The Bird who lit the summer of '76 with joy

AMERICA AT LARGE: Nobody had more fun playing baseball than Mark Fidrych

IN No Big Deal, the genre-bending book he co-wrote with Mark (The Bird) Fidrych after that magical 1976 baseball season, the poet Tom Clark summed up his subject: "Combine Harpo Marx, the Fonz, Gyro Gearloose and Neal Cassady into one flaming package, loping into history and poetry on the pipe-cleaner stilts of an Everglades flamingo."

He was a bright-burning comet, materialising unannounced to capture the fancy of an entire nation for one unforgettably joyful summer, then disappearing with equivalent abruptness.

But for the four-and-a-half months he held centre stage, his combination of joyful exuberance, zany antics and skilful artistry served as a refreshing reminder of what baseball used to be like when we played it for fun. And nobody had more fun playing it than Mark Fidrych.

Fidrych, who died at 54 this past Monday, was an anomaly in the solemn world of big-time sports. He held conversations with baseballs, and thought nothing of interrupting a game to cast off his glove and crawl around on his hands and knees to landscape the dirt around the pitcher’s mound to his satisfaction. If an opponent got a hit, which didn’t happen all that often, he might ask the umpire to take the offending ball out of play so that it – the ball – might reflect on its misbehaviour.

He was a gangly, overgrown kid, and the personification of pure, unadulterated pleasure.

The United States was celebrating its bicentennial that year, but by the time the summer was half over Fidrych's face was on more magazine covers than Uncle Sam's. Sports Illustratedpaired him on its cover with his namesake and doppleganger, Big Bird, from Sesame Street. Rolling Stonefeatured him on its cover, along with a disarmingly candid interview that sent the Detroit Tigers' entire PR department into red alert mode. When he was interviewed by NBC following a win in his first nationally televised game, he let slip a four-letter barnyard expletive that led Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to fine him $250 – a significant penalty for a 21-year-old kid who was only making $16,500 a year.

When he arrived in Florida for spring training he was a “non-roster invitee’,’ not even included on the 40-man Detroit roster. By July he was the starting pitcher in the All Star game and the object of more attention than any rookie since Jackie Robinson had broken the colour line almost 30 years earlier. Although the season was nearly six weeks old when he made his first start, he won 19 games that year and led the American League in complete games and earned run average.

Beatlemania a decade earlier had nothing on Bird-mania. When the Tigers’ team bus rolled up to a road hotel, scores of squealing teenaged girls would be waiting, shouting his name.

By the time the year was over he was the subject of six books (including a children's colouring book), although the one he wrote with Clark, the poetry editor of the Paris Review, was the only one with which he cooperated. When the Beach Boys played Detroit, they invited him into their helicopter to fly to the gig. Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant asked to have their picture taken with him.

Through it all he remained the picture of youthful innocence. When the Tigers played a series in Chicago that coincided with a widely publicised King Tutankhamun exhibit at the Field Museum, the Bird wondered if this King Tut was “some big rock star I don’t know about”.

Despite his newfound celebrity, he drove a second-hand car and lived in a cheap apartment, where, he said, “sometimes I get lazy and let the dishes stack up, but they don’t stack too high. I’ve only got four dishes.”

He enjoyed his wild ride, but he never let it change him, and when they asked him what he’d do if all of this suddenly came to an end, he cheerfully replied, “Oh, I’d probably be back in Northboro, working in a gas station.”

And then, all of a sudden, it did. And he was.

Had he been born in this day and age The Bird would never have made it to the major leagues at all. By the time he was six the developmental psychologists would have diagnosed him as dyslexic and suffering from ADHD. They’d have put him in special classes so that instead of repeating both the first and second grades he’d have learned to read, and they’d have pumped him full of pills so that instead of bombarding his classmates with raisins fired across the room and then racing off to the playground for baseball, he might have been a dutiful student and handed in his homework, which he rarely did.

And since he wouldn’t have been 19 (and hence ineligible under Massachusetts interscholastic rules) by his senior year at Algonquin High, he wouldn’t have been packed off to Worcester Academy, and the major league scouts might never have seen him pitch.

Due credit here should go to Mark’s father. Paul Fidrych was an educator by trade, an assistant principal in Northboro. Another parent might have been infuriated, or embarrassed, by his son’s academic shortcomings, but Fidrych pere recognised Mark’s limitations and encouraged paths more likely to result in success, whether that be an after-school job at the local garage or the decision to sign with the Tigers instead of playing college ball in New Mexico. Paul knew Mark would never be a student.

The Bird’s moment in the limelight, alas, predated the multimillion-dollar contracts that would shortly become commonplace, but at the end of the season the Tigers tore up his contract, rewarding him with a $25,000 bonus and a new pact that guaranteed him $225,000 for three years.

In the spring of 1977 he tore up his knee in a bit of horseplay in the outfield. He was sidelined for several weeks, and when he tried to pitch again an imperceptible alteration in his throwing motion resulted in a torn rotator cuff, and a pitcher who had dominated major league hitters a year earlier couldn’t get anybody out.

He scuffled along for a couple of years without success, winning just 10 more games in parts of four seasons, and before he was 30 he was out of baseball. He had used part of his windfall to purchase a pig farm in central Massachusetts, and he turned his attention to that with the same enthusiasm he had brought to the baseball diamond. He got married, had a daughter, and supplemented his income from the farm by driving a truck for a contractor.

I hadn’t seen a lot of the Mark over the past few years, but he sometimes played in the charity golf tournament we used to run for Our Lady’s Hospital at Crumlin. He’d drive straight from the pig farm to the car park at South Shore Country Club and unload his clubs from a dusty and somewhat odoriferous pick-up truck, and his playing partners invariably reported that they’d never enjoyed a round as much as one spent in The Bird’s company.

He was at his farm and working on his truck on Monday when a jack collapsed. He was crushed to death.

Clips of the 1976 Fidrych were playing on television sets from coast to coast that night, as those of us who had experienced the Summer of The Bird attempted to explain what it was like to those too young to remember it. Whether the speaker was describing Mark Fidrych or the privilege of having watched him, the words “pure” and “joy” seemed to come up a lot.