I was searching for baseball poems on the Internet. Nothing could be more poetic than a poem about Mark Fidrych. He was special. He played the game with heart, took the nation by storm and never once winced or complained when his story ended in tragedy.
He never made big money, a great rookie season playing for the MLB minimum and then he was done. Went back to Massachusetts drove truck and farmed and died tragically a few years ago when a truck he was working on fell on him.
Need I tell you that the Bird was close to my age, close to my heart and a hero of mine for all the right reasons.
Mark Fidrych, Baseball’s Beloved ‘Bird,’ Dies at 54
Published: April 13, 2009
DETROIT — Mark Fidrych, the golden-haired, eccentric pitcher known as the Bird, who became a rookie phenomenon for the Detroit Tigers in 1976 and later saw his career cut short by injury, died Monday. He was 54.
His death occurred on his farm in Northborough, Mass., Joseph D. Early Jr., the district attorney for Worcester County, said in a statement. A family friend discovered Fidrych’s body beneath a Mack dump truck, Early said. He appeared to have been working on the truck at the time. The Massachusetts State Police began an investigation into the accident, he said.
During the summer of the nation’s bicentennial, Fidrych (pronounced FID-rich), then 21, electrified the baseball world. “He was the most charismatic player we had during my time with the Tigers,” said Ernie Harwell, the veteran announcer, who began broadcasting Tigers games in 1960. “I didn’t see anybody else who was as much of a character as he was."
Fidrych’s record in 1976 was 19-9, with an earned run average of 2.34, the best in major league baseball, and 97 strikeouts. His 24 complete games were the year’s best in the American League. Fidrych was named the rookie of the year in the American League and finished second to Jim Palmer in the race for the Cy Young Award.
Called “the fidgety, 6-foot-3 bundle of nerves” by The New York Times, Fidrych had a mop of golden curls and a gawky gait that prompted a minor league manager, Jeff Hogan, to compare him to Big Bird, the “Sesame Street” character. The nickname — shortened to the Bird — stuck, but his appearance was only one of Fidrych’s vivid traits.
He often talked to the baseball, fidgeted on the mound and got down on his knees to scratch at the dirt. Fidrych would swagger around the grass after every out and was finicky about baseballs, refusing to reuse one if an opposing player got a hit, and rejecting fresh ones he declared to have dents. He liked to jump over the white infield lines on his way to the mound, with a wide, toothy grin that, coupled with his hair, made him easy to spot even from the upper reaches of Tiger Stadium.
“Everybody really had a fondness for this young guy, especially the young girls,” Harwell said. “After he got a haircut, they’d run into the barbershop to see if they could get the curls off the floor."
Mark Steven Fidrych was born Aug. 15, 1954, in Worcester, Mass. His wife, Ann, whom he married in 1986, and a daughter, Jessica, survive him. The son of an assistant school principal, Fidrych attended public and private schools in Worcester and entered the 1974 amateur draft.
But Fidrych, a right-hander, was not picked until the 10th round, and he spent two seasons in the minor leagues before making the Tigers after spring training in 1976.
He threw a few innings as a relief pitcher and made his first start in May. He captured the attention of Tigers fans in his first game as a starter by throwing seven no-hit innings and allowing only two hits in a 2-1 victory against the
Cleveland Indians.
A month later, Fidrych pitched the Tigers to a 5-1 victory over the
Yankees in a nationally televised game in front of a capacity crowd at Tiger Stadium. Fans, who rocked the stadium with applause, refused to leave until Fidrych came out from the dugout to tip his cap. Weeks later, he was named the starting pitcher in the 1976 All-Star Game. But he gave up two runs and took the loss as the National League won, 7-1.
Still, Fidrych’s reputation grew as the season progressed, drawing near-capacity crowds to stadiums across the country as he performed his antics and kept winning ballgames, falling one short of 20 victories.
The Tigers, who paid him the league minimum, $16,500, for the 1976 season, gave him a $25,000 bonus and signed him to a three-year contract worth $255,000. Picking up a series of lucrative endorsements, including a deal with Aqua-Velva, an aftershave maker (he joked to The Detroit Free Press that “it was a lotion, not an aftershave, because I really wasn’t shaving yet”), Fidrych wrote an autobiography with the author Tom Clark called “No Big Deal.”
But as it turned out, his rookie season was his biggest.
Fidrych sustained two serious injuries as soon as the 1977 season began, tearing the cartilage in a knee while cavorting on the field in spring training, then suffering a rotator cuff injury during an early-season game. “I was playing Baltimore in Baltimore, and about the fifth inning, something happened,” Fidrych wrote. “The arm just went dead."
Fidrych did not have surgery until 1985, but by then his career was long finished. After 1976, he played in only 27 games through 1980. Released by the Tigers in 1981, Fidrych competed briefly with a minor league team owned by the
Boston Red Sox.
His lifetime major league record was 29-19, with a lifetime E.R.A. of 3.10, in 58 games, all but two of them starts.
Fidrych went home to central Massachusetts, where he bought a dump truck, becoming a licensed commercial truck driver, and eventually his farm in Northborough, where his family owned a diner.
Fidrych returned to Tiger Stadium in 1999 for ceremonies marking the last game there. A cheer went up from the crowd when Fidrych pawed at the dirt on the mound.
“He was a little naïve, just a sweet kid, really,” Harwell said. “He captured the public’s
imagination.”
And now, the poem that brings it all back. How interesting that it is told via a man with a routine job, a man who could have made this routine job a career, but a man who is striving for more.
I Once Was Mark The Bird Fidrych's Substitute Mailman
David Schaafsma
I know Northboro pretty well
You go door to door every day
You get to know a town well, maybe too well
But for years I was a substitute carrier
On Keigo’s route, the name Mark Fidrych, The Bird
On one of four hundred mailboxes
‘74 pumping gas at the Sunoco
Algonquin diploma in hand
Spring training ‘76―a Tiger
If they want me to be a bat boy,
I’ll do it
Coleman gets the flu,
Bird gets his shot
Retires the first fourteen Indians, two hitter
That summer Ford pardons Nixon
Bird starts the All Star game
The summer of disco,
Mark borrowing
Tommy Veryzer’s i.d. to dance The Fried Egg
You remember what he was like:
When I’m out there the mound belongs to me
Talk to the ball, point where it has to go
Throw back balls that have hits in them
Manicure the mound on hands and knees
Strut around the mound after every out, run on
And off the field every inning
Manager Ralph Houk said, I’ve never seen anything like it
Not even Walter Johnson started this fast
This is how it fell apart, and it always does
But not usually this sudden
Goofing around in center field, spring training ’77
Blows his knee out, cartilage torn
In July, his arm, it just feels dead,
Torn rotator and it’s over
Nineteen wins one season, eight wins the next four years
And just like that he’s done, he’s toast
Summer ‘74 pumping gas and in ‘82
Back pumping gas, glass slipper
No longer fits
A contractor in Northboro today
53, just like me
I like to drive truck, he said when he played
So that’s what he does, commercial trucker
Ten wheeler, hauling gravel and asphalt
Some people say I look like him
Same height, same age, same curly mop of hair in those days
Road trip that summer to see him at Tiger Stadium
Couple kids ask me for his autograph
My buddies have a good laugh as I sign their gloves
I left the P.O. and Northboro in ‘97
Keigo retired and I had the chance to take his route
I would have become Mark Fidrych’s mailman!
But to take any job for ten years
Makes it your career
I had bigger plans for my life
I ran into him just once:
Crazy blizzard winter of ‘95
Three feet of snow,
see a guy digging out mail boxes
As I come with the mail the guy says
I’ll have this dug out in a couple minutes, sir
And I see it was the Bird
Sir, he calls me, a guy who once pitched The All Star Game!
No problem, I appreciate it, I say, and I did
Standing there, with an armful Of Rolling Stones and electric bills
