Feller, Paige teamed up for 1946 barnstorming tour

Feller burst on the baseball scene with the Cleveland Indians in 1936 before he had even finished high school. Arguably one of the hardest throwers of all time, “Rapid Robert” fanned 15 St. Louis Browns in his first major league start. Soon he was the game’s top pitcher, averaging 25 wins a season and leading the league in strikeouts from 1939-41. But the day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the 23-year-old enlisted in the Navy missed most of the next four seasons.

It was while aboard the USS Alabama that Feller, a savvy entrepreneur his entire adult life, began to seriously consider a unique barnstorming tour pitting a team of white big leaguers against a squad made of Negro League stars as a way to augment his big league salary when he returned to the field.

“I had it all laid out,” Feller told William Marshall, author of "Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951."

“I knew what I was going to do and I knew the people personally that I was going to have get the black clubs together – the Kansas City operator, Mr. (J.L.) Wilkinson, and Satchel Paige and many others that I wanted to oppose us.”

After making nine starts for the Indians at the end of the 1945 season upon his postwar return, Feller reclaimed his throne as one of the sport’s top hurlers in ‘46 with an America League-best 26 wins and 348 strikeouts. It was in mid-July of Feller’s stellar comeback campaign that he announced plans for a coast-to-coast exhibition tour featuring an all-star squad made up of players from both the American and National leagues and a team of the nation’s finest Negro League players.

Having obtained from Commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler’s permission to carry the tour beyond the 10-day barnstorming limit, the 27-year-old Feller’s ambitious plans by September called for a 27-game tour beginning Sept. 30 at Pittsburgh with the itinerary including stops in such outposts as Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Newark, New York, Columbus, Dayton, Louisville, Davenport, Des Moines, St. Paul. Omaha, Wichita, St. Louis, Kansas city, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Vancouver, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Tacoma. Feller even set a game in Versailles, Ky., home of Chandler.

Teammates on Bob Feller’s All-Stars included Bob Lemon, Mickey Vernon, San Chapman, Charlie Keller, Spud Chandler, Phil Rizzuto and Stan Musial. Satchel Paige’s All-Stars, among the top performers from both the Negro American League and Negro American League, included Max Manning, Barney Brown, Hilton Smith, Buck O’Neil, Hank Thompson, Art Wilson, Howard Easterling and Quincy Trouppe.

In his autobiography "Now Pitching, Bob Feller," the “Heater from Van Meter” wrote about the elaborate logistics that went into his planned transcontinental trek in 1946. No one had ever attempted to use airplanes to crisscross the country, let alone playing a game in the afternoon then flying to a second game that night hundreds of miles away.

“I had put together a full roster of players whose combined annual salaries in the majors exceeded two million dollars,” Feller wrote. “The owners of the teams didn’t like that. They said they were concerned about their players getting hurt while barnstorming. Then they really objected when they found out how were travelling. We were going to fly.

“That was unheard of for professional sports teams. They took trains. They said I was exposing their athletes to even greater dangers. But I chartered two DC-3s for a month from Flying Tigers Airlines. We had ‘Bob Feller’s All-Stars’ painted on the side and took off to play 35 games in 27 days. We were the only baseball teams travelling by air. No other barnstorming tours were doing it yet, and the major league teams hadn’t started flying either. We were pioneering the practice of a professional sports team travelling that way. Today it’s hard to imagine teams going any other way.”

Feller had a longstanding affinity for air travel, as newspapers across the country wrote about the then 22-year-old fireballer learning to fly in 1941. As was reported in The New York Times in Sept. 24, 1941, he had been taking flying instructions at Cleveland Airport for three weeks and had soloed for the first time a week prior.

“Feller is interested in flying for the sport only,” said instructor Don Patrick. “He has flown a lot of miles on airlines and had been thinking about lessons for the past two years.”

Having special access to an airplane that October came in handy for Feller.

“The only two games I missed conflicted with a contract I had made to appear at a milk convention in Atlantic City,” he wrote. “We were playing in California at that point of the tour, so I flew all night from Sacramento, made my appearance in Atlantic City, and flew all night again to rejoin our tour in California.”

While big league teams traveling by airplane increased with the West Coast expansion of the Dodgers and Giants in 1958, trains were the dominant mode of transportation for baseball players for decades. After the first major league team to fly to a game, the Reds, who went from St. Louis to Chicago on June 8, 1934, there were sporadic flights over the next decade, but it not until after World War II that plane travel became common.

There were reports in 1946 that a pair of future Hall of Famers were paid thousands of dollars by their teams to not take part in Feller’s barnstorming tour that offseason partly due to the fear of planes crashing.