Bob Feller (HOF '62) is asked what Kenny Rogers was doing & he answers:

"A fan asked Feller what Kenny Rogers was doing in the last World Series when umpires noticed a brown smudge on his palm. Feller replied that Rogers was applying more spin to the ball.

• “He was trying to cheat,” Feller said. “It’s not the first time anyone’s ever done it. They’ve been doing it from Day 1.”"

(Tyler Kepner's article from today's Yankee-Indians game continues):

"The conversation bounces all over the place, because Feller has seen so much and knows so many. He mentioned that Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins, was once a bat boy for a team he played on. He said he remembers George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, as a kid in Cleveland.

“I knew him when he could walk under this table standing up,” Feller said, adding that Steinbrenner gives an annual donation to the museum.

• Feller’s grandson (Daniel, age 15) said his war service was more important to Feller than his baseball career. Players know about both. Jeremy Sowers, the young Indians left-hander whose work Feller praised, wants to hear the war stories.

“I would certainly like to sit down with him and talk about World War II,” said Sowers, a political science major in college. “Not even about pitching.”

Feller has strong opinions about the war in Iraq, and he bemoaned what he called a lack of leadership.

• “We should have gone in there with 450,000 troops and declared a military dictatorship or martial law, have a curfew, taken over all the oil and given them the going price, same as we did with Japan when the war was over, and then given the country back to them when it was over,” Feller said.

“It would have been over years ago. The last good general we had, in my opinion, was Schwarzkopf,” he said, referring to Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. “We haven’t had a lot of good leaders anywhere in our nation. I’m really concerned.”"

From Tyler Kepner's NY Times article, 3/7/07, "At 88 a Hall of Famer Who's Still in there Pitching" Takes cookies.

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