Halfway through his first season as a major leaguer, Mark (“The Bird”) Fidrych has returned innocence to the summer game, and pure joy to Detroit.
“Go Bird. Gooooooo Bird! Go Birrrrrrrrrrd!”
The four men in the yellow Big Bird costumes are leaping up and down along the first base box seats, leading cheers in the $4.50 section. Down behind home plate, a woman is holding her hand over her mouth, as if she is witnessing The True Life Second Coming. Around in the left field stands, the entire gallery is on its feet hooting and hollering; out in dead center field a giant cloud of marijuana blows lazily up into the big lights and a fifteen-foot sign appears, looking as if it’s been scrawled by an idiot. It reads THE BIRD IS THE WORD
Out on the mound here at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, a twenty-one-year-old pitcher, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, goes through his warm-up tosses before facing the Baltimore Orioles. Obscure as you and me just a few months ago, The Bird is now a bona fide phenomenon. Here in the Motor City, he has been a hometown favorite since his first victory, but it was only in late June that he became a national hero by whipping the league-leading Yankees on national TV. Twenty-eight million people saw his now highly publicized antics, and since then he has wormed his way into the national heart like no one in recent sports history. This evening, as the Orioles game is about to begin, The Bird goes through a few of his colorful routines.
He gets down on his hands and knees and smoothes out the pitcher’s mound. The woman sitting next to me behind home plate sighs, “He looks jes like a little boy out there making sand castles.” Her girlfriend, Agnes, who works for Ford Motors, shakes her head, gnaws on a hot dog, suddenly leaps up, spreads her legs, cups her mustard-covered fingers over her mouth and bellows: “Go get ’em, Bird!” Then she sits down and smiles sweetly. The Bird is through working on the mound, and one might think his warm-up tosses would begin in earnest. But instead he begins doing a few deep knee bends, then jumps up and down a few times—jumping jacks, by God. The lad is working out, doing calisthenics! A couple of seats to my left, Hugh Dugan, a steel salesman, his wife and their two sons are enjoying The Bird’s pregame antics.
“What’s going on here?” I ask Hugh, while sighting The Bird through my binoculars. “I mean, what’s happening?” The fans have just given Fidrych a standing ovation simply for running out on the field.
Hugh, a big man with a likable warm face, smiles: “You gotta understand Detroit,” he says. “This town is a great sports place. We go see anybody. We go see the Lions and they always lose. We go see the Pistons and they stink. We go see the Tigers and they haven’t had anything exciting since 1968 when we won it. You don’t have a lot of Broadway shows in Detroit. You don’t have much to do. Now this kid comes, and he’s a winner. What’s more, he’s a natural. I mean, he’s such a likable kid. I don’t know how to put it, but he’s got two things going for him. One, he’s a hell of a pitcher. Everybody saw the Yankee game on television and how he talks to the baseball and congratulates his teammates after good plays, and everybody is writing about that. But I’ve been following baseball a long time, and this kid has got the goods. He keeps the ball low and away, and he gets tougher when men are on base.”
Hugh’s wife, a dark-haired version of Loretta Haggers from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, adds, “And he’s so cute. Will you meet him?”
“Sure.”
“Well, you tell him the Dugan family loves him.”
After The Bird has finished his pregame antics, the first batter for the Baltimore Orioles steps in. The Bird is hunched over already, double pumping, talking to the baseball. Using high-powered binoculars, it’s fairly easy to read his lips. The Bird is saying, “Get your ass in gear. Get it over there now. Get it on.” There’s a rhythm to his words, as if the point of his talk is to put himself into a kind of trance. Unfortunately, Orioles leftfielder Al Bumbry seems not to have been drawn into The Bird’s Baseball Bardo. On the first pitch, Bumbry cracks a line single to left field, and the fifty-one thousand fans at Tiger Stadium give out a huge groan. Now Bumbry, a fast man on the bases, inches toward second and the fans start in with that chant again. “Go Bird. Go Bird. Go Bird.” Orioles centerfielder Paul Blair lays down a perfect bunt and nearly beats it out, but he is caught by a quarter step on a beautiful scoop throw from the third baseman, Aurelio Rodriguez. The swiftness of Rodriguez’s throw seems to get The Bird hyped. He turns toward third, nods, and then throws a ball outside to the Orioles’ leading hitter and the All-Star second baseman, Bobby Grich. Annoyed at himself for missing the corner, The Bird takes the ball and motions toward the plate with it, as if he’s reminding himself where he wants to place it. The fans adore it. “Talk to him, Bird. Talk to him, baby. Show him now, Bird!” And The Bird does. His next three pitches to Grich are knee high and hit the outside corner. On pitch number three, Grich swings from the heels, misses by a good foot, and leaves Bumbry an easy target at third for catcher Bruce Kimm. When Rodriguez applies the tag to Bumbry, the fans are on their feet. Another standing ovation, and The Bird is leaping, gawky and stork like, off the mound, raising his right fist to Kimm and leading the team off the field to the dugout. I look over at Hugh Dugan, who smiles.
“This kid will last forever if he doesn’t break his leg on the dugout steps,” Dugan says. “Have you ever seen anyone come off the mound like that?”
When it is all over, Fidrych has posted his ninth win, a 4–0 shutout. After the last out, The Bird stops at third base and shakes hands with his entire team, pounding them on the back, hugging Ron LeFlore, slapping hands with Bruce Kimm, pummeling Rodriguez, Rusty Staub, and Alex Johnson. I start to leave, but there’s no way out. The fans have started to scream again. “We want The Bird! We want The Bird! We want The Bird!” A huge armed phalanx of security guards rims the dugout. Kids are scrambling over the roof. The Big Birds are leaping up and down, flapping their arms. Finally, after two minutes, The Bird appears, waving from the dugout, and there is a cheer that rocks the pillars of the old ball park.
For a young man only two years out of high school, Mark Fidrych’s unlikely rise from class C in the minors to the major league sensation of 1976 sounds something like a 1940s Jimmy Stewart baseball scenario.
The irony is that Mark Fidrych was not even a great high school pitcher. “He won a few and lost a few,” as Tiger public relations man Hal Middlesworth puts it. At age nineteen, Fidrych was still in Northboro High School. When the school wouldn’t let him play any more baseball there because of his advanced age, he transferred to nearby Worcester Academy. The school didn’t have much of an athletic program, but Tiger scout Joe Cusick was impressed with what he saw of Fidrych. “First of all, there was his body,” Cusick remembers. “He had a lean, string-bean body and that’s a good sign. We don’t like to get pitchers who have too many muscles in their upper arms, shoulders, and chest. It makes them muscle-bound. The other factor was that Fidrych got the ball over the plate. He had unusual control for a high school kid.”
On June 9, 1974, Fidrych was signed and sent, at semester’s end, to the Tigers’ rookie team in Bristol, Virginia. There he pitched in the shadow of Bob Sykes, a fellow rookie who went 10 and 0 (and today remains in the minors). Nonetheless, Fidrych performed well enough to be sent on to Lakeland, Florida, the Tigers’ class C club. In two and a half months, he posted an uninspiring 5–9 record and 3.77 ERA, but the Detroit management’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “He was a lot better than his record indicated,” says Tiger manager Ralph Houk. “He kept the ball low and away.” By mid-July of the following summer, Fidrych was promoted again, this time to double-A ball in Montgomery, Alabama. He pitched exactly fourteen innings and was promoted after a month to the Evansville, Indiana, triple-A ball club, the last stop before the major leagues. This time Fidrych finally began to fulfill the Tigers’ expectations. He posted a 4–1 record and, even more impressively, gave up only 1.59 runs per game over forty innings.
Encouraged, the Tigers invited Fidrych to spring training this year, where his ERA immediately bloated to 4.66 in a handful of outings. What saved Fidrych were the other Tiger pitchers, who performed with equal lack of distinction. Manager Houk took a flyer and decided to bring Fidrych along after spring training as a nonroster player (meaning that he was officially still on the Evansville roster).
Fidrych first pitched in relief against the Oakland A’s on April 20, gave up a hit to the first batter, and was promptly taken out. Three weeks later, he pitched a scoreless inning against Minnesota in relief. Finally, ten days later, he got his first start against the Cleveland Indians.
The rest is instant history. He went the route in that start, giving up only two hits, winning a 2–1 decision. After a 2–0 loss to Boston, The Bird suddenly began to fly. In rapid succession, he won eight straight games, compiled a 9–2 record by midseason and was named the American League’s starting pitcher for the All-Star Game. His record is now 11–4 and he also has the lowest earned run average in the major leagues—1.97 at the beginning of August.
Everyone seems to love The Bird now (he was so nicknamed for his remarkable resemblance to Big Bird of Sesame Street). Wherever he ventures he is surrounded by great, teeming hordes of reporters; teenage girls, who swoon in his presence; middle-aged mothers, who seem to feel some uncommon bond with him; and even middle-aged men, who find in The Bird’s youthful exuberance something they themselves have lost. Yet, for all of the national Birdmania, it is merely the thinnest imitation of what is going on locally in Birdland—formerly known as Detroit. Here, The Bird has become a cause célèbre. Daily, he receives over a hundred letters and presents from fans—homemade cakes, bird dolls, flowers. The Ford Motor Company recently loaned him a new Thunderbird so he could travel in style (he had been driving a Dodge Colt). Breakthrough, a Detroit right-wing group, has been trying to cash in on The Bird’s instant fame by distributing banners of Fidrych with the logo “The Bird Came Like A Breath of Fresh Air. The Bird For Mayor. Recall Young” (Detroit Mayor Coleman Young). The Bird hardly takes the posters seriously, though he seems to enjoy them: “That’s life,” he says amiably. “A bunch a nuts, right?” For all his fame, however, Mark Fidrych still makes a humble $23,500 a year—a base pay of $16,000, plus the standard rookie’s bonus for sticking with the team. Indeed, his salary has become almost as legendary as his pitching skill. Michigan State Representative Dan Angel introduced a bill into the state legislature that would mandate Tiger general manager Jim Campbell to tear up The Bird’s old contract in midseason and issue him a better one. Though the Tigers refused—Campbell said he’ll take care of The Bird next year—there does seems to be a case for special pleading here. According to the Tigers’ public relations department, the average attendance for a home game in which Fidrych does not pitch is a mere 20,594. On The Bird’s second home start, the attendance at Tiger Stadium was 17,894. Since then, the young pitcher has regularly drawn sellout crowds of fifty thousand for his home starts. By figuring the average Tiger ticket at three dollars, which local columnist Joe Falls did, and multiplying that by the twenty-seven thousand extra fans The Bird brings in, he represents an eighty-one-thousand-dollar bonus for the Tigers each time he pitches. Adding concessions, which Falls figured at slightly less than a dollar a head, The Bird’s last four home starts alone have been worth an added half-million-dollar gross. Of course, the visiting team gets 20 percent of the gate and the American League takes a 4 percent cut, but the Tigers make up for that on the road, where The Bird has drawn 32,678 to Texas, 30,425 to Minnesota, and 37,504 to Cleveland in recent starts. Not bad for a team that is mired hopelessly in fourth place, still playing under.500 ball.
In the Detroit Tigers’ locker room after the Oriole game, The Bird is standing bare-assed, sipping a Stroh’s, the local beer, and surrounded by twelve reporters, many of whom are sticking microphones in his affable, smiling face. And what a face. It is long and loose-lipped like Mick Jagger’s, his curly blond hair falling over his ears like an untrimmed plant. The Bird is the picture of sensual, all-American innocence. Lanky, wiry, and muscular, his whiplash body is deceptively strong. At first glance, one’s impression is that The Bird looks quite a bit like a rock star, most especially like Roger Daltrey of the Who. All resemblance to the articulate, intelligent, and very British Daltrey, however, is shattered when The Bird speaks. Here is a language that is pure baseball Americanese, as much a surprise at first hearing as his antics are at first sight.
Example: an overweight local sportswriter, wearing blue-and-white checkered pants and a blue Alligator shirt, approaches The Bird with a tape recorder and summons up his interviewer’s deeply resonant voice: “Well, another victory for Mark Fidrych. Yessir, this has been quite a year for the young man from Northboro, Mass. Tell me, Mark, what are your feelings as you stand here on the eve of your ninth victory?”
The Bird waves his gawky muscular arm through his mass of yellow ringlets and shakes his head: “Well, to tell you the truth, I, ah… see up dere onna clock, it’s ten-thirty, and I’d like to go out and get laid!”
The sportscaster is agog and it’s clear from the guy’s scrunched-up look of pain that he’s wishing there was some way he could get this comment past the station manager and on the air. But no way. Perhaps a technical question.
“Mark, this was your first shutout of the year.”
Fidrych: “It was? Boy, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Ah, yes,” says the announcer. “That’s very good! But what I wanted to know, Mark, is just what was it you were throwing out there? Was it a slider? A fastball? Does your pitch sink?”
Fidrych takes another slurp of beer and tries to swallow it without smashing his face into the half dozen mikes that are perilously close to his nose.
“Well,” he replies in a voice so soft it can barely be heard, “I jes throw it… and it goes somewhere.” Fidrych sits down on a stool with his back to his locker. Behind him, clipped onto the gray metal, is a picture of an eighty-one-year-old Japanese shot-putter. Beneath the picture is the caption “One of a kind.” I look at the photo and try to figure out why it’s there. A local reporter tells me that Mark’s mother sent it.
“Mark, Mark,” says an eager reporter. “Do you think the media will have any effect on your game?”
Mark looks around at the ten microphones threatening him and the notebook pads being scribbled upon.
“No,” he says. “I’m the same kid now I was when I got into this game. And I want to get out of it the same way.”
The reporter is persistent: “Come on, Mark. Isn’t there some difference in the way you are working? I mean all these interviews, all these people hassling you and following you around and shoving microphones in your face. Well, isn’t that getting to you a little bit?”
Fidrych shakes his head and for the first time looks a little weary. “I leave my phone off the hook,” he says. “Then I can get some sleep. I mean I can’t even go out and get a bite to eat. It’s ungodly.”
Jerry Green of the Detroit News nods and gets a look of intense seriousness in his little wolf eyes. “Mark,” he says, in a quietly melodramatic voice. “I’ve got one question for you.”
“What’s that?” Fidrych says softly.
“What’s my name?”
Fidrych smiles and waves his arms around like a kid who is splashing water in his backyard rubber pool.
“Gee, I don’t know,” he says affably.
“You don’t know who I am, Mark?” says Jerry Green, getting a little put out and tugging on the lapel of his herringbone jacket. “I’m the sports editor of the News, and I write for SI!”
“Gee,” says Fidrych, “what’s SI?”
Jerry Green looks up at the rest of the reporters as if he has just been stoned. “Sports Illustrated, Mark! I mean, I put your picture on the front page of the News and you don’t know my name?”
“Well, gee, I’m sorry,” says Fidrych. “I mean, I don’t read the papers. Maybe I should, huh? People say that the papers are important. I should read them. I should know your name. I should. But so many people come around here. It’s hard to remember everyone. I should, though, huh?”
“How about the money, Mark?” says another reporter. “Do you think the Tigers should give you more dough?”
“Heck no,” says Fidrych. “I’m already making more than my old man ever made. Hey, what if they tore up my contract, gave me a lot of money and it all went to my head? What would happen then?”
Earl Weaver, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, is sitting in the dugout with his aging superstar third baseman, Brooks Robinson, and third base coach Billy Hunter. They are talking about The Bird:
“I’ll tell you one thing,” says Weaver. “Bobby Grich says he doesn’t have overpowering stuff. He’s not a Nolan Ryan or a Jim Palmer. But he has that natural ability to change speeds. He’s like Catfish Hunter that way. And that’s something you can’t learn. I mean, Hunter will throw about ninety different speeds at you. The Bird does the same thing. He got Paul Blair on a fast slider last night, so Paul comes back and tells Lee May about it. May gets up, gets behind two strikes, and is waiting for that fast slider. He’s all set. The Bird gives him a slider all right, but he takes just a little bit off of it. We all saw it coming in and, well, that was all she wrote. You can’t teach that kind of stuff. It’s the one facet of the game you can’t teach. That kid’s got it. I’ll tell you one thing more. I wish to hell he was on our side!”
I am sitting in the locker room with Rusty Staub, the Tigers’ best hitter, and Bill Freehan, their aging but still powerful catcher. Fidrych had agreed to meet with me the next morning, but he is now out on the outfield grass, shagging flies. Staub, a big happy-looking man in his early thirties, is pulling on his sweat socks and shaking his head: “Whatever you see is for real. There’s nothing fake about Mark. But I just hope they don’t spoil him. People like Bill and I are doing our best to help him. We’ve been around a while, and we know how heavy it can all get. I mean we don’t run his life for him, but if he asks us then we will try to help.”
“We don’t want anybody screwing him,” Freehan says.
“All in all, he’s handling it pretty well,” Staub says. “Still, it could all change just like that. I know. I’ve been around both ends of it.”
I watch Staub and Freehan go out on the field, and Ron LeFlore, the Tigers’ All-Star center fielder comes in. Behind him is The Bird. “Sheeet, Bird,” LeFlore says in a joshing voice and pointing at The Bird’s scraped-up old tennis shoes and battered torn Levi jacket. “Look at these old shoes and this jacket. You are making money now, man. You’ve got to get some real clothes.”
“I like my tennis shoes,” says The Bird. “Heck, they’ve already stopped me from wearing cutoffs. They want me to wear leisure suits. I’m not gonna wear that stuff. That’s ungodly.” He halts and suddenly turns away: “Oh, my gosh!”
Before I can ask him what’s wrong, The Bird is running through the locker room into the training room. A few minutes later he comes back. “My daisies,” he says. “Jesus. Jack forgot to water my flowers, and now they are gonna die. I hate it when things die.”
LeFlore looks up at him and shakes his head. “He ain’t nothing but a baby. You just can’t help but love The Bird. Let me tell you one thing. We all love playing behind The Bird. He is the realest thing that’s ever hit this team and we don’t want anybody fooling with him, on the field or off.”
Cookie Baker is the wife of Art Baker, who owns Auburn Discount Drugs. Cookie is an attractive middle-aged mother who is now waiting patiently in line along with about four hundred other people for The Bird’s autograph. The Bird himself is seated at a makeshift desk that is roped off to give him a little breathing space. Cookie is ecstatic: “What do I think of The Bird?” she says. “I think he’s the greatest thing for Bicentennial America. The Bird is gonna lead us back to the top. The Tigers, Detroit, the whole country.”
A second later, a woman describing herself as the cheerleader for a team of Little Leaguers called the Sterling Heights Giants pulls three kids up to me. “Are you a writer?” she asks, introducing herself as Mrs. Poplawski.
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, the Sterling Heights Giants are behind The Bird 100 percent. I just wanted you to know that. Since The Bird started talking to the baseball, all my kids talk to their baseballs now. They also talk to their gloves, their bats, and their hats.”
Mrs. Poplawski looks at me with a very serious expression. Then she breaks into a grin. “I’d like you to see Sean talk to a baseball,” she says.
Behind her, a miserable-looking kid is staring down at his feet, which point in opposite directions.
“C’mon, Sean.” says Mrs. Poplawski. “Talk to the ball.”
Sean looks down at his ball and starts to talk but no words come out. “Ah ah ah,” he says.
“Well, he does it every day,” says Mrs. Poplawski. “He usually talks to the ball just fine. I don’t know what’s come over him.”
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Fidrych (Mrs. F. is known as Mother Fidrych to her son, Markie) and their two daughters, Carol Ann and Laurie, are sitting in the third floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel. This is the Fidryches’ first trip to Detroit to see their son pitch. The game is on Friday night, and they are calming their nerves with a few beers.
Mrs. Fidrych is a small woman with a pixie haircut and shy, frightened eyes. She is also quite a talker. Like Mark, she seems to say anything on her mind: “They gave my Markie a new car today. The Ford people. They gave it to him. A Thunderbird. Isn’t that wonderful? Markie gave us his old Dodge Colt. He’s at a team barbecue at Rusty Staub’s house now.”
“This must be pretty much for you,” I say. “I mean all this attention.”
“It’s very exciting,” says Mr. Fidrych, a heavyset man with sideburns, a mustache, and a large friendly face.
“That was so nice of them, the Ford people,” says Mrs. Fidrych. “Markie is having a dream come true. I just hope nothing happens.”
“Oh, Mother,” says Carol Ann, Mark’s teenage sister, “what could happen?”
“They could hurt Markie. I mean the crowd. I hear that they don’t let him get any sleep. You know that. He’s an excitable boy, anyway. He doesn’t get much rest. The reporters are always asking things. A lady called me up from the New York Times and wanted to know what kind of things I have on my walls. I had to describe my whole house to her. But it’s all wonderful, too. The neighbors just cry when Markie pitches.”
“They cry?” I said.
“Yes, they do,” says Mrs. Fidrych. “The next-door neighbor cries and the lady at the filling station cries when she puts in my gas. She says Markie brings tears to her eyes. I mean he’s such an honest boy. So good. Do you know he went to Holland just to see the tulips? He brought me back some, too, and a clock.”
Carol Ann pouts and shakes her head. “If I know Mark, he went over for the girls!” she says.
“No,” says Mother Fidrych, shaking her head. “The tulips. He brought them back. He’s a very affectionate boy. I don’t see him so much now. I get phone calls but I would rather get letters. I guess I’ve got to stop treating him like a baby. He’s a major leaguer now. A man. But I worry. Still it’s all so wonderful.”
“Oh, shut up, Mother,” says Carol Ann.
“Don’t talk like that to your mother,” says Mr. Fidrych. He turns to me. “This is all a little exciting for us, you know. I mean, it’s wonderful.”
“Did you ever think Mark was going to make it?”
“Sure,” says Mr. Fidrych. “He was always a good athlete. He won in high school, he won in the American Legion, and he did well in the minors.”
“Did you encourage him in his style?” I ask.
“No,” says Mr. Fidrych. “That’s just his way of loosening up. He’s always been a hyper kid. I went to see him when he pitched in Boston, and when I got into the locker room he couldn’t stop moving. He was doing chin-ups the whole time he was talking to me.”
“This is all so wonderful,” Mrs. Fidrych adds. “People give us free meals and drinks because I tell them I’m The Bird’s mother.”
“Really, Mother,” says Carol Ann, squirming on the bed.
“Did you see the Big Birds over at the stadium?” I ask. “People dress up like giant birds… and jump up and down and flap their wings.”
“Really!” says Mrs. Fidrych. “Isn’t that wonderful. They make special birds all for Markie.”
“Not special birds, Mother,” says Carol Ann. “Those are the Big Birds from Sesame Street. You can buy them in any department store.”
This piece of news does not faze Mother Fidrych. “Oh, isn’t that nice,” she says. “Markie has helped bring back Sesame Street.” She sips her drink and smiles affably out at the world.
The Bird is on the mound again. There are fifty-one thousand fans in the stands. It could be a repeat of the TV game against the Yankees, or of the recent shutout against the Orioles. But tonight things are just a little off. The ball is coming in low and away, but a bit too much away. The Royals, whose whole hitting philosophy is to hit the ball where you can (if the ball is low and away, don’t try to pull it, but instead hit it to the opposite field), are waiting a little longer and getting their quick bats around in time to poke line drives to right and left. Still, the only run they are able to score is on an infield hit. Unfortunately for the fans and The Bird, Dennis Leonard, the Royals’ fastballing stopper, is at the peak of his form. Perhaps miffed that neither he nor any of the Royals pitching staff was picked for the All-Star Game, Leonard is popping in his fastball. Leonard fans eight, and The Bird goes down to defeat, 1–0. (It will become a Bird trademark: Fidrych’s three other defeats have been either by one run (4–3) or by shutout (2–0 and 1–0).)
In the locker room immediately after the game, The Bird is sitting at his locker, drinking beer. Even here, we can hear the screams of the Tiger fans, “We Want Bird! We Want Bird! We Want Bird!” The Bird blinks, confused. “I lost it,” he says. “I just didn’t feel mean out there tonight, you know. I was getting behind the hitters, 2 and 0, 2 and 1. I just didn’t have it. I didn’t challenge them.”
The reporters are surrounding The Bird, thrusting mikes into his face. “Do you think the media had any effect on your lack of meanness?”
“No,” says The Bird. “I could say that, but it would be a cop-out. I mean, I just didn’t have it.”
He gulps and what looks like a tear starts to come to his eye, and suddenly you realize that this is really the youngest of kids. Suddenly, from the doorway, a man with graying hair and a worried look rushes into the crowd.
“Mark, you gotta go back out there. They won’t leave.”
The Bird looks down. “I lost,” he says. “What do they want me for?”
“They love you, Mark,” a reporter says. “Losing 1–0 is no crime.”
“It’s not that I lost,” The Bird says. “It’s that I didn’t challenge them.”
“Talk later,” says the stadium man. “Please! They’ll tear the place apart.”
Mark Fidrych agrees to get on his old sweatpants and shirt, and go out. He is barefooted as he runs down the runway, the whole great gaggle of scribes behind him. Out on the field the cops are holding arms. The Bird waves to his fans. “BIRD BIRD BIRD,” they scream.
Back in the dressing room, after the place clears out a bit, LeFlore looks at me and smiles. “We hate to lose behind The Bird. He’s such a nice kid. Really, he ain’t nothing but a baby.”
The Bird is relaxing with his family at their room in the Pontchartrain. He is wearing his Muhammad Ali T-shirt, old Levis, and tennis shoes, and he is drinking a Stroh’s. Cuddled up on the bed next to him is his little sister, Laurie. Carol Ann is curled at the end of the bed; his parents are sitting in chairs.
“You don’t look too sad now,” I say to Fidrych.
“Nah,” he says. “I’m with my family now. I don’t want to take the game home to them. But I’ll worry about it all night. Beat my pillow and beat a few beers.”
Mother Fidrych looks concerned: “Markie, Markie, listen. I got a book for you to read. It’s ‘How to Hang Loose.’”
Fidrych opens his rubber lips and shakes his head: “Yeah, you drop your pants. That’s how you hang loose.”
“Now, Markie,” says Mrs. Fidrych.
“Don’t tell me what to say, Mother,” The Bird says. He looks over at me and opens his hands. “She’s always telling me what to say.”
“When did you start this talking to the ball?” I ask, breaking the silence.
“Markie talks to cars, too,” says Mother Fidrych. “When they don’t work, he just talks to them, and then they do.”
“Yeah. I talk to ’em all right. With a monkey wrench. If they don’t work, I beat the hell out of ’em. Then they work!”
“What did you think of the fans giving you a standing ovation even though you lost?”
“That was great. It’s life, isn’t it! I mean, losing and all. But the fans have been great.”
Father Fidrych shakes his head. “I’m glad you came back out,” he says. “The people who stay to see you are the people who have the seats out in the bleachers and way up in the upper deck. They are the real fans. The rich guys who have the good seats along the baselines aren’t really the real fans.”
“That’s right,” Mark says. “I love the kids in the bleachers. Hey, there was a cop up there in the bleachers who gave a kid hell. Started beating on him for no reason, and the kids out there just did a job on that dude. That cop was history, man. I don’t like to see the police hassling kids. I don’t like poor people not being able to have good seats. It’s not right. I mean I’m one of those kids.”
“I met a Puerto Rican lady today,” says Mother Fidrych, “and she even liked you.”
“Hey, Ma,” says Mark. “Really. ‘Even.’ Hey listen, I’m Puerto Rican myself. I feel that way. I hate it when they scalp tickets and some rich guy can get a better seat. It’s not right.”
“Yeah,” says Father Fidrych. “And they are selling pictures of you on T-shirts and you aren’t getting a cent. We ought to see about that!”
“No,” says Mark. “That’s life. They gotta make money, too. If some guy wants to make money selling my picture, then let him. That’s life isn’t it?”
“But, Mark,” says Mr. Fidrych. “They’re taking advantage of you.”
“So what? It doesn’t hurt me. I’m happy this way. I don’t want to get involved in lawsuits and things. I just wanna play ball. I don’t ever wanna change.”
Fidrych points to the man on his T-shirt, Muhammad Ali. “Here’s a champ. Here’s a man who is himself. You gotta hand it to him.”
Suddenly, Mother Fidrych is up out of her chair, rushing over to her son.
“Joe Louis,” she says. “I never knew you liked Joe Louis, Markie!”
“Oh, Ma,” says Mark. He hugs her and tells her that she is staring at Muhammad Ali. “I love you, Ma,” he says. “But sometimes.…”
Unfortunately Mark Fydrich’s mother wasn’t worried in vain. He finished his rookie year (1976) with a 19–3 record, and was runner up to Jim Palmer for the Cy Young Award. He was given a $225,000 contract by the Tigers and things looked bright indeed. But the very next season he tore his rotator cuff while pitching in Baltimore and he was never the same pitcher after that. His natural sinker was gone and he was hit hard. By 1980 he was out of baseball. The Bird went back to Massachusetts where he bought and drove his own dump truck. Eventually he bought a farm, but at the age of fifty-four he suffered a strange accident. A friend found him under one of his trucks, dead. It was ruled that he’d had a heart attack. Thus ended the life of one of the most beloved players in sports. Even though he was really only a star for one year, it was his eccentricity and sweetness which won over the entire nation. In the year of the bicentennial he and his family seemed to embody the very best in America. Talent, kindness, and an innocence that I doubt anyone will see again.