COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. (AP) -When Bob Feller takes the mound on Sunday, he’d be happy if his fastball reaches his age. But he’s 90, so that’s not likely.
“I’ll be throwing just as hard as ever, but the ball probably won’t be going quite as fast,” Feller said with a laugh. “I’m not going to go out there and throw 99 miles per hour, but hopefully I can throw strikes. I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll have my Cleveland Indians uniform on.”
Baseball’s second-oldest living Hall of Famer is scheduled to start in the inaugural Baseball Hall of Fame Classic, which replaces the Hall of Fame Game. Feller will be joined by four other Hall of Famers – Ferguson Jenkins, Paul Molitor, Phil Niekro and Brooks Robinson – along with several former major leaguers, including George Foster, Jim Kaat, Bill Lee and Lee Smith.
The seven-inning exhibition will be preceded by a parade and a hitting contest, and local officials are hopeful the Classic will become a success like the Hall of Fame Game was for nearly seven decades.
League Baseball Players Alumni Association, a key organizer of the event along with the Hall of Fame. “This will be a great success and hit here in Cooperstown.”
Major League Baseball announced in January 2008 that the Hall of Fame Game was ending after 68 years because of scheduling problems. Then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and other members of Congress objected, but baseball commissioner Bud Selig defended the move, explaining that major league teams play 162 games in 183 days and that the addition of interleague play made it difficult to schedule two teams for a game in Cooperstown.
Feller criticized the decision at the time, partly because of the perception that today’s players don’t revere the game’s past as much as he does.
“The world didn’t start the day these athletes were born,” Feller said in a recent interview. “I think all major league ballplayers should go visit Cooperstown and walk through the Hall of Fame. They’d be more appreciative of what this game means to the baseball world, not only the United States but the entire baseball world.
“But I think it (the inaugural Classic) is a great promotion for the Hall of Fame and I’ll be signing autographs and taking pictures with the fans,” added Feller, who hopes to last a couple of innings. “I think it’s going to be a very good promotion for the Hall of Fame and for all of baseball.”
mily events that includes a family catch and a chance for kids to run the bases at Doubleday Field.
“We are extremely excited to start a new Cooperstown tradition,” Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson said. “A legends-style baseball game is a natural fit.”
Feller, who stays loose by throwing a rubber ball in his back yard in Gates Mills, Ohio, is anticipating better weather than he endured on April 16, 1940, in Chicago against the White Sox, when he pitched the first of his three career no-hitters.
“It was a bad day. There were only a little over 14,000 people in the ballpark,” Feller recalled of the only no-hitter thrown on Opening Day. “It was cold, it was windy, it was cloudy and in the lower 40s, and before the game was over the high 30s. The only people who were warm were the two pitchers and maybe the catcher because we were moving around. Everyone else was freezing to death. If you hit a ball on your fist, it gave you a handful of bees.
“I was lucky,” Feller said. “There’s a lot of luck involved in pitching a no-hitter. I only struck out eight, which wasn’t that many for me at that time.”
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