American Valor Quarterly Issue 11 - Fall 2014 | Page 39

Bill Gilbert: There’s a point too, Gene, building on what Bob just said. The question has been asked of you, what would these players and the other 500 major league players, minor leaguers and the Negro leaguers, have been if there hadn’t been a World War II? Does anybody know exactly how much greater they would have been? There are computerized programs, projections, that average out what a player did three years before the war and three years after the war and you can establish an annual average. On that basis, we know now, for example, that Bob Feller would have won another 107 games. That would have given him 49 wins more than Nolan Ryan has. He would have struck out another 1,100 hitters. He would have had five no-hitters, instead of three, and 19 one-hitters, in