Vic Socotra

14 April 2009

Bird is the Word

(The Bird Grooming the Mound)

It is raining and I have committed myself to a trip across the rivers, and a long walk in the rain. Thank goodness it held off long enough for the home opener downtown, though if the game had been in Phillie, at Citizen’s Bank Park, they would have cancelled it.

Harry Kalas, the voice of the Phillies and a member of their broadcast team since 1971, collapsed in the Press Box at the Nationals new stadium, and was pronounced dead at 1:20 pm at the GW Medical Center.

It must have been a motivating factor for the defending World Champions. The Nationals held on gamely, scoring two in the bottom of the ninth, but came up short, 9-8.

Oh well, so be it. The rains did not come on until darkness had fallen.

Mr. Kalas was a vocal icon through his work on NFL films, though I never knew his name. There is nothing intrinsically sad about the thick gray skies and the chill rain, but the clouds and the slight shiver under the raincoat are enough to prompt the memory of other times, warmer ones, under a humid Michigan summer sun.

It was 1976. They tell me Kalas had been the Phillies voice for five years. I wouldn’t know. I did not follow the senior circuit, growing up in an American League town.

There was someone else from that year whose life I remember better than my own.

It came back to me in a rush when I heard the news of the other death. I could not mark it with a shrug of sympathetic indifference as I did for Mr. Kalas. This one seared like an old kiss and a whiff of fresh-cut grass.

I had to hunt for what I was doing that year, searching for the months. A girl I loved had gone off to France and married someone there; I was between jobs; torn between going back to the staid publishing game and doing something completely different. There did not seem to be much percentage in hanging around the Midwest any longer.

I think I was in Labrador, Canada, that winter, and in Albuquerque in the summer, and a Navy recruiter’s office sometime in the middle of the year. The timing is fuzzy, and I cannot find my notes about the trips.

I know where he was that year better than I know where I was, at least every three days in the pitching rotation of the Detroit Tigers. Mark Fidrych was having the season of his life.

We know where he is today, too, in a funeral home in his home town of Northborough, Mass. The Bird is dead at 54, crushed under his ten-wheeled dump truck on the 110-acre farm that he bought with the bounty of the magical year of 1976.

June 28, 1976, the hated Yankees visiting Tiger Stadium, Monday Night Baseball on ABC. Color television.

I know what I was watching that night but I have no idea where. It was his eleventh appearance in that single magical season. The Tigers had sucked the year before, worst team in organized baseball. It was another rebuilding year after the fading glory of the Series win in 1968.

Fidrych did not start until the middle of May, and was not dubbed The Bird, after the Big Bird of Sesame Street for a few weeks. He was beyond being an eccentric, what with his curls and blue eyes, and on-his-knees maintenance of the mound.

And of course, talking to the ball. Baseball writer Bill James quoted Yankees Graig Nettles about an appearance at the plate before The Bird. Fidrych was talking to the ball before starting his motion. Nettles responded by talking to his bat: "Never mind what he says to the ball. Hit it over the outfield fence!"

Nettles struck out. "Damn," he said. "Japanese bat. Doesn't understand a word of English."

The Bird was Everyman, and that was part of the mystique. He walked on to the roster, making rookie base pay of $16,500. He worked 250 innings, most of them on three day’s rest, and he probably shot all his promise in that one year. Still, he went 19-7, led the league with lean 2.34 earned-run average and completed 24 games.

That is more than the entire pitching staff of most teams do these days. He worked fast, even with all the antics. Most of his games were done in less than two hours. The girls loved him.

He finished 1976 as Rookie of the Year for the AL, and second in the Cy Young balloting for best pitcher.

He was a phenomenon. His appearances on the mound- the team still sucked, by the way- increased attendance by 400,000 fans. Babies were named in his honor (they would be older now than The Bird was then), and the state legislature considered his financial situation so dire that they passed legislation doubling his pay.

He hurt his leg in Spring training the next year, and then his arm went dead a month or so later, and he was out of baseball altogether and back on the farm by 1983.

There were appearances down through the years, but mostly he drove his truck and slopped his pigs. It is not a matter of easy-come, easy-go, since it did not come easy, just fast. And having been struck by the lightning, it went away just that quickly.

In the moment, though, the reflection and intensity of the light around The Bird made an impression that all these years later is more real than anything I can recall about anything else.

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