Farewell to The Bird

I know this is a Mets site, but the death of Mark Fidrych compels me to post.

I recently turned 40, which means when Fidrych blazed across the baseball sky in 1976, I was seven years old and just really getting into baseball. The Mets were always number one, but back then we memorized the lineups of the Big Red Machine and the Dodgers and the Yankees and the Royals, too, because they were the teams to beat.


And though the Tigers were awful, they had The Bird, whose on-field antics were surpassed only by his absolutely incredible performances. And so we mimicked his delivery, the talking to the ball, the smoothing of the dirt on the mound. He was a true character and a phenom in every sense of the word, and he had only that one phenomenal season before injuries to his knee and shoulder brought a premature end to the fun.

You can read more about Fidyrch in The New York Times and in Jim Caple's column on ESPN. Reading the tribute pieces, I realized I forgot - or maybe never realized - just how dominant Fidrych was. He had 24 complete games as a 21-year-old rookie, including 12 complete games in his first 13 starts. In his third and fourth starts, he threw two 11-inning complete games.

What a different game it was back then.

The remembrances also recall how huge Monday Night Baseball was in the pre-Internet, pre-SportsCenter days. It was the only time you could see teams from other cities, so when Fidrych beat the Yankees, seemingly every fan was watching.

Fidrych should also be remembered as a man who played with pure joy, who never displayed any regrets for his career ending so soon, and for being so down to earth. As a father of a soon-to-be-seven-year-old son who is playing his first Little League game tonight, I wish there were more role models out there like The Bird.