Читать книгу Bad Boys, Bad Times. The Cleveland Indians and Baseball in the Prewar Years, 1937–1941 онлайн

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The procedure that applied to Feller was called “recommending.” A Major League team (Cleveland in this case) would sign a player (Feller), then nudge a friendly club (Fargo-Moorhead) to quietly ink him to a valid minor league contract. After a certain length of time the Major League team would advise their partner to sell the player to a higher level (the Class A New Orleans Pelicans, a long-time friend to Cleveland). From there, the Major League team would be informed what a great prospect they had, and would buy the player’s contract—which is just what the Indians, acting on manager Steve O’Neill’s recommendation, did. This appeared to be a legal move, with the paperwork to back it up. However, the Indians were quite careless in shifting Feller through their farm system before he had pitched a single inning for Fargo-Moorhead or New Orleans. He arrived in Cleveland during the springtime, doing some concession work at League Park and pitching sporadically for an amateur club. The Indians had beaten the system, yet Feller’s great pitching late in the year completely blew up the scam.