The Summer of '76 (The Bird Was the Word)

On Mark "The Bird" Fidrych

I remember being a youngster, not knowing much about baseball. It was the summer of 1976. I lived in Clarkston, Michigan, at that time. I was four years old. Mark "The Bird" Fidrych took the state of Michigan by storm. The summer of '76 was my initiation into baseball. The great rookie who single-handedly gave the Detroit Tigers respectability appeared everywhere.

The Oakland Press, one of the newspapers we used to get every day, had included iron ons of Mark Fidrych during the summer when he was taking everything by storm. I'm sure that my mom ironed on "The Bird" to a tee–shirt or three of mine.

Fidrych would fix up the mound between pitches. He would talk to the baseball and tell it where he wanted it to go. In his rookie season, he threw 24 complete games. In 19 seasons and 526 starts, former Tiger future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander has thrown 26 complete games — and nine of those were shutouts. 

The game has changed. The most complete games in a season for Verlander is six. The last guy with 20 complete games was Fernando Valenzuela (another rookie superstar in 1981, five years after the Bird) in 1986. Amazingly, Jim "Catfish" Hunter threw 30 complete games in 1975. But Fidrych was an incredible dude in that fabled summer. 

Down the road, even after he had faded from view, I grew my hair like his so it would fly out of my baseball cap. I thought it was so cool. Looking back, I can't even believe my dad would let me wear my hair like that. But it was for a good reason. In fourth and fifth grades, I had my school picture taken with my Tigers shirt and baseball hat on. I was a Tigers fan.

And it all started during the summer of "The Bird." 

A version of this was previously published on the blog.