Two Gloves

Bob Feller died yesterday at 92. He was the Iowa farmboy who took the baseball world by storm before he even got out of High School. He was the fastest pitcher of his generation so his nickname quickly became Rapid Robert. Then, like so many others, Feller enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor. When the war was over, he went back to the Cleveland Indians and was the leader of the pitching rotation of the last Indian team to win a World Series, back in 1948.

The Great Ducknik had a Bob Feller glove when she was small. The Great Plotnik had a Marty Marion glove. Marion was a shortstop with the St. Louis Cardinals in the '40s, whose nickname was "Octopus" because he had such long arms. He was alo called "Mr. Shortstop" and was known as the best shortstop of the 1940s; by the time Plotnik needed a real glove by the mid '50s, you couldn't do better than a Marty Marion.

Marion was born a year before Rapid Robert but Mr. Shortstop is still alive. Obviously, Plot and Duck have preferred having gloves belonging to baseball players with long life expectancies.