strikeouts.
Major League Baseball has introduced only one significant new award in the past 30 years. The Hank Aaron Award, presented to each league's best hitter annually, began in 1999.
It is now time to start another one in honor of Bob Feller, the great Indians pitcher who died Wednesday at age 92. Anything awarded in the name of "Rapid Robert" would have to go to the two league leaders in strikeouts. In some ways, it is the heart of the game, this matchup of pitcher's speed vs. batter's power. The award would reward hard throwing because it's called hardball, and you can't hit what you can't see.
An objection might be that Nolan Ryan holds the career record in strikeouts, but he didn't miss 31/2 years in his prime because he volunteered for active duty in World War II. Feller wasn't on the mound stateside in the early 1940s, racking up soft stats against 4-F's in the war years. He was over there, in the North Atlantic on convoy runs, in the Pacific, in the flight pattern of kamikazes, as a gunner's mate on an anti-aircraft battery on the USS Alabama. He made sacrifices without even being close to a batter's box.
Feller's baseball life was full of amazing statistics, such as leading the American League in strikeouts every full year he pitched from 1939-47 and sending a career-high 348 batters back to the pine without making contact in 1946, in his first full season after the war.
He was part of the game's power mystique, which ran from Walter Johnson, the "Big Train," through Feller to Ryan and Roger Clemens. He wasn't particularly eager to expand the club. When asked how good Washington Nationals fireballer Stephen Strasburg could become after he stifled the Indians last summer, Feller said, "Check back with me when he's won 100 games."
That was part of what he was about, too. The "Heater from Van Meter" was flashy with the strikeouts. But he wasn't a flash in the pan. Durability was part of the equation when it came to piling up the K's.
Many baseball people will shudder at the very thought of a Feller award for strikeouts. This is an era of restrictive pitch counts and of treating arms the way museums treat delicate vases. Feller, and for that matter, Ryan, now the Texas Rangers president, never believed in pitch counts. Strasburg was monitored as closely as a complicated and hazardous experiment in physics and still blew out his arm, undergoing ligament transplant surgery before his rookie season was over.
Feller had a high leg kick that hid the ball and must have made it explode into a hitter's face like the projectile that gave him one of his nicknames, "Bullet Bob." But he believed his power also came from his joints, wrists and fingers. He thought hard work on the family farm built up his joints and hours of playing catch behind the barn with his father, Bill, built up his arm. You could never throw enough, according to Feller.
The mistake was to think Feller was a "thrower," whose answer to trouble was simply to throw harder. Every pitcher needs an off-speed pitch to disrupt hitters' timing, or else they can "sit" on the fastball. Feller had one of the game's most devastating curveballs, which he threw straight overhand, with a motion that he likened to "pulling down a window shade." He could almost snap hitters in half with the pitch, as they tried to check the ferocious swings they had already begun in an effort to catch up to his fastball.
Most mere mortals would, of course, bounce that pitch in the dirt, five feet in front of the batter. With Feller, it became an out pitch.
The Feller award for strikeouts would, admittedly, lead some pitchers to overthrow. The answer to that is to develop a complementary pitch, although one as effective as his window shade curve is probably beyond most pitchers.
The Bob Feller Award also might lead pitchers to throw more pitches, work more innings, and stop handing the game off to the bullpen in the middle innings. Furthermore, it goes against trends in the game and in society today. In Bob Feller's day, a man was expected to finish what he started.