9

Northboro Redux

After all the cheers and tears, it was time to move on to the next stage of life. For the first time in Mark’s twenty-nine years, his future would not include playing baseball. The initial months were difficult. “I got so mad at the reporters,” says Lorie. “They were constantly calling him or just showing up. They wouldn’t leave him alone.”

“Mark hasn’t talked about baseball,” Virginia told one in early July, explaining that he hadn’t bothered to watch the All-Star Game. “He’s still very upset about it.”

“He was really depressed,” says Lorie. “I felt bad for him. I wanted to yell at them, ‘Just give him a break. He’s been through enough; just give him a little time to sort things out.’ Of course you’re going to be depressed at that point. My parents felt bad for him. They tried to be there for him. But it was one of those things where he just needed some time.”

There was a lot of time now. The closeness of family and friends helped. His buddies had always been there. To them, he had always been Fid, not The Bird. They didn’t want anything from him; didn’t expect anything from him except for him to just be Fid. That had always been enough.

Initially, Mark stayed with his parents and Lorie in the house in Northboro he had bought for them after his first big year. “He was a very protective big brother,” laughs Lorie, who was in her late teens by then. “He would have to look over every boy who came to take me out. And he was very blunt with them. He would tell them, ‘You want to live until tomorrow, you keep it in your pants, pal.’” Lorie’s older sister remembers her complaining of a time Mark sent her back in the house to change clothes because he thought her tank top was not quite appropriate for a date.

Eventually Mark plunged back into life as Fid from Northboro. The energy and blue-collar work ethic were too strong for him to sit around. Fortunately, he had not blown his baseball money—he had invested it wisely while still in the game. He had bought a 123-acre mostly wooded farm on some of the last available land in Northboro. When he had spoken of owning a farm and driving trucks as a twenty-one-year-old rookie with the world at his feet, writers had laughed and used it as more proof of his supposed flakiness, but he had been serious all along. “Mark had always wanted land,” says longtime friend and occasional business partner Wayne Hey, “even from way back. When he got some money from baseball, he took advantage of it and bought the property. Then he added another section a few years later. He sold a little of it off at a nice profit and ended up with around 120 acres. There’s not hardly any land like that around here anymore. Everything else has been developed.”

Mark bought cows, pigs, turkey, and sheep. The farm work kept him busy. There was always something that needed to be done; something that needed to be fed, something that needed to be cleared away, cut down, or graded. Sometimes, when he was feeling down, he would take his chainsaw and cut wood for hours to work out the frustration. It’s a slow process, giving up something you have worked at and loved all your life. It’s not easy to let go. But baseball had never defined Mark Fidrych. He enjoyed playing it—he loved it—but he had never been just a baseball player. The time slowly passed, and he adjusted to life as Fid from Northboro once more.

Mark lived simply and didn’t need a lot of money—only about 6,000 dollars to pay the taxes on his land. He told a reporter, “Why do I need big money? You got a thousand dollars, you got a thousand problems. I’ve always been small. I just want to stay small.” But even as he said that there were thousands of ideas going on in his head of what to do. “Initially, we played around raising cows, cutting firewood—trying to do something on the land,” says Hey. “But it never became anything big. We always needed to have our regular jobs. But we did a bunch of things. We put in swimming pools for a few years. When we were putting in pools, it was always rush, rush, rush because it was the middle of summer and people wanted their pools before it turned cold. Then when they found out Mark Fidrych was putting in the pool we had to allow some extra time to go see the neighborhood kids and sign autographs. He would take half an hour or an hour a day and greet all the kids and the parents. I never saw him turn down anybody who wanted an autograph—he always appreciated them coming up and asking him. He always took time to talk to them.” Mark would sometimes also give impromptu backyard pitching lessons to the family’s kid after a job.

Detroit sportswriter Jim Hawkins dropped in unannounced one day in the early 1980s and found Mark chopping wood on the farm. “See what a guy’s gotta do when he gets out of ball?” Mark joked. Mark welcomed Hawkins warmly and introduced him to his seven cows, named Babe, Zorro, Adam, Hiawatha, Alfon, Bronson, and Fred. He introduced his thirteen pigs. They had names also. “I call them Porkchop 1, Porkchop 2, Porkchop 3,” Mark said. He refused to show any bitterness to the game or his fate. “Ball got me this,” he said looking around at the farm. “Do you think I would have gotten this if I’d stayed pumping gas at Pierce’s Gas Station? People ask me, ‘Don’t you think it’s tragic, what happened to you?’ I say, ‘No, it’s not tragic. What I had in Detroit, you couldn’t ask for anything better. I’ve got no regrets. I can’t have any regrets because I did what I wanted to do.’ … The Tigers did as much for me as they possibly could.

“The only thing I’d change,” he concluded, “if I would change anything, would be to listen to Rusty Staub that day in spring training when he said, ‘Slow down, boy.’”

*   *   *

Mark was moving past thirty years of age. Life was changing. Most of his friends were married. The Cut Off, his favorite hangout in Northboro, was condemned and became an empty lot. Pinball games were replaced with Pac-Man and video games. People didn’t need gas station attendants to pump their gas—every station was self-pump now. Nobody even wore leisure suits anymore. The world was changing. The decade of the seventies was becoming a distant memory.

There were occasional activities that kept Mark involved with baseball. He was an extra in the Neil Simon movie The Slugger’s Wife in 1985. He joined the Screen Actors Guild and traveled to Atlanta along with other former major leaguers such as Bucky Dent, Bernie Carbo, and Al Hrabosky to film the baseball scenes in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Mark made $100 a day and told reporters, “I like doing this kind of thing. I’ll take any part they want to give me. I don’t even have to speak any lines.”

Mark teamed with Bucky Dent later that year on a baseball camp for kids. He played in an old-timers classic baseball game and golf tournament in Anchorage, Alaska, in July of 1986 to raise money for the Special Olympics. He would sometimes see the Tigers when they came to Fenway Park and visit with old friends still on the team, but baseball slowly sank into the background of his life.

Even as Mark was adjusting to life after baseball, there was always the nagging question of what had gone wrong with his arm. All those different exams and tests by all those different doctors—no one had ever come up with an answer. Tendinitis in the shoulder, weak muscles from changing his motion to compensate, muscle spasms, scar tissue, a subconscious mental block—there never was an appropriate explanation for what had ended his career. In 1985 some friends told Mark about a clinic in Georgia in which doctors were using revolutionary technology in the form of an instrument called an arthroscope. It was a small flexible tube with fiber optics that could be inserted into joints to allow them to see exactly what was causing problems in knees and shoulders—space-age stuff. A brilliant, innovative young doctor at the clinic was rapidly pushing this technology into everyday use. The young doctor’s name was Andrews. James Andrews.

Mark went to the Hughston Sports Medicine Hospital in Columbus, Georgia, where Dr. Andrews performed arthroscopy on his shoulder and made a startling discovery: there were two severe tears in the rotator cuff. Finally, there was an answer to the eight-year-old mystery. Mark had battled all those seasons, worked so hard to come back, all the while trying to pitch with a torn rotator cuff. The manipulations, the exercises, the hypnosis, none of it had helped because the rotator cuff hadn’t been fixed. “It made me know I wasn’t crazy,” Mark later told reporters. “Now I know my problems weren’t in my head.” The rotator cuff was surgically repaired. Once again, Mark could open doors with his right arm and sleep through the night without waking up from pain in his arm if he rolled on it the wrong way.

Although the shoulder was now fixed, Mark was thirty-two years old and had been out of baseball for almost three years—it was too late for The Bird to make a professional comeback. He had moved on. Dr. Andrews would also soon move on—to Birmingham, Alabama, where he became the orthopedist to the stars, repairing more major athletes’ injuries than anyone in the country; a doctor on agents’ speed dials.

In 1986, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated visited Mark in Northboro for a feature article, ten years after his rookie season. Mark told him of a recurrent dream he was having—of being on a baseball field alone, no crowd, no cameras, no reporters; just Mark Fidrych throwing strike after strike. Just Mark Fidrych playing baseball.

Smith followed Mark on his rounds at the farm, getting slop for the pigs, clearing land at the site of his future house. Mark told him, “You don’t make any money doing this. You do it because it’s something to do. You do it because it keeps you going.” He added, “I’m in love with my land. I got it all from playing ball.”

Mark spoke of his attempts to make a living after baseball, doing several different part-time jobs. He told Smith that, in addition to his income from the farm, a few times a year he earned money speaking at banquets, did a little promotional work for various companies, and shot a commercial for Miller Lite that never aired. He had lots of ideas, sometimes the ideas would just come flooding in, but he still hadn’t found his niche. “I’ve never found another place as comfortable as a mound,” he reflected. “Never.”

Mark’s friend Wayne Hey told Smith, “Deep down, I think he’s been completely lost without baseball. A lot of people wouldn’t know it, because he’s got something to say to almost everyone.”

Overall, it was a depressing piece—catching Mark in the middle of transition, still perhaps wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life, still struggling somewhat to find regular income. But the phase didn’t last long. Mark Fidrych did not wallow in pity.

“Sometimes I still daydream about ball, but it’s over,” Mark told a reporter in 1987. “Sure I cried [when not being able to pitch well anymore] and I used to get depressed. But if you’re depressed, go to Children’s Hospital in Detroit; that’ll get you out of depression.” Mark had often visited there as a player and had been affected and inspired by the attitude of the sick children with whom he had talked.

One of the temporary jobs Mark held was as a beverage salesman. He visited Chet’s Diner in Northboro regularly as part of the route. Chet’s was an old-fashioned one-piece diner out on Route 20. A Northboro institution since 1919, Chet’s was one of the oldest diners in the northeast. The owner, Mr. Pantazis, was a hardworking man who had immigrated to the United States from Albania in 1936 and had fought for his new country in World War II. He had bought Chet’s in 1960 and ran it as a family business with his wife and children, including his pretty daughter, Ann. Mark Fidrych and Ann Pantazis had attended high school together but scarcely knew each other. Ann had been a serious honor student back then, taking mostly advanced-placement classes—they had traveled in different circles. Ann had attended Fairfield University, majoring in biochemistry, and worked as a dietician at a local hospital in addition to helping out at the diner.

Now in their early thirties, Mark and Ann discovered each other at the diner. Ann seemingly did not know about Mark’s famous past. To her he was just a nice guy with an engaging personality who had popped into her life; a guy who came by the diner and always made her laugh—there were no preconceptions of the famous athlete.

“He bugged me for a long time for a date,” Ann told a reporter in 1987. “I was seeing someone else, but he said, ‘When you get rid of him I’ll be waiting.’ My mother was skeptical.” Soon, Mark and Ann were seeing each other seriously.

For the first three months, their relationship was kept secret in the small town. “It’s my thrill,” Mark told Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith, “just her and me.” Smith wrote that Mark was nervous about commitment. The first girl he had fallen for had left him (the one who sent him the Dear John letter he wrote about in No Big Deal). Smith also wrote that a two-year relationship in Detroit had ended when the woman wouldn’t go with him to the minor leagues or to Northboro.

Ann was perfect for Mark. She was smart, levelheaded, hardworking and shared a lot of his values. “Mark never liked fake women,” says Lorie. “He didn’t like the big-city, showy, materialistic types with false fingernails and tons of makeup. He and Ann were different in a lot of ways, but their differences kind of complemented each other. I’ll never forget when Mark pulled me out on the deck one day and told me he was going to propose to Ann. He showed me the ring and asked, ‘What do you think?’ Ann made Mark so happy.” They were married on October 12, 1986.

“After they got married, Mark settled down—eventually we all settle down,” says Wayne Hey. He still had time for his buddies and fun, but usually would say, “Let me talk to Ann first,” when plans were discussed.

Mark and Ann had a daughter, Jessica, the next year. Mark embraced fatherhood like he did everything else in his life, telling reporter in 1987 that the birth of his daughter was “one of the greatest highs of my life.”

A man with a family needs a steady job, and Mark was ready to pick one main source of employment. Soon after his daughter was born, Mark walked into a dealership and plunked down $80,000 cash for a new ten-wheel Mack truck. Initially, he didn’t even know how to drive it, but with much practice he eventually learned to smoothly shift gears and maneuver the massive truck like a pro. He named the truck Jessica after his baby daughter and proudly put the name on a plate above the front bumper. He had a local artist paint a logo on the side of the truck of Mark pitching, and he became the president and CEO of Mark Fidrych Company, Inc.

As an independent trucker, Mark contracted to use his truck to haul asphalt and gravel for construction companies. There was nothing easy about the work—twelve-hour days often starting at 5:00 AM. He became a common sight at construction sites in central Massachusetts, building roads, driveways, parking lots, and sidewalks. Sometimes people would be surprised to spot him—not expecting to see Mark Fidrych in a truck named Jessica working at a sidewalk construction job on Route 12 in Leominster, Massachusetts. “People on the road wave at me,” he told a reporter in 1987. “They say ‘I didn’t think it’d be you driving it.’ I say, ‘Why not?’ I’m proud of this truck.

“A lot of people think that Mark Fidrych made enough money where he didn’t have to work,” he said. “Well, I made enough to get me a ten-wheeler and a piece of land and a house, and now I’ve got to support that. Baseball was a lot easier life. Now all of a sudden, I’m on 495 with two blown-out tires and a ton of asphalt sitting there. I’d rather face somebody with the bases loaded and no outs.”

He always took time to stop, talk to fans, and sign autographs. Once traffic was at a standstill due to construction and his truck was stopped near a downtown area in a small town. The owners of a local sporting goods store reported that they ran out of baseballs due to people running in to buy balls to take out for him to sign. They had to send an employee over to the nearest Walmart to bring back some more.

Mark enjoyed himself driving the truck just like he had told reporters he would back in 1976. He was happy being one of the guys on the job and then going out for a beer with the other workers when the job was done; putting in a hard day’s work and then coming home and jumping in the pool with his clothes on. The company that contracted his truck most frequently was Amorello & Sons of Worcester. “We’ll be working a job and a cop on duty will come over, then say, ‘Is that really Mark Fidrych driving that truck?’” Anthony Amorello told a reporter in 2000. “He’s such a down-to-earth guy you’d never guess he was a superstar.”

Mark approached his trucking business with the same enthusiasm and attitude as he had baseball. “One day I was driving home on Route 20 and there was a little construction job going on there with trucks and stuff,” says Robert Boberg. “And there was Mark, directing traffic, wearing the glow-in-the-dark vest. And he’s waving at everybody, a huge smile on his face, having a grand old time.”

There was “always a smile” on Mark’s face, according to Joe Amorello. “The rain, the snow—he was the first one on the job every day. He’d dress in a flannel shirt, and he’d be the first one to grab a shovel and get to work. He was an incredibly hard worker, and we got it done, but we sure had some laughs along the way.”

*   *   *

Together Mark and Ann built a beautiful four-bedroom contemporary house, designed by themselves with the help of an architect, on a hilltop that overlooked the farm and the town of Northboro. The house had huge picture windows that provided a spectacular view, vaulted ceilings, and the centerpiece of the living room was a twenty-nine-foot-high stone fireplace built with rocks Mark gathered from the farm. Mark called his land Blue Water Ranch. The ranch would eventually have a man-made lake for fishing and ice skating and a pool. “This is what baseball got me,” he would proudly tell visiting reporters.

“The farm was really where Mark’s heart was,” says his brother-in-law Rick Duda, Carol’s husband. Mark loved working on the farm, walking over the land with his beloved dog Patches, sitting on the deck talking to friends while watching hawks lazily float above the trees—a huge smile on his face, rubbing his hands together as he discussed his latest big plan. He put out food for deer in his backyard and enjoyed showing the deer to any children who came by the farm visiting with their parents. “Look what I’ve got,” he would say, pointing to the deer.

“I’m happy where I am,” Mark explained to a reporter in 1987 while discussing his farm and new family. “The man upstairs—the Lord, not the general manager—had some other direction for me and this is it.”

“I looked at myself and how I wanted to live my life, and so I’m here,” he noted to another reporter in 1989, after explaining that he could have made more money by staying in Michigan or in a bigger city. “When I hurt my arm, I was fortunate that I had guys I was playing ball with that said, ‘Prepare yourself for when you get out of the game.’”

Mark was involved with Jessica in youth sports as she grew. He helped coach her Little League baseball teams and youth soccer teams. “I picked Jessica to be on my farm team in baseball when she was five,” says Joe Sullivan, who became a close friend over the years. “I asked Mark to help me coach. He was great with the kids. He signed twelve baseballs; there were twelve kids on the team. After each game we gave away one of the balls to our ‘player of the game.’ We made sure each kid got a ball by the end of the year. The kids on the team all loved him.”

Mark was not a pushy sports parent; there was no screaming and yelling from the sideline or bullying referees. He noticed that girls tend not to be as competitive as he had been when he was young, and he adjusted accordingly. “He said to me, ‘I’m not sure if I should say something,’” says Hey. “Girls approached the game differently.”

Mark appeared happy just to be involved and help out. Other parents remember him having fun playing pickup basketball games with kids in the neighboring gym while waiting to pick Jessica up from gymnastics class. The Fidryches routinely had Jessica’s softball and soccer teams over for swimming parties.

“In my last years at Algonquin, his daughter Jessica was there,” says Robert Boberg. “She was a nice kid. She played on the volleyball team, and Mark would come to all the games. I would usually bump into Mark at the games. He would always ask how my son was doing because he knew he was umpiring. He was very interested in his daughter—a good parent. He was very proud of his family.”

Initially, there was little sign in the Fidrych house that the owner had once played professional baseball. Boxes of memorabilia were stored in the attic. Mark was moved immeasurably when, in her early teens, Jessica began taking items from his baseball career and bringing them down to decorate the basement. Initially, she hadn’t been too impressed with her formerly famous father’s career, but when she discovered that he had made the Aqua Velva commercial, she conceded that he must have been fairly big.

Mark had one more opportunity to scratch the itch of baseball. In 1989, he joined the nearby Marlboro Orioles of the Stan Musial League, an amateur league consisting mostly of college kids. “I just wanted to play,” Mark told a reporter. “I heard about this league.”

“He called me up,” said the Orioles’ manager, Tony Navarro. “He said, ‘This is Mark Fidrych. I wonder if you’d have a spot open on your team.’ He didn’t say, ‘I want to play for your team.’ He didn’t want to take anybody else’s job. He asked if there was a spot open.”

At thirty-five years old, Mark was the oldest player on the team. The next oldest, Andre the mailman, was twenty-six. “I kept thinking about the game all day,” Mark told a reporter before his first game. “I was just driving my truck, delivering asphalt, and thinking about the game. Just dying for the game to start. My wife … she’s never even seen me play.… When we were first together, there’d be all these phone calls, and she’d say, ‘What’s this all about?’ I said, ‘Oh, I used to play baseball.’”

Mark enjoyed the camaraderie of his new team. He tried to act like a regular guy even though the younger players were in awe of him. “I’d take my teammates out for a beer after the game, but I’m not sure how many are legal age,” he joked. He invited them to his house for a party at the end of the season. But it was hard to stay active in baseball while putting in sixty-hour weeks with his truck and helping with his growing daughter. Also, he had never properly rehabbed the arm after his surgery, which made it difficult. He eventually gave it up and relegated his baseball playing to occasional old-timer’s appearances and fantasy camps.

It was at an old-timer’s game that Ann Fidrych first saw her husband pitch in front of a crowd. “She told me, ‘You’re two different people. Your personality changed when you put on the uniform. You were running around, smiling from ear to ear, signing autographs for kids,’” Mark later said.

At another old-timer’s game, he took along his brother-in-law Rick, who was a huge baseball fan. “He took me into the dugout with him and got a bunch of guys to sign a baseball for me,” says Rick. “When they would start to sign it he would joke and say, ‘You don’t want that guy to write on your ball do you?’ I got Ernie Banks, Bob Lemon, Joe DiMaggio, a bunch of great players.” His brother-in-law got him a baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio? That, in and of itself, has to qualify as the world’s greatest brother-in-law.

Mark took Rick with him to a couple of Tiger fantasy camps in Lakeland also. At the camps, middle-aged baseball fans would plunk down large chunks of cash for the chance to spend a week playing baseball with former major leaguers. At the Tiger camps, as well as the Red Sox camps in Winter Haven, Mark was one of the favorite coaches and appeared to have as much fun as the fans. “Mark loved those camps,” says Rick. “He just had a blast with the campers, goofing off and telling stories. One time all the campers and players were up late on the last night—telling exaggerated stories of their heroics on the field; just laughing and having a good time. And, of course, the refreshments were flowing. The next morning, everyone looked terrible on the bus going to the airport. Everyone had a hangover. Mark gets on the bus and just lets out a huge yell, then busts out laughing while everyone is holding their heads.”

*   *   *

In 1996, Mark made a foray into the publishing business. He came out with a children’s coloring book based on his 1976 season, The Bird of Baseball: The Story of Mark Fidrych. The book was the brainchild of Rosemary Lonborg, wife of former Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg, who Mark had met and befriended at charity events. “Gentleman Jim” Lonborg, who became a dentist near Boston after his baseball career was finished, was involved in many charities, particularly the Jimmy Fund, the official team charity of the Red Sox, which has provided help for area children since the early fifties. Rosemary Lonborg had written two previous children’s books, one based on her husband entitled The Quiet Hero: A Baseball Story. “He was a gentleman and a good sport, and I thought that was a good example for children,” she explains. Rosemary has a passion for children and has worked for over twenty years at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the Jimmy Fund Clinic, helping children who are going through cancer treatment, assisting them with fun activities, and providing morale support. She initially had wanted to make a series of inspirational children’s books about baseball players who were good examples, but the players she contacted turned her down. Over the years, the Lonborgs and Fidryches became close as they attended many charity functions together, the Lonborg daughters often babysitting young Jessica while they were at the events. “I presented the idea of a children’s book about himself to Mark, and he loved the idea. We decided to make it a coloring book for kids based on his 1976 season.” Mark paid to have the book published himself. He also served as the distributor and marketer for the book. He had thousands of copies made and stored them in his garage.

“Whatever you do, just do it with joy,” the book concludes. “The theme of the book was joy,” Rosemary says. “Bringing joy to your life and giving joy to others. Be yourself and make other people happy. That’s an important lesson for children, and Mark was a great example of that.”

With his pickup loaded down, Mark drove to bookstores asking them to place the books. But it was not a money-making deal—he gave away many more books than he ever sold. He would later give out autographed copies of the book on Opening Days at the Northoboro Little League each year. He gave away hundreds of books to Rosemary’s patients at the clinic. He gave away autographed copies all throughout the region over the years.

*   *   *

Mark remained close to his parents throughout their lives. Virginia died in the early 1990s as a result of several medical conditions and complications from a broken hip. Paul Fidrych died in Jacksonville in 1998 at the age of seventy-four. Mark had realized how much baseball had meant to his father, often telling reporters, “I lived his childhood fantasy.” Baseball provided a lifelong bond between father and son. Once, Mark was able to introduce Paul and a friend to Ted Williams. Words can not describe how much it meant for a baseball fanatic who grew up within fifty miles of Boston to be introduced to Teddy Ballgame by his own son. “Now I can die in peace,” Paul Fidrych was heard to say after Mr. Ballgame walked away. Although Mark was gracious in giving credit to all his former coaches from Little League through the majors, he always named Paul Fidrych as his greatest inspiration and best coach.

Over the years, reporters would seek Mark out with regularity for “where-are-they-now” type articles and special occasions. He always welcomed them and was open. He was easy for them to find—his number was in the phone book. Sports Illustrated ran articles on him in 1986, 1997, and 2001.

“That whole ride, it was probably the biggest roller coaster any human being could be on,” he told one writer, speaking of his time in the limelight. “Anyplace you went there was press, television. Anyplace you went in the airport, people recognized you. You were like Mr. Clean (in the sixties). You know how Mr. Clean was a household word? Everyone knew Mr. Clean. Well, everyone knew The Bird. To me, it was great.”

He always maintained that he wasn’t actually talking to the ball, but only looking at the ball while reminding himself before each pitch to watch his mechanics and verbalizing what he wanted to do with the pitch. But he admitted, “It was pretty neat seeing the cartoons of me talking to the ball in the Detroit newspapers.”

With a trace of nostalgia he would tell them how much he had enjoyed his time in the majors. “Every time they have an All-Star Game, I think of the time I was there,” he said in 1996.

And, above all, he was upbeat. “You know, Mark Fidrych is a lucky guy,” he summed up one interview. “I got a great life now,” he told another reporter in 1999. “I got a family. I got a house, I got a dog. I would like my career to have been longer, but you can’t look back. You have to look to the future.” He told ESPN in 2000, “I have a family, I have a lot of things that, at fifteen, I thought I’d never have. Life is beautiful.”

Is that how he truly felt? Really? By all accounts, yes—that’s exactly how he felt according to those who knew him. If he had bitter feelings, he kept them to himself. Maybe it took a lot of effort, but he kept them to himself. Had he come along a few years later, he would have made untold millions of dollars in baseball. A few years later and medical care would have been able to diagnose and fix his rotator cuff and give him more years in the majors, but he never expressed regret to reporters, family, friends, or old teammates. “I talked a lot with Mark,” says John Hiller. “He was never bitter. He was always a very happy man. He met a great woman and was very happy with his life. His career allowed him to do a lot of great things.”

“He never even slightly suggested any regrets of his injuries,” said Joe Amorello, a friend who worked with him for over twenty-five years. “He was just happy to have the time he had in sports. He considered himself a lucky man.”

Mark did occasionally express regret to reporters that he didn’t get more endorsement deals and, despite a desire to do public relations work for Major League Baseball, was never offered anything. Hadn’t he done a little bit of good for baseball? It would have been nice to get a little something; you know, a little something for the effort. Who better than The Bird to represent Major League Baseball to a new generation of fans? Who better than The Bird to make them remember the fun in the game at a time when steroid scandals and chronic boorish behavior by stars were trying the resolve of fans? But the call never came.

Mark remained a Tiger fan, frequently going back to Detroit for games and events, or catching them when they came into Fenway Park. He kept a special place in his heart for Michigan and the people of the state who had treated him so well. “When I’m on that plane (returning to Detroit) I get goose bumps thinking about the games I played, thinking about what I did, how much fun I had,” he told a reporter in 1996. “I’m lucky because when I go to Detroit, or basically anywhere, when people recognize me, they ask, ‘How’s it going? What’s your life like?’ They’re always very, very concerned. That, to me, is like, Wow! A person who saw me twenty years ago is actually concerned. They want to know how Mark is doing. What a great feeling to have. I don’t know if other ballplayers can have that feeling.”

On another visit to Michigan he said, “It’s neat [still being recognized]. I don’t do that many appearances, but I enjoy it. I like seeing the children of the parents who followed my career with the Tigers. I like seeing the parents tell them about the time they saw me pitch. It’s part of my life.”

The first time Ann accompanied Mark to Detroit, she remarked at how many friends he seemed to have there, as everyone from baggage handlers at the airport to people on the street called to him and wished him well. “I don’t know any of these people,” he confessed.

“Do you have any idea how big your husband was?” Jim Hawkins asked Ann when Mark introduced them in 1999 while visiting Detroit.

“I’ve heard stories,” she replied.

“You have no idea,” said the man who wrote Go, Bird, Go. “You had to be there.”

Mark, along with a number of former Tiger players, participated in the special activities associated with closing Tiger Stadium. On September 27, 1999, before the last game at the old stadium, Mark, wearing his Tiger uniform, got the largest round of applause as he ran to the mound. He dropped to his knees and smoothed the dirt, then took some soil from the mound and, with tears in his eyes, put it in a bag. Then, he ran off the field of his youth one last time.

*   *   *

It was during the late 1980s that Mark Fidrych discovered two things: (1) The Bird could make money for good causes, and (2) he had a blast doing it. Mark began to spend more and more of his time doing charity work. He attended countless charity events in the Detroit area and, as a policy, never accepted an appearance fee. He asked for only compensation of plane fare and hotel room.

He participated in a charity basketball game at Boston Garden. “Can you believe they let me on the parquet floor?” he asked a reporter.

He helped support the local diabetes walkathon in Northboro, attending and giving out copies of his book to all the walkers. He hosted a golf tournament for the American Heart Association in Oxford in 1994.

There was the golf tournament held by former high school teammate Bill Stapleton each year at Sandy Burr Country Club in Wayland to raise money to fight Parkinson’s disease, the Special Olympics Golf Tournament each year at Bally Meade in Falmouth, the Baseball Assistance Team dinner in New York to raise money to help those in baseball who are in need, ex-teammate Steve Grilli’s Cooperstown event for the Hospice organization of Central New York, the Globe Santa fund-raiser in Boston to benefit less fortunate children in Massachusetts at Christmas, a Wiffle-ball game for the Jimmy Fund in Worcester, the Cape Cod Fall Classic Genesis Fund Fishing Tournament to benefit sick children, and the annual Joe Cronin Fishing Tournament for the Jimmy Fund. There were many others.

A disproportionate amount of Mark’s charity work was for disabled children. He regularly attended fund-raising events for special-needs children and even had an event at his farm for them that was attended by Big Bird. “Mark really had a soft spot for special-needs children,” says his sister Paula. “He was so patient with them.”

A reporter in 2000 described Mark participating in the annual Dan Duquette Skills Challenge in Fenway Park in which he “gently helped handicapped children soft-toss a baseball into a circle and hit off tees and then played ball with children of sponsors.” The event raised more than $100,000 for the Genesis Fund, which supports research into birth defects and aids the families of children with birth defects. “The kids don’t know who I am, but their parents do,” Mark explained. “It was a kick. In the bullpen, I told the kids how I warmed up out here many years ago. I enjoy giving back. I’d like to do a lot more, but it’s tough when you’re out trying to make a living.”

“It’s called giving back,” he told another reporter in 2001. “If you can help a younger kid out that is a great thing to have because people helped me out.”

The charity in which Mark had the biggest impact was the Wertz Warriors of Michigan. Organized in 1982 by former Tiger slugger Vic Wertz, the group uses an annual cross-country snowmobile ride across the state to provide complete funding for the Special Olympics Michigan State Winter Games. After Wertz died, other Tigers such as Bill Freehan and Dave Rozema helped out. Each of the fifty to seventy riders raises at least $3,500 for the seven-day, 900-mile snowmobile trip. In the early 1990s Mark met two members, Larry King (the truck driver not the television personality) and Bob Ernst, while at a celebrity duck hunting expedition in Arkansas and struck up a friendship. They told him about the work the Warriors did and Mark was hooked. He had never snowmobiled before, but that did not stop him. “We had to help teach him how to ride and keep an eye on him the first few years,” says Warrior chairman Victor Battini. “But he did okay, there were no major wipeouts.”

Beginning in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, and ending in Petoskey, each day the riders zigzagged their way across northern Michigan, stopping at restaurants, lodges, schools, and watering holes along the way. At each stop, Mark, as the group’s headliner, would make a speech and greet visitors. He signed thousands of autographs and posed for thousands of pictures. A highlight event of the ride was the participation in opening ceremonies at the Special Olympics Winter Games. They gave the athletes rides and interacted with the kids. “It’s not the snowmobiles for me, it’s the Special Olympics,” Mark said in 2006. “It’s the athletes. It’s another thing to help out where you can.” The February 2009 ride was Mark’s seventeenth straight year of participation.

“Mark was the catalyst for the group,” says Battini. “People would come out to see him. He was the nicest athlete I’ve ever met—just an unbelievably great guy. He had absolutely no ego; just an unassuming, humble, fun guy to be around. We loved the guy.

“One of the first years he rode with us, we got into Elba, Michigan, late one night,” continues Battini. “It had been a long, cold ride and we were all dead tired. My phone rang at the hotel, and a guy said, ‘There’s a bunch of people waiting here for Mark Fidrych.’ There was a little place about fifty miles away that people were expecting us that we hadn’t known about. Mark was already in his pajamas, but he jumped up and said, ‘Let’s go.’ So we rode over there, and he talked and stayed until the last person got a picture and an autograph. To this day, we still get twenty to thirty thousand dollars out of that little place every year.

“Mark always had time for everyone,” adds Battini. “I never saw him turn down a request or walk away before everyone had an autograph. And he was just great with the kids, the Special Olympians. He would give them rides and talk to them. They all loved him. Mark just had a way of connecting with people. It didn’t matter who you were, he had a way of making you feel like you were the most important person in the world. He could spend a few minutes with someone and make them feel like they were his best friend.”

Kathy Hinchman worked with the Special Olympics and witnessed Mark’s effect on the kids. “The athletes were thrilled,” she says. “He would speak from the podium onstage, but he didn’t speak as a professional athlete, he spoke as someone who loved and respected those athletes. He was dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans, and a Wertz Warrior jacket. When he walked around in the hallways, he didn’t walk with security or an entourage, he walked around as Mark, the Wertz Warrior.” The Special Olympians didn’t know, and most didn’t care, that he had been a famous baseball player (although their parents certainly did). To them, he was just a guy who showed genuine interest in them as individuals, who made them laugh and encouraged them. The kids loved him as Mark Fidrych, not The Bird.

*   *   *

Over the years, Mark was a familiar face around Northboro and in the area. He attended town meetings, regularly hung out at the American Legion, and was frequently seen driving his truck (honking his air horn at kids in their yards) or walking in a store holding his daughter’s hand. He was happy to donate time, autographs, pitching lessons, or, once, even a live pig to local charity auctions. He apparently always had some copies of his coloring book with him to hand out (did he never leave home without them?). In the winter he drove his Ford F350 pickup truck with a snowplow on the front and plowed streets and mailboxes, making a chalk mark on the dashboard for each mailbox he cleared because he got paid by the city per mailbox. “If he would see an old lady shoveling her driveway, he would stop his route and help her clear it,” says Rick Duda. “Everything was, ‘Yes ma’am, yes sir.’ He was always polite to older people.”

He was seemingly never in a bad mood, always having something to say to everyone, always with a joke or something funny and a quick easy conversation. There was no such thing as a routine greeting from Mark Fidrych. He might yell out across a crowded drugstore to the wife of a friend, “Hey, has your husband gotten over that case of herpes yet?” Or, seeing some acquaintances raking a huge pile of leaves, swerve his truck through the pile, scattering leaves everywhere, and drive off howling hysterically. He would meet people at charity events or in the stands at a game or simply in a restaurant, strike up a conversation, become friends, and invite them to visit or call. And he would mean it. He would remember a name and ask about the kids or wife of someone he had only briefly met before. He seemed to enjoy talking about construction, trucks, farms, and family even more than baseball.

If you had Mark Fidrych at a wedding reception, you didn’t need to worry about entertainment. His dancing became the stuff of legend. “Oh, he thought he was dancing, but it was horrible,” said Nancy Amorello, who termed it The Fidrych Dance. “He’d be flailing his legs, limbs flying everywhere, leaving five or six people with a bruise.”

“I had a double wedding with Kirk Gibson,” says former Tiger Dave Rozema. “By the end of the night, Mark had danced with every single female in the place. All the old ladies loved him. He was just having a blast.”

To friends, he seemed to never change. “Mark was the same from the time he was fourteen until he was fifty-four,” says Brad Ostiguy.

“When you would see Mark after some years, it would always be just like you never left,” says Dan Coakley.

“He always said he would come back to Northboro, and he did,” says Ray Dumas. “And he never changed. He would come up to me and slap me on the back so hard it would almost knock me down—I’m eighty-seven years old now—he’d just walk up on the porch and say, ‘Hey Mr. D, where’s Mrs. Dumas,’ just like he had never left the neighborhood.”

“Fame never changed his personality,” says Carol.

Fame may not have gone to Mark’s head, but he recognized how much his fame meant to other people and how much happiness it could bring them. He would spend time talking with people who approached him—actually giving his time, not just a handshake and a greeting. He was able to talk to people and come across as the down-to-earth guy that he was, even to perfect strangers. He could make other people feel important. Fans often remarked to others that they were happy to learn that he was a special guy after meeting him.

Ronnie Pappas was one such man. Pappas was a sixty-six-year-old Cape Cod man dying of cancer in 2005. He was a huge baseball fan and loved Mark Fidrych. Mark was contacted by Ronnie’s sons, and he took the time to visit him in Cape Cod, talking baseball and giving him an autographed baseball, bringing joy to his final days.

Tom Marino, manager at the Northboro Legion Post, recalled a time when a man came into the American Legion and asked Mark if he would autograph a baseball card for his son who was having an operation the next day. Mark looked at the card and said, “No.” Everyone was shocked because they had never heard of Mark turning down an autograph request, especially for a kid. But then he said, “But I’ll be there at ten o’clock in the morning and I’ll bring it.” Mark showed up the next day at the hospital in his Detroit Tiger uniform and visited with the kid for two hours before he had his operation.

“Mark never turned down a request for an autograph,” says Carol. “And he never charged for autographs.” At his first card show, Mark was signing autographs and the kids in line kept handing him tickets. Mark later explained, “I said, ‘Whoa, time out. What are these tickets?’” Someone informed him that each of the kids had to pay an extra fee for tickets to get his signature. “I said, ‘Forget that.’ If they want me at the show, they pay me, but they can’t charge extra for tickets. It’s my say, so I say it. If they won’t do it that way, I say, ‘Fine, you don’t want me then.’”

He told another reporter in 1996, “I only do card shows when the promoter gives free autographs. The promoter can pay the ballplayer and then the ballplayer can do his thing for two hours. That’s just the way I’m handling that.”

He had always enjoyed interacting with fans, especially kids, and continued to enjoy that into middle age. As he got older, he appreciated the attention and the chance to step back and relive the glory. “The best thing I loved about playing ball was seeing a little kid’s happy face,” Mark said. “I went to a Bruins game, and a kid came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Fidrych, can I have your autograph?’ And I said, ‘Little buddy, you just made my day.’”

He gave people the impression that he never realized how special he had been. “He was so unassuming, he actually told me once that he couldn’t believe people got so excited about what he did as a Tiger,” says Victor Battini of the Wertz Warriors. “He said, ‘I was just having fun.’ But I think he enjoyed it. I think he liked the recognition.”

Fans would see him in a seat at a Tigers game or at Fenway Park and he would strike up a conversation that would last for innings. On a plane from Boston to Detroit for the 2006 World Series, a man discovered that the dark-haired lady in the middle seat was also going to Detroit for the Series. “My husband used to play for the Tigers,” she said casually. “Oh really, who?” the man asked. With that the tall curly headed man in the window seat leaned forward and introduced himself.

But around Northboro, Mark downplayed his fame. “It was funny,” said Northboro selectman Jeff Amberson, “people not from Northboro would see Fid and go, ‘Hey, that’s Mark Fidrych, the former major league pitcher,’ while people from town saw a really good, really nice guy who was a pig farmer and owned a trucking company and, oh yeah, way back when played baseball.”

One story goes that someone came into Chet’s and saw Mark working there. “I know you from somewhere. Your face is familiar,” the stranger said. “Well,” Mark replied, “I used to work at the gas station after high school.”

“My son was a big baseball fan,” says Joe Sullivan, “but it was a long time before he would believe that Mark had actually played in the majors. He just didn’t think he acted like a former professional player. He thought Mark was just a guy who had gone to school with Mom and was good friends with Dad. My son finally went down to the baseball card store and asked the guy if he had a Mark Fidrych card, and he pulled out a whole stack. But a few years later, when he was older, he joked with Mark, ‘I bought your rookie card—it only cost a dollar.’”

Mark became a regular working at Chet’s Diner every Saturday morning. Chet’s, like everything else in his life he valued—his family, his farm, his dog, his truck—fit Mark perfectly. There was no pretense. A sign near the grill still states, “Prices subject to change according to customer’s attitude,” as regulars in flannel shirts, jeans, and old baseball caps belly up to the counter on stools. Chet’s was the only diner in Northboro that had a framed copy of Rolling Stone with a picture of one of its workers on the cover. Mark cooked, cleaned tables, poured coffee, laughed, and talked to everyone, thoroughly enjoying himself, with Mother Pantazis cooking up her famous hash, Ann working behind the counter, and Jessica waiting tables—frequently reminding her dad to quit talking so much because he was falling behind.

One spring morning Mark was working the breakfast shift and an eight-year-old boy and his father recognized him. The kid asked Mark if he was going to Florida to try out for the Red Sox that year. “Well,” Mark replied, “I’m not sure, do you think I should?”

“Oh yes,” the kid answered. “The Sox could really use your pitching.”

Mark flashed the kid and his dad a big smile and said, “Well, then I just may head down to spring training.”

The kid beamed. “Dad! Mark is going to try out for the Sox!”

Mark stayed involved with local baseball. He gave free clinics to youths in town and sometimes threw batting practice to the high school team at Algonquin. He showed up for Opening Day of Northboro’s Little League every year. He was always friendly to the Little Leaguers, tried to greet each one, and handed out autographed copies of his coloring book. As the kid who had made good, he enjoyed returning to the same Little League field he had played on and encouraging the kids. Little Leaguer Michael Upton recalled getting an autographed baseball from him: “He handed me the baseball and said, ‘Always keep up your dreams and you’ll succeed.’ That was an awesome day for me.”

Mark allowed the Boy Scouts of local Troop 101 to use his farm for their campouts. He had met the Scouts and their leaders when they would stop at Chet’s for breakfast before outings. He kept telling the leaders they should use his farm for campouts, telling them how beautiful it was there at night. After they took him up on the offer, they enjoyed it so much it became an annual event. He would give them stuff to burn, let them play with the pumpkins that had gone bad, let them take hikes in the woods, and sit around the evening campfires with them and tell stories. They got the feeling that he enjoyed the weekends more than they did. One of the scouts, Daniel Rowe, will never forget his first camping outing at the Fidrych farm. “We were getting ready to make a bonfire and the adults told me and a few of my friends to go make a fire, so we did,” he says. “We made a bonfire out of long spears of wood and pallets and, of course, put some lighter fluid on it. We lit it up, and forgot to have some water buckets nearby, so it quickly became a very big fire. Someone ran up to get him and told him, while we were trying to get water from the nearby stream. He came down and said something along the lines of, ‘Oh that is nothing. When someone told me there was a huge fire, I thought it was going to be burning halfway across the field. This is what I expected you guys to do.’ He even invited us back the next year.”

*   *   *

People sometimes put on a certain act for cameras, to maintain a carefully crafted image. Friends sometimes remember someone only in good terms. A true measure of a man’s personality and character can be found in his behavior away from the camera; in how he acts when the media are not there, and how he treats total strangers. John Sanderson of Reading, Michigan, had a chance encounter that perfectly illustrates the true Mark Fidrych. “We go up to the upper part of Michigan every year over Thanksgiving deer hunting,” Sanderson explains. “On Friday nights we used to go to Newberry to a big restaurant for dinner—it was about the only place to eat in town that time of the year. For several years we would see the same group of people there. One of them was a tall guy with curly hair, always wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap with his hunting clothes. He was always cutting up and laughing. He stood out in the crowd because he was so tall and had that curly hair. One year I asked the waitress who he was because he looked familiar, and she said, ‘I’m not sure what his name is, but he used to be a famous baseball player.’ One of my friends said, ‘Mark Fidrych?’ And she said, ‘Yea, I think that’s it.’

“So she talked to him, you know, some celebrities don’t want to be bothered, but he jumped right up with a big smile and came over to our table and talked for a long time. He joked and talked about his baseball days. I hadn’t been that big of a baseball fan, but I remembered watching him on TV. He didn’t have any hard feelings or grudges about his career. He said that what had happened to his arm could have probably been fixed easily nowadays. He joked about how little money he made his first year. He said even though he later played on another team he always wore a Tiger hat out in public.

“When we got home, I mentioned it to my grandson who was about fourteen at the time. He was shocked. He’s a big baseball fan. He gave me some baseball cards to see if I could get them autographed when we went back the next year. So the next time we went back, November of 2007, I took them. He was real nice about giving autographs. He joked with me, ‘You’re not going to sell them are you?’ He said, ‘I want you to promise that he’ll get them to keep and not to sell.’ He signed them ‘To Brad.’ Brad’s cards were wrinkled and creased. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a perfect card in a little plastic case and gave that to me. He said, ‘Just bring me back a letter from Brad next year.’ He really lit up like a lightbulb; he seemed happy that we recognized him. I offered to buy his meal, but he said, ‘No thanks. I’m just glad you remembered an old guy like me.’ He was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. The world needs more people like that. The next year when we went back, I had the letter from Brad, but the restaurant had closed and I never did get to see him and give him the letter.”

*   *   *

Monday, April 13, 2009, Mark Fidrych woke up early and started to work, just like every day of the previous twenty-six years. He had spent the day before, Easter, with family, having the Fidrych traditional Easter egg battles with his sisters. He had given Carol a load of autographed Mark Fidrych coloring books to pass out to the kids in her grade school class.

Mark had a job scheduled with his truck, Jessica, for Monday morning, but the site wasn’t ready when he arrived, so he returned home. On the way, he passed a friend. They talked truck to truck for a few minutes with Mark mentioning that he was going to take advantage of the down time to do some needed repairs; then he drove back to the farm and crawled under the truck to work on it.

And that’s where his friend, Joe Amorello, found him when he stopped by later.

The coroner would rule that a piece of Mark’s clothes got caught in a rotary part of the engine. He was fifty-four years old.