Cream Pitchers

Bob Feller's fast ball is fast. It was timed recently and registered a speed of ico m.p.h. Last year, his fifth in major-league baseball. Bob Feller won 27 games for the Cleveland Indians--a record unmatched by any other big-leaguer. He also led the American League in strike-outs (263) and earned-run averages (2.62). Some experts consider 22-year-old Bob Feller the pitchin'est pitcher that ever lived.

To Indian Owner Alva Bradley, Bob Feller is an excellent investment. On days when Feller is scheduled to pitch, ballpark attendance swells 50% to 200%. Last week, when Robert William Andrew Feller signed his contract for the coming season, Owner Bradley grinned from ear to ear. "You can safely say," he told newshawks, "that Feller's salary is the highest that has ever been paid a pitcher." Sportswriters, well aware that Lefty Grove's 1931 salary of $27,500 was baseball's all-time pitching high, promptly set Feller's salary at $30,000.

That guesstimate started something. Owner Walter O. Briggs of the Detroit Tigers, considerably irked, announced that his pitcher Buck Newsom had been paid $30,000 last year, would get even more this year. Owner Bradley stuck to his big guns. Said he: "Feller is still the highest paid pitcher in baseball."

Sportswriters chuckled at this brush-up between Millionaires Briggs & Bradley, but rival club owners were fit to be tied. "It certainly reeked of poor taste, particularly at this time of year," hissed one vexed bigwig. "Ballplayers find out soon enough what others are getting and use such figures as argument for more dough."

Lest the fire die, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, after a few days' snooping, announced, from an "unimpeachable source," that Bob Feller's pay for 1941 will be not $30,000 but $45,000.

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