A sad day for baseball and Detroit Tiger fans everywhere...
Mark "The Bird" Fidrych has passed away at age 54 in an apparent accident on his farm.
The Bird's story is one of those stories that was uniquely suited to baseball. Fidrych had only one great season -- his rookie year, 1976 -- pitching for the Detroit Tigers. He captured the imagination of fans everywhere, including me. I was 5 years old, and knew nothing about baseball, but he made me a Detroit Tiger fan for life. I watched his antics along with my dad everytime he was on television.
In 1976, he finished his rookie season with 24 complete games and went 19-9 on the year with a 2.34 ERA. He was only one of two rookies to start the All-Star Game, and he finished as the American League Rookie of the Year.
All great accomplishments, but that's not what made him special.
What made him special, in this era of overblown egos, multi-million dollar salaries, and prima donnas throughout the game, is that The Bird, for lack of a better term, was just happy to be on the mound. He represented the joy of the game like nobody, frankly, has since.
You see, Fidrych was a character. He would run out to the mound before each start and groom it with his hands, getting the dirt just so. He would talk to himself, and even more bizzarely, the ball itself before delivering it to the plate. He was having fun, playing a kid's game.
The Bird was a kid himself when he was called up before that first rookie season. As he himself said, he was just grateful to big pitching in the bid leagues:
Mark Steven Fidrych was born in Worcester, Mass., on Aug.15, 1954, and was only 20 months out of high school when the Tigers invited him to spring training in 1976. "I walked into that big league clubhouse in Lakeland [Fla.] and went, 'Wow! Free orange juice!' " he recalled in a 2001 Sports Illustrated story. " 'Free chewing gum!' . . . I was in heaven."
A baseball field indeed can be a heavenly place, and The Bird commanded everyone's attention every time he threw the ball. As a kid, in later years when I played in the backyard, I would mimic The Bird, talking to ball, telling it where to go, to fool the hitter and get him to swing and miss.
The Bird had one great season. The next year, he tore cartilage in his knee, and then later his rotator cuff. While he won 19 games as a rookie, he only won 10 more total in the majors. As Tiger fans, we continued to hope and pray that The Bird would make a comeback, to bring back the magic of that '76 season. It never came.
Fidrych left baseball, took some of the money he made, and became a farmer in his native Massachusetts. It was there where he died, doing his apparently his second love of farming.
But baseball was always his first love. As he explained the feeling of pitching a major league ballgame:
""Man, I get out there and I'm so happy that I just start singing along while I'm pitching, ya know what I mean?"
RIP Bird.