The King and His Court: Eddie Feigner. The Clown Prince of Baseball: Max Patkin.
Historically, everybody viewed such acts as sideshows to the real game — baseball. Dismissed as promotions to attract fans. Gimmicks to entertain them. Add-ons, in most cases, to the ball game they were really coming to see.
Today’s version of a sideshow is looking like the main show…and I’ll get to that.
Eddie Feigner was unique. A softball pitcher, he brought three teammates and a 104-mile-an-hour fastball to challenge local teams in seven-inning games…fund-raisers for his bank account and assorted charities. There were some gimmicks — he pitched from second base, he pitched blindfolded and sometimes did both — but his team usually won and Feigner usually struck out an inordinate number of hitters.
In a made-for-TV exhibition, he whiffed Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Maury Wills, Harmon Killebrew, Roberto Clemente and Brooks Robinson in succession. His act lasted more than five decades and by his own statistical account he threw 930 no-hitters and 238 perfect games among his 10,000 starts, striking out 141,517 batters.
While I can’t verify his statistical accuracy, I can verify he was a magician on the mound, having watched him as a pre-teen at a couple of his Winnipeg stops.
The same goes for Max Patkin. He was a mime ahead of his time, with a body and face he used to make people laugh, which I did both as a young fan and later as a baseball writer. The legend is that his comedy routine started after he joined the Navy during World War II. He was pitching for a service team in Hawaii, and gave up a long home run to an Army slugger named Joe DiMaggio. Patkin throw down his glove and marched around the bases behind DiMaggio. He threw on baggy baseball pants, changed the “R” in “Crown” to “L” and spent the next 51 years selling himself as the game’s Clown Prince.
That brings up the Savannah Bananas.
Next week, the Bananas take their version of baseball — that would be “banana ball” to hallowed Fenway Park, the second of six major-league stadiums they’ll play in this season. At their first, they entertained more than 41,000 fans in the home park of a team (Houston Astros) whose record crowd was 43,000, and that was during the 2019 American League Division Championship.
Next week in Boston, anybody seeing them in action against The Party Animals may also see Bill Lee, the former and eccentric Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox southpaw, who was a Bananas’ original. Lee is seeing little or limited action since suffering a heart episode in the Savannah bullpen, at age 75. If he returns to Fenway, watching the Bananas costs $195 per ticket to sit in the upper deck, or $1,600 behind home plate.
A week later, a ticket to see the Red Sox play the Yankees…$76.
That makes banana ball a hit. But why? Its rules include: teams win innings to win the game; fans’ catching foul balls count as outs; bunts are forbidden, as are mound visits by catchers and coaches; there’s a kinky rule about walks…etc.
For me, this began with Eddie Feigner and Max Patkin.
