The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych by Doug Wilson (review)

Those who observed Mark Fidrych’s amazing year of 1976 will never see its like again. Those who did not can be forgiven if they believe the rest of us exaggerate. At the beginning of the movie Gandhi, the narrator says something like, “In the future, people will have difficulty believing that such as man existed.” Thanks to Doug Wilson, they will believe in “The Bird.”

This kid pitcher from rural Massachusetts barely made an impact on scouts, yet improved steadily until he reached the starting rotation of the woebegone Detroit Tigers. He became not only the best pitcher in baseball, but among the most famous and most beloved men in America. That’s the story any baseball fan who observed it knows and remembers. It’s all here, including insightful reasons why the times were right for “The Bird” to fly from local hero to national phenomenon.

Wilson doesn’t just tell the story that everyone saw. He also tells the inside baseball story of this once marvelous pitcher’s rise and fall. Unlike many baseball writers, Wilson has a working knowledge of how the game is played. He researches like a scholar and writes like a journalist. He charts, with compassion and acuity, the sad path from Fidrych’s wonder year to his professional demise at age twenty-eight. After 1976, “The Bird” won exactly ten major-league games.

Fortunately, Wilson was able to interview Ralph Houk, the Tigers’ manager in 1976, months before he died at age 90 in 2010. With vivid memory and profound understanding, Houk shares why he believes Fidrych was so successful and also speculates on why he got hurt. Many fans and historians blame Houk for over-working a twenty-one-year-old arm that threw dozens of elbow-bending sliders to the tune of 250 innings and twenty-four complete games. Houk himself believed the answer was more complex and finally, probably, unknowable.

Wilson pinpoints the exact pitch after which Fidyrich’s arm went dead, never to return. Yes, it followed all those complete games, but it also followed a knee injury sustained the following year. Pitching a baseball is stressful and complex. Why successful pitchers fail is equally so. No matter how much or how little one knows about pitching, one will learn something from the way this book unpacks the mystery of Fidrych’s arm.

Yet the book’s value is not merely that it captures “The Bird,” either the media sensation, the national craze, or the All-Star pitcher. Mark Fidrych, the real human being, is the story here.

Fidrych was a handful in school in Northborough, Massachusetts, a small town west of Boston with rural sensibilities. Fortunately, his father was an educator who recognized his son was hyperactive and may also have endured other learning disabilities. The elder Fidrych wisely stressed athletics. Mark’s coaches and even his teachers were touched by this gangling boy’s zest for life and his respect for everyone he met, even if he couldn’t sit still or keep quiet in a classroom. An account of his many boyhood accidents and calamities, born from heedless enthusiasm, foreshadow greater accidents to come.

Fidrych’s quotidian, small-town virtues made him an unusual and compelling personality by the time he became the first athlete on the cover of Rolling Stone. Exhausted by celebrity artifice and narcissism, the public embraced this young star with the common touch who seemed on intimate terms with the baseball.

Most of America lost touch with Fidrych over the years. Occasionally there were stories of how he had returned to his hometown, on his own farm, with a happy wife and children. He ran his own small trucking business, hauling gravel and cement. He was reconciled to his fate, happy with his one great year rather than bitter that there weren’t more. He might even have been happier than he would have been with more. Who knows how...