Fast Eddie Is Slowing Down : Yet the King Still Faces the World With His Eyes Closed

Eddie Feigner, the King, the greatest softball pitcher ever, the man who has struck out some 117,000 batters and pitched about 240 perfect games, unloaded the ball.

As it whistled over the plate, I swung. The sweet sound of softball against anodized aluminum rang out across the dew-covered field, and the ball sailed into right field. A clean, hard double. Off the King.

OK, so the King is 60 years old. And granted he was pitching in the final inning of the final game of a 220-game season. Big deal. Anyone who hits the King won’t allow the magic moment to be tarnished by such minor details.

Oh, one other thing. He was pitching blindfolded.

They say there is a fine line sometimes between courage and raw stupidity. That line becomes a bit more obscure when you step into the batter’s box, without a helmet, against a man who once routinely threw at 104 m.p.h. but now serves up a mere 85 or 90 m.p.h. fastball. And you know the man can’t see.

As I dug in to face this man with a rag over his face, I recalled a line from the King’s publicity brochure: “While blindfolded, he knocked a cigar out of a stunt man’s mouth with a fastball. Eddie came close many times, actually hitting the stunt man’s helmet right in the ear with one pitch. Finally, on the 18th try, he struck the cigar right out of his lips.”

Right in the ear? On the 18th try?

His first sightless pitch was a strike. I had to take the umpire’s word for it, because although the game was played in Burbank, I was somewhere near Van Nuys when it crossed the plate. When a batter lunges away from the plate out of fear it’s known as “bailing out.” This was the next step. It is known as “running away.”

Summoning all of my courage and borrowing a bit more from friends, I stayed in the box for the second pitch. It was a ball, a foot outside.

“Where did it go?” Feigner asked, his blindfolded face tilted at a curious angle. There was something slightly unnerving about that. For all the King knew, the ball he had just delivered at about 85 m.p.h. was lodged between my gums and Adam’s apple.

“He’ll throw this one a little slower,” the catcher, Tim Mackin, advised me as the King prepared his next pitch. Mackin has one of those open, honest faces and a soft, sincere voice. I didn’t believe him for a second.

Pitch No. 3 came from God knows where following a double-pump, windmill delivery. I swung the bat when his arm came around the first time. He released the ball when his arm came around the second time. My timing was perfect. I had hit the King.

A few batters later, the game was over and Eddie Feigner had concluded his 40th season of dazzling batters and fans with his enormous arsenal of pitches. He has logged 3.3 million miles in those 40 years, showing off his skills in nearly 4,000 towns and cities in the 50 U.S. states and 80 countries. He has pitched more than 900 no-hitters. He has struck out 6,000 batters while pitching blindfolded, a few thousand while pitching from second base and many while kneeling down.

He has also struck out a lot of batters while kneeling, blindfolded, at second base.

“I’ve pitched blindfolded to so many batters that people just take it for granted,” Feigner said. “You’d be pretty shocked if your dentist decided to fill a couple cavities while he was blindfolded, wouldn’t you? Well, pitching blindfolded is just as unique.”

In an exhibition game, without a blindfold, he once struck out six consecutive batters: Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Maury Wills, Harmon Killebrew, Roberto Clemente and Brooks Robinson.

There has never been anyone quite like the King.

Feigner developed his steaming, underhanded delivery as a youth. He returned to the game in 1946 following a two-year stint in the U.S. Marine Air Corps during World War II. Feigner and some friends on a regulation 10-man team had just pounded the daylights out of a pretty good ballclub in Pendleton, Ore., when one of the opposing players decided a rematch was in order. Feigner took it a step further. Not only would he pitch against the team in a rematch, he would do it with only three other players on his team.

“And the only reason I didn’t agree to play with just myself and a catcher is that they probably would have walked both of us,” Feigner said.

The four-man team played the 10-man team a week later inside the walls of the Washington State Prison. In seven innings, Feigner pitched a perfect game and struck out 19 batters. One ball was hit to the shortstop, another to the first baseman. The quartet won the game, 7-0, and the King and his Court was born.

In 40 years, the Court has changed. Players have come and gone, but always there was Feigner. He has pitched nearly 8,000 games in those four decades, including stretches that would wither most pitchers of any age. He once pitched in 57 games in 41 days.

Two games, though, stand out in his mind.

“One was the last game of the 1950 season and we were playing the Illinois state softball champions in Chicago,” Feigner said. “I got on the microphone before the game and told the fans, ‘I feel like I can throw all strikes tonight.’ I threw only four balls the entire game and struck out everybody. That was a competition game. No one even came near a pitch.”

The other game that sticks in his mind was a no-strikeout performance.

“We were in Waco, Tex., playing a team that had just played in the world tournament. These guys decided that the way to beat me was to bunt against me, because we only had four guys on the field. Well, they bunted everything for four innings and we threw all 12 guys out at first base. Then they decided to start swinging. Well, I had no strikeouts so I decided I’d keep it that way. For the next three innings I made them hit the ball exactly where I wanted them to hit it. They knew what I was trying to do, but they couldn’t do anything about it. That was better than a no-hitter.”

Feigner’s vast assortment of pitches is almost as impressive to watch as the raw speed he can generate. Anyone who has watched a vintage performance by the King is left with the memory for years. One fan is KNBC station manager Jim Foy, who has seen Feigner pitch several times over the last dozen years or so.

“Oh, he isn’t that hard to hit against,” Foy said. “All he does is throw pitches between 90 m.p.h. and 8 m.p.h., all from the exact same delivery. You don’t know what a change-up is until you get one of his.”

The change-of-speed pitch is particularly devastating because Feigner knows precisely when to use it. He’ll set up a batter with two or three smokers that are often heard but not seen, then come back with a 25-m.p.h. pitch that normally leaves the batter lunging halfway to the mound.

But the pitch that is perhaps the most deceitful is not a pitch at all. It comes only when he already has two strikes on the batter, and he delivers it from behind his back. At the last second, he reaches up with his glove and slams the ball into it. The catcher, having prepared for the trick by putting another ball in his glove, slams the mitt and lobs the ball back to the mound while running off the field with the King and the other two players. Just another strikeout.

More than one batter, duped by the non-pitch and the strike three call of the umpire who is instructed to go along with the gag, simply walks back to the bench. Some don’t.

“We pulled it on one guy and he starts arguing with the umpire,” Feigner said. “He’s getting madder and madder and finally my catcher comes out to the mound and tells me the guy isn’t arguing that there was no pitch, he’s arguing that the pitch was high.”

The Harlem Globetrotter-type tricks have brought laughter from about 15 1/2 million people around the world, including those in such traditional softball hotbeds as Thailand, India and Saudi Arabia.

“We played a team of jockeys, including Angel Cordero, in Albany, N.Y., last season,” recalled Mackin. “One guy must have been no more than four feet tall. Gary West (the first baseman) gets down on his knees. Then the shortstop gets on his knees. Then I decided to join in so I laid down on the ground with my mitt about eight inches off the plate--about knee-high on this guy.

“And Eddie wound up and threw a perfect fastball right down the middle of the plate, eight inches off the ground. I never moved my glove. It was tremendous. It was amazing to see a pitcher, a guy who had spent years and years grooving the regular strike zone, adjust instantly and throw a perfect strike to this little guy.”

The decades and the pitching and the traveling have taken their toll on the King. His once-black crewcut is now a gray crew cut. He is able to turn loose the fastball much less often than he once did. And once in a while, he talks of giving up the eight-month tours of the world.

Mackin, the burly catcher who was drafted by the Cleveland Indians and the U.S. Army on the same day in 1968 (the Army won), and joined the Court two seasons ago after hitting a homer and a double off Feigner in his first two at-bats, says the 220-game seasons wear out the King.

“Near the end of the last two seasons he says things like, ‘I can’t do this anymore. This might be the last season.’ But I really don’t think he’s serious. He might pitch until he drops on the mound.”

Feigner said he might start cutting back on the number of games. But even if it’s only in exhibitions, he said he cannot imagine that he will ever stop throwing the softball.

“ Retire is a bad word. Some guys resign from their job and go home and die,” Feigner said. “I love the idea of being on the road and pitching. I’ll probably be putting on pitching shows as long as George Burns is telling jokes.”

Probably longer. But when it ends, Feigner has a lifetime of memories tucked safely away. Good memories.

“I think I’ll probably be remembered as one of the best softball pitchers that ever was, and at least the most famous, whether I want to or not,” he said. “I’ve done what I’ve done for so long, people I think will always remember the King and his Court. But I also know there are 3 billion people in the world who have never heard of me. Who cares?

“I believe God has a job in this life for each of us to do. We sometimes think we pick that job, but most of the time He picks it for us. What I want people to remember when they remember Eddie Feigner is that I was a guy who filled my role here, a guy who did his job and did it well. I hope they think of me as a guy was an honest, sincere performer who always put on a good show.”

Feigner says he’ll crank up the tour again in the spring. If you get a chance to catch the show, take it. Even at 60, the King is still pretty majestic.