Rockford's greatest baseball players: This West player had a big bat — and even bigger arm

Editor's note: This is another entry in the Rockford Register Star's exploration of the area's greatest athletes since the end of World War II. We have picked the greatest players in multiple sports like football and basketball. This is the eighth in our baseball series. Links to previous stories are below.

George Feeley helped set Dale Greenlee on the right track.

Greenlee, who went on to become a starting guard on the Kansas team that reached the 1974 Final Four and captained the Jayhawks the next year, also once thought he could have a bright future in baseball.

“George Feeley made me realize I wasn’t going on to play baseball anywhere; I’d better stick to basketball,” recalled Greenlee, an all-conference pitcher for Guilford in 1971. “We had a heck of a team and I was a decent pitcher, but George was such a good hitter. He took me yard. That didn’t happen much.”

Especially at Guilford in 1971, where there was no fence and the outfield was so large a regional tournament picture from that year shows a girl riding a horse in the grass beyond the centerfielder.

“George hit a ball off me once that is still rolling,” Greenlee said. “I challenged him with a fastball. He jumped on it and hit it 380 feet down the left-field line. Foul. The catcher started giving me signs, calling for a curveball. I shake him off, thinking I am a man. I am a fastball pitcher. He hit a line drive over my head. Our center fielder took one step back and stopped. He never got it. That ball rolled 500 feet. It was just gone. I tell people that ball is still rolling, 50 years later.”

Feeley had a big bat, but was known for an even bigger arm and is our choice as one of the three outfielders on our all-time Rockford-area baseball team of the last 75 years.

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Athletic talent from a young age

The first mention of Feeley’s name in the Rockford Morning Star came at age 11 when he qualified for the state Junior Olympics with a record toss of 284 feet in the midget division of the baseball throw.

“George Feeley was one of the best outfielders who ever played in the conference,” said Don Tresemer, a former coach at both Harlem and Freeport. “He had a great arm, just a great arm.”

“He was always a threat,” said Dan Humay, who was Freeport’s head coach for over 30 years. “He was always a real threat. He was a complete outfielder. He could go get the fly ball. He could run. He had a really good arm, was a good base runner and a good power hitter. He was the complete package.”

Feeley started out batting in the No. 8 hole for West High as a junior, but moved up to No. 3 by mid-season and led the conference — then known as the Big Eight — in batting with a .432 average.

Then, as a senior, he and star left-hander Dan Domski led West to its greatest season in history.

West, which was converted into a middle school in 1990, won its last conference title in 1971. The Warriors also became the fourth Rockford team in history to reach state that year, joining Guilford’s 1968 state runner-up squad, East’s 1962 semifinalist and Boylan’s 1964 quarterfinalist.

Part of dominant 1971 team

Feeley and Domski led West (26-5, 14-2) every step of the way. Domski (15-0) was unbeatable on the mound from start to finish. He began with the first perfect game in conference history, a 2-0 win over Belvidere in the Big Eight opener, He would go on to throw 33 consecutive hitless innings to start the season, finishing with a 0.23 ERA in 113 innings and 196 strikeouts, three shy of Auburn's Dan Scarpetta, who broke Domski's conference record in 1972. In his last game, Domski threw all 11 innings of a 1-0 win over Kankakee Eastridge in the first round at state.

West won that game on Feeley’s RBI double to the base of the fence, 390 feet from home plate. Feeley also ran down a liner in center and held the runner at third to help Domski, who struck out the next two hitters, escape a bases-loaded, no-out situation in the first inning.

“He’s the best all-around player I’ve ever had,” West coach Charlie Wild told the Morning Star’s Dave Shultz after the game. “He can hit, he can throw and he can chase down anything near him in the outfield. And I’ve never seen a kid with more desire.”

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Without Domski, who was drafted in the 31st round by the Washington Senators that spring and later pitched for the Wisconsin Badgers, on the mound, West was crushed 10-0 the next day by eventual state champ Waukegan. West made six errors, including five in the first three innings. Everything went wrong for the Warriors, everything except George Feeley. He doubled in his only at-bat for West’s only hit.

Feeley and Domski were both named to the all-tournament team, joining the Guilford trio of Glen Nowicki, Brad Blair and Nick Janicki as the only Rockford all-state tourney players at the time.

Feeley had come up big for West all year. In Domski’s 3-0 win over Auburn, Feeley was 2-for-2 with two RBI. In a 5-1 win over Freeport that moved West into a tie for the Big Eight lead with Boylan at 8-1, he was 2-for-3 with 3 RBI. “He broke our backs,” Freeport’s Dan Humay told the Morning Star.

He then hit a two-run homer to beat Harlem 4-2 the next day and put West in first place by itself to stay — even though teams were trying to pitch around him.

“You tried not to let him beat you,” said Gregg Marinelli, Boylan’s coach at the time. “Move the ball around and not throw him strikes. If he goes after them, he goes after them. If not, we will walk him and go from there.”

The road to professional baseball

Still, Feeley hit .363 for the year and seemed to get almost every big hit for West. That included six hits in a double-header against Peoria High. Kansas City Royals chief midwest scout Art Stewart was at that game to check out Peoria High’s Dan Goodwin, whom the White Sox selected a couple of months later as the No. 1 overall pick in the 7th annual draft. But after that game, the Royals — and usually several other teams — had a scout at every one of West’s games the rest of the season.

Kansas City chose Feeley in the sixth round, making him the third-highest drafted players in NIC-10 history behind only Boylan's Jake Smolinski and Auburn's Dan Scarpetta..

He quickly signed with Kansas City.

“Money isn’t the main thing to me” he told Shultz, who worked for the paper for more than 50 years. “Playing means the most. All my life I’ve wanted to play major league baseball.”

Feeley didn’t get there. He started off 3-for-30 as a pro in the Appalachian League before hitting a three-run homer for Kingsport. After batting .145 that first season in Rookie League ball, he improved to .246 with 24 RBIs in 114 at-bats his second year in Rookie Ball, this time for Billings, Montana. But although he improved significantly, that was it. He was out of pro baseball at age 19.

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Still, he had one of the greatest high school careers in Rockford history, and was one of Rockford’s highest-drafted players. He at least got a shot at what he had always dreamed of.

“Nothing means more to me than playing professional baseball,” Feeley told the Morning Star the day he signed with the Royals. “I’ve never had any other ambitions.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com.

About this series

The Rockford Register Star has been writing about the greatest area athletes in various sports since the end of World War II. Previously, we have picked the greatest players in football, boys basketball, girls basketball, boys tennis, girls tennis, boys golf and girls golf, as well as greatest games in football, boys basketball and girls basketball.

Their entire careers, spanning from high school to the pros, is considered, but only players from schools that are in the newspaper's current coverage area are considered, so players such as catcher Gene Lamont of Kirkland and pitcher Seth Blair of Rock Falls were not eligible. For baseball, we picked nine position players and four pitchers. All players were picked by sportswriter Matt Trowbridge with input from NIC-10 History Blog author Alex Gary and local coaches. Players who were used at several positions during their career were placed where they fit best on this team. One player will be revealed each day.

Pitcher: Drew Dickinson, Freeport

Pitcher: Dan Scarpetta, Auburn

Catcher: Nick Shields, Harlem

First base: Matt Dettman, Auburn

Second base: Sean Lyons, Byron

Third base: Andrew Wilhite, Stillman Valley

Shortstop: Jake Smolinski, Boylan

Outfield: George Feeley, West

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: West's George Feeley third-highest NIC-10 baseball draft pick ever