This was Easter Sunday, 1937, in Vicksburg, Miss. A thick-muscled kid, rather jowly, with a deep dimple in his chin, slouched out to warm up for the Indians in an exhibition game with the Giants. He had heavy shoulders and big bones and plowboy's lumbering gait. His name was Bob Feller and everybody had heard about him.

This was the farm kid Cy Slapnicka had dug up in a town named Van Meter, Iowa. In a night exhibition in Cleveland the previous July, he had struck out eight Cardinals in three innings, though not every pitch had found the strike zone. One had shattered a chair in the grandstand. In August he had struck out fifteen Browns in an official American League game, and three weeks later he had fanned seventeen Athletics. With a dead ball or live one, no American League pitcher from Cy Young and Rube Waddell through Walter Johnson and Lefty Grove had struck out so many in a nine-inning game.

All this the Giants had heard, but they had not seen the young man. They were taking their pre-game exercises when the kid kicked his left foot high and delivered his first warm-up pitch. All over the field, action ceased.

Nobody said anything. Everybody just stood still and watched. Twenty baseball seasons have passed, and that small tableau remains vivid in the memory of witnesses. Those who were there do not tire of describing the scene. "That day," they say, as though telling of a personal achievement, "I saw a pitcher."

Last spring the Giants came barnstorming east from the Phoenix, Ariz., training camp in company with the Indians, as is their habit. Arriving in New York just before the season opened, one of the party said, "You're going to be astonished when you see Feller this summer. He's got the fast one back again, somehow. For three or four innings, I'll swear he's good as ever."

As it turned out, there was little occasion for astonishment because Arnerican League fans didn't see much of Feller. He is coming now to the end of his eighteenth season -- there were, in addition, forty-four months in the Navy and eight battle stars. He has pitched forty-nine innings, lost three games and won none.

You could call it the end of an era, probably, for if there is another player active in either league who was there as early as 1936, his name does not come to mind. At any rate, it's the end of a career.

Hank Greenberg has said he would talk to Feller soon and "be guided by whatever decision he makes" regarding the future. He said he didn't feel that Feller was "doing justice to himself to stay on the team without working. There's something wrong with the picture of him warming up in the bullpen."

Of course the picture is wrong. So are those figures: no victories, three defeats. It always seems wrong when this happens, though there never could have been a moment's doubt that the year would come when Feller wouldn't win a game. When Slapnicka led him off the Iowa sandlots, he started the boy toward this year.

Reviewing the seasons that lay between, one must take exception with the record books, which usually offer a reliable measure of ability. Feller, for example, will never join the tight little group of twelve pitchers who won 300 or more games in the big leagues.

He should be No. 13, but his total is 266 and the thirty-four victories he did not score will forever be beyond him. In the three seasons before he joined the Navy, he won twenty-four, twenty-seven and twenty-five games. He was away more than three seasons, far more time than he would have needed to win thirty-four games against the strongest opposition. Against the squatters who homesteaded the American League during World War II, he might have won thirty-four in a single summer.

To he sure, there is meat enough in Feller's record to feed any man's pride. In 1938 he struck out eighteen Tigers in nine innings. In 1946 he fanned 348 batsmen, smashing a record that Rube Waddell had held for forty-two years. He pitched three no-hit games. In one four-year span, he struck out 1,007 batters in 1,238 innings.

He was, simply, the greatest pitcher of his time. Curiously, the biggest victories almost always eluded him. In 1940 a stranger named Floyd Giebell beat him, 2 to 0, in the deciding game of Cleveland's pennant race with Detroit. In 1948, he pitched a two-hitter in the opening World Series game with the Braves, and lost to Johnny Sain, 1 to 0. Trying for Cleveland's fourth victory in that series, he was knocked out before the biggest crowd that ever saw a baseball game.

All the same, he was a pitcher whose like is seldom seen. One winter a Cleveland newspaper man scoured through the records and then telephoned Feller. "There is," he said, "just one regular player in the league whom you've never struck out. Did you know you'd never fanned Birdie Tebbetts?"

"No," Feller said, "but I will." He did.

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