Bob Feller

Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio faces Cleveland fastballer Bob Feller, who died Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone is ever going to throw a ball faster than he does,” DiMaggio predicted. Feller was a 17-year-old high school student when he pitched his first game for the Indians and struck out 15 batters. Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean's Major League record. "By the end of his brief rookie season," the New York Times reports, "Feller was the best-known young person in America, with the possible exception of Shirley Temple." In 1937, with his picture on the cover of Time, he opened his first...