Mark Fidrych, 1954 - 2009

In the early 1970’s, my grandfather retired from General Motors and my grandparents bought a mobile home in Lakeland, Florida and began spending their winters there.

To say times were different then would be a gross understatement, of course, but let me add this one thing. During spring training, major league ball clubs would bring their players in to southern and southwestern stadiums, much as they do now, but with one major change: you could show up in the parking lot outside the stadiums and wait for players to arrive first thing in the morning – and actually get them to sign autographs.

You could still do this now, I suppose, but I don’t think things would quite be the same. When you begin paying people seven and eight figure salaries, they begin to feel and act differently. Not intentionally, necessarily, but still. However, in the ‘70’s, while professional baseball players did make good money, many of the lesser known players – even some starters – didn’t quite make the shoot-the-moon salaries we see today. So if you were a fan, you could actually watch players arrive at spring training, driving pickup trucks and even riding in on bicycles, unshaven and half awake at 7:00 am, before they’d even showered.

So the first winter my grandparents spent in Lakeland, Florida – where the Detroit Tigers hold spring training -- my father bought a baseball and went down first thing in the morning and got the autograph of every single Detroit Tiger player he could find. If you’re a Tigers fan who remembers the great “Bless You Boys” Season of 1984, you’d recognize many names on it – “Sweet Lou” Whitaker, Lance Parrish, Alan Trammell…

And Mark Fydrich.

Fydrich passed away this week at his home in Massachusetts, in an accident on his farm. Rather than trying to sum up anything about him, I found a great article online through CNN.Com, from a sportswriter working for Sports Illustrated Online that really summed up the brief magic Fydrich brought with him onto the baseball scene – and emphasized the tragedy of how quickly his career came and went, especially when you consider how he really came out of nowhere and was transported to national fame in a matter of months.

At a time when the baseball community is beginning to settle down a little from the initial shock of yet another series of steroid scandals, and maybe beginning to try to come to grips with how to handle all the problems Major League baseball has created for itself and its fans, it’s nice to remember a time when all these problems weren’t around, when baseball was more of a game and less of an industry, and when baseball fans were seen as just that – fans, and not consumers.

Here are excerpts from the article:

“It's impossible to look back at Fydrich's remarkable 1976 -- knowing what we know now about pitch counts and such things -- and not cringe at the way manager Ralph Houk abused him. Of course, nobody was counting pitches in 1976, but even so it's hard to believe a manager would allow a rookie to throw five extra-inning games. Five! Or how about this stretch: From July 29th to August 29th, The Bird threw a nine-inning game, a seven-inning game, a nine-inning game, another nine-inning game, another nine-inning game, a 10-inning game, a nine-inning game and an 11 1/3 inning game -- each one on three-days rest. Imagine that: Fydrich threw 73 1/3 innings and seven complete games in a month.

To give you a comparison, K-Rod threw 68 1/3 innings all last year…

Everyone knows how it ended for Fidrych. He hurt his leg, then his shoulder, and though he did pitch well at times, he never quite felt right again. He only started 27 games in the big leagues after his rookie season. He tried to hang on, and at times toward the end it was sad to watch. I remember the game he started in Cleveland in 1980, when he was 26 years old, going on 40. He pitched to two Indians batters. Miguel Dilone singled and stole second. The Bird hit Dell Alston with a pitch. And The Bird was taken out of the game.

Two weeks later, in front of 12,000 or so in Toronto, The Bird pitched his final game. In the fifth inning he gave up a three-run homer to Ernie Whitt. Then he got Lloyd Moseby to ground back to him. And the career was over.

In many ways, time has reduced Fidrych to one of the 1970s fads -- like Evel Knievel, bell-bottom jeans, disco and the guy who said "You doesn't have to call me Johnson." But Fidrych was more than that. He was what's possible. He was an overgrown kid living his dream. He was magical. Monday was a sad, sad day in baseball. First we heard that Harry Kalas, the Philadelphia Phillies announcer with the voice that sounded like it should crack the clouds, died.

And then we heard that Mark Fidrych was found on his Massachusetts farm, dead at 54. There are a lot of things to remember, but I mostly recall watching him kneel on the pitchers' mound and smooth out the rough Cleveland dirt that day when I was a kid. All these people around us laughed and pointed and yelled insults. The Bird did not seem to mind at all. He just kept on working the dirt. He knew the score. He was exactly where every 9-year-old boy in America wanted to be.”

– Joe Posnanski, “Inside Baseball”, an online article from SI.Com