Bob Feller Ruins Bridgeport’s Opening Day

Post date: Apr 11, 2013 6:06:42 PM

Bob Feller Ruins Bridgeport’s Opening Day

Loyal followers of the Chicago White Sox had much to look forward to on Tuesday, April 16, 1940. Comiskey Park had been an empty shell for nearly five months, with no activity since Sunday, November 26, 1939, when the Chicago Bears drubbed the hapless Chicago Cardinals, 48-7. Now that spring had returned, the somber but majestic sports cathedral at 35^th and Shields would come alive again as the Sox hosted the Cleveland Indians to kick off the 1940 baseball season. Sox fans had high hopes that the Pale Hose would improve on the shiny 85-69 record they had tallied in ’39, and maybe challenge the Tigers and Yankees if they could get off to a good start. A boyish gentleman from Van Meter, Iowa, however, had other plans.

21-year-old Bob Feller and his Cleveland Indians left the Congress Hotel that morning thinking it was much too cold to play baseball. With a stiff north breeze and the temperature struggling to reach 35 degrees, Feller was not thinking as much about coming off a 24-9 season as he was about his poor spring training, and his particularly un-Feller-like pitching performance three days earlier. On Saturday April 13, Rapid Robert had pitched an exhibition game in Cleveland, yielding 15 hits and 10 runs in just five innings. Feller was skeptical about what he might be able to do with the ball in such inclement weather in Chicago, and his experience in the second inning proved him correct.

In the White Sox half of the second, Taffy Wright latched onto one of Feller’s offerings and launched a tricky fly ball to Roy Weatherly in center field. The wind gave Weatherly fits, and he dropped the ball as Wright scampered safely to second. Nobody thought too much about it when the official scorer called it a two-base error. For the next two batters, Sox catcher Mike Tresh and pitcher Eddie Smith, Feller fiddled with his curveball, but the stiff wind at his back would not allow it to break over the plate. Tresh and Smith both walked, and Bob Kennedy came up with the bases loaded. Feller decided to throw him nothing but fastballs. The 21-year-old Kennedy, playing in only the fourth game of his Major League career, was completely overmatched and meekly struck out. For the rest of the game, Feller decided to stay with his devastating heater, and in the Indians’ half of the fourth, when Wright misplayed Indian catcher Rollie Hemsley’s flyball into a triple, the Indians squeaked a run across the plate. The way the Master of Van Meter was dealing, it was all the tribe from Cleveland would need.

With Feller throwing nothing but fastballs, the White Sox continued to make nothing but outs. After two hours and twenty-four minutes of baseball, the small crowd of 14,000 had experienced the first Opening Day no-hitter in baseball’s history, a 1-0 masterpiece. Six years later, on May 5, 1946 pitcher Leon Day of the Newark Eagles threw a no-hitter against the Philadelphia Stars to open the Negro National season, but Feller’s accomplishment stands alone in the annals of Major League history. How did the young fireballer celebrate this historic feat? His parents and younger sister had taken the Rock Island Rocket from Des Moines to Chicago to see him pitch, and the whole family had breakfast together the next morning.

Sox loyalists could take some solace in knowing that their local heroes made history on this date also: no other team in history had ever ended a game with the same batting average it started with!