That player started out as a pitcher, much-desired by several MLB organizations out of high school, and the team that signed him used him as a relief pitcher initially, when he was still in his teens.  He first played in the bigs in mid-July, and got into a little over a dozen games, starting slightly more than half of them. He got no votes for Rookie of the Year. (A first-ballot HoFer was a rookie that year and had a spectacular rookie season, so this player could never have been in the running, anyway, in addition to other disqualifying factors.) The next spring training, still in his teens, this player made the starting rotation, and started the third game of the year. It was a rainy day, and the mound felt "slippery and greasy" to him. On the third pitch of the game, he "slipped and lost [his] balance just as [he] was delivering the pitch. [His] arm popped. You could hear it all over the infield. [He] felt a severe pain in [his] throwing arm before the ball even reached the plate. [His] … elbow was killing [him]."

Not too surprising for a young pitcher trying to establish himself as a big-league competitor, he hid the injury from his manager. Finally, the pain became unbearable and after six innings of agony, he told his manager that his arm hurt, and the manager pulled him from the game. He lost that game, and his team removed him from the starting rotation. The arm did not stop hurting, so his G.M. took him for treatment—not to a medical doctor, however, but to a sort of "mechano-therapist." The man the G.M. located to treat him (just a few blocks from the ballpark, incidentally) was "a small, powerful man with bulging eyes and strong, stubby hands, who practiced something called mechano-therapy--bone and muscle manipulation." After a brief examination, this "therapist" diagnosed him with "adhesions in his elbow." Then, saying "Hold on, son," he grabbed the young man’s "wrist with his left hand and [his] elbow with his right" and "gave a sudden twist—and darned near pulled [his] arm apart. The pain was blinding."

He never pitched in a game again, in the major or minor leagues, and eventually the arm had to be amputated.

This is an awful, tragic story, and it’s hard to say who gets the lion’s share of the blame—the organization for putting such a young man in a big league game in the first place, or the manager for failing to notice that his pitcher was in pain, or the pitcher himself for not having the sense to confess his injury to the manager immediately, or his teammates who heard the young pitcher’s arm popping but kept dumb about it for six innings, or the G.M. who found such shoddy unqualified non-medical treatment, or the quack himself for daring to practice without an advanced medical degree.  Who do you blame for causing the promising young man’s career, and his arm, to be cut short?

Fortunately, this is only a theoretical question. The young man’s name was Robert William Andrew Feller, and the detail in the story that is off is the final one, about never pitching in MLB again and eventually losing the arm. Everything else is more or less as Feller tells it in Now Pitching: BOB FELLER, his autobiography.

It’s a weird title, don’t you think? "Now Pitching" is, after all how a relief pitcher gets introduced, right, not a starter, and Feller certainly started the overwhelming majority of his 266 MLB victories. (258, to be  exact. Oh, the other thing I deliberately messed up, though technically accurate, because I didn’t want to give away the era too quickly, was the part about not winning the ROTY. There was no ROTY Award yet, so he couldn’t have won it. Joe D. was a first-ballot HoFer, wasn’t he?) But the second-most astonishing thing about the story, apart from my fictional ending, is how dangerously poorly the most valuable arms in the major leagues were cared for in 1937. The Indians let someone with no medical training examine Feller’s arm for a few minutes, diagnose him, and treat him by yanking that sore arm like it was a wet towel that needed wringing? Unbelievable.

The single most astonishing thing about the story is that Feller endorses the treatment (which cost the Indians, btw, all of ten bucks). He praises the Indians for "the enlightened way they handled my injury in 1937." In Feller’s defense, what he’s praising, apart from the mechano-therapy, is the fact that the Indians refrained from pitching him while he was hurt and kept trying to find treatment for his injured arm, as Indian fans clamored to pay admission to see the boy wonder and the Indians refused to let that happen until Feller’s arm felt ok. (In my summary, I also omitted the fact that the Indians did try some medical doctors first, some X-Rays, some deep massage, but medical science was stumped by Feller’s condition. And the "enlightened" Indians did try pitching him again, once in May and once in June, while his arm was "killing him," but these attempts to pitch lasted only two ineffective innings. Feller’s comeback game, after the therapy, came on July 4th. Can you imagine what a pitcher’s agent would have to say about a ballclub ever pitching a seriously injured teenager today, and then exposing him to "mechano-therapy"? I can’t.) Of course, everything worked out just fine, so Feller has nothing to complain about, and everything to praise. His arm felt better almost instantly, after that moment of "blinding" pain, so no harm, no foul, I guess.

What’s the point of this story? A small point is how little I knew about Feller’s amazing life before reading this book, compared to Joe D.’s or Ted Williams’ life. Everyone has lacunae in his knowledge, and Feller is a big lacuna in mine (as opposed to a Big Kahuna). Very good feel for how the world was before most of us were born. A bigger point concerns how terribly athletes were treated way back then—you’ve got to assume that the Indians treated their big young star with exceptional care, which raises the question of what callous treatment for a scrub looked like. A kick in the ass, and "Shaddup, kid, and play"? Probably.

But the largest point, for me, is how my counter-factual conclusion to Feller’s story makes perfect sense. If his story really did conclude in the tragic way my version did, of course, we’d never read about it. He’d never be Bob Feller, and he’d never write an autobiography.

Which makes me wonder: how many injured young athletes got the sort of treatment Feller got that made their condition worse, and never played ball again?  My best answer is: A lot. This is what I think most athletes mean (even if they don’t know it) when they say in interviews how incredibly lucky they are. Of course they’re incredibly talented and incredibly hard-working, almost every professional athlete is both those things, but in anybody’s life there are dozens and hundreds and thousands of moments when their entire future could have been suddenly and finally snuffed out—the bus that just missed running over them on the street when they were kids, the fever that mysteriously abated a minute before it would have started cooking their brains, the dog bite that turned out not to be rabid. And for athletes, routinely pushing their bodies to their absolute limit, the non-fatal but career-ending injuries that they DON’T get, that they somehow avoid while their teammates’s careers get blighted, one after another—well, as far as I’m concerned, every single athlete who makes it to the pro level has already won some kind of lottery before he throws a single pitch or sinks his first free throw.

When they say how lucky they are, I believe every word of it. I know that nowadays they’re instructed to say they’re lucky, to praise God, to thank their teammates, in lieu of saying "Damn, I’m talented, aren’t I?" and we know, on some level, that some of them are laying it on a bit thick and they’re secretly dying to attribute their victories to their own incredible set of skills, talents, characters and general abilities. But without taking any of that away from any of them, I marvel at how lucky all of them have been to have sidestepped ALL of the career-ending crises that have laid low so many other promising athletes, those who never get to write an autobiography complaining about the awful event that cut their careers off before they ever got started.

On every field, behind each athlete stands a ghostly squad of those athletes he has played with and against, some of whom had as much promise as he did, or more, but ran into some sort of cruel obstacle barring their chances for success. As new medical treatments are developed, and as obsolete attempts at treatment fade away, let’s hope that all our current problems will be met by treatments that are only now being perfected. How incredibly lucky we all are, just to have dodged the bullets we have,  that have wrecked the lives of some of our classmates, our co-workers, our friends and relatives—how lucky we are to have made it to 2016. Happy New Year, everyone, and best wishes for all of your futures.