The Bird: The Spirit of ’76

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Mark “The Bird” Fidrych’s introduction to America.

Even more personally, for me anyhow, the date marks the debut of my brother Andy’s seven-part podcast series on the Detroit Tigers pitcher.

On June 28, 1976, the 21-year-old with big curly hair and an even bigger array of pitches befuddled the eventual American League champion New York Yankees to win his eighth game of the season. Along the way, he beguiled a national audience on Monday Night Baseball.

You can catch the game here:

A few weeks later, Fidrych was the starting pitcher for the American League in the All-Star Game in Philadelphia. Three months later, he capped one of the most unlikely seasons in Major League Baseball history with 19 wins and the AL Rookie of the Year Award.

It wasn’t just what he did—it was how he did it that left an indelible, delighted impression on so many. He was child-like in his mannerisms, in his enthusiasm, in his joy. He got on his hands and knees to landscape the pitcher’s mound; he talked to the baseball between pitches; he carried himself with an endearing, innocent magnetism.

Alas, a spate of injuries starting the next season curtailed his career—Fidrych’s last year in the big leagues was 1980—but his magical 1976 season was never forgotten.

Andy’s series is sure to revive memories of that summer, while also introducing Fidrych to a new generation of fans. It will also break new ground with fresh insight about Fidrych’s childhood and post-playing career impact. Tragically, Fidrych died in 2009 in an accident working on his truck.

Some 13 years earlier, Andy had a remarkable and spontaneous one-hour ridealong with Fidrych—an experience that had a direct influence on what has become this podcast, “The Bird: The Spirit of ’76.”

The prologue and first episode debut tomorrow on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.

Episodes, featuring unprecedented access to Fidrych’s family and teammates, will continue weekly through mid-August. Andy has devoted many hours on this project and I’m thrilled that it’s about to make its public debut.

More details to come soon; meantime, I encourage you to give the series trailer a listen:

Related: As noted above, 30 years ago Andy met Fidrych, which led to his penning a column about the experience for his newspaper, the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

In June 2023, I wrote a column about it:

Share

After being relatively indifferent at its outset a few weeks ago, I’m getting into the World Cup swing of things. I’ve seen bits and pieces of maybe five soccer (or “football” if you prefer) matches; on Thursday, I caught the entirety of the U.S. vs. Türkiye contest.

That was an entertaining one, even if there was nothing at stake beyond pride—which is to say there was still plenty riding on the outcome. Looked like it was going to wind up in a 2-2 tie before a literally last-second goal by Türkiye, which had no chance of advancing in the tournament while the Americans had already clinched moving on to the next round.

At least the victory gave Türkiye something better to feel about on the long flight back home Friday. By the way, if you missed the memo as I had, here’s what prompted the 2022 spelling change of the country of 82 million formerly known as “Turkey” that’s mostly in Asia but also extends partially into Europe:

From one week to the next, only rarely do I have clarity and certainty about what I’ll be covering on any given Saturday in this space. I have a pretty good sense of what my next column will cover—immigration feels apt to mark our 250th birthday as a nation—but this week’s topic has come around only in fits and starts.

That’s much closer to the norm than the exception.

And it’s nothing new, really. Some 33 years ago, as a Christmas gift to my wife’s side of the family, Bridgett and I created a home-made board game that we dubbed “Family Soicle.”

A play on “Family Circle,” the game’s proper pronunciation is “soy-cull.” Patterned after Trivial Pursuit, it featured over 200 cards, each with a question and three possible answers—only one correct—that drew from everyone’s lives. The topics ranged from the silly to the life-altering, and the idea was to have some laughs while learning a bit about one another.

After unveiling it that holiday, we played it a grand total of one time, getting to only a tiny fraction of the cards before conversation and interest shifted elsewhere. While it was disappointing to see our efforts net such little interest, the experience provided useful lessons:

• Just because I’m passionate about something doesn’t mean others will be. Others’ disinterest wasn’t personal.

• The journey is more important than the destination. In this case, I enjoyed learning so much about everyone during the question-and-answer process that yielded the game cards.

• Hold onto stuff, especially if it doesn’t take up much space. The board that Bridgett created was unwieldy, so that’s long gone, but the playing cards have endured. Now that so much time has passed, I’m wondering if maybe we’ll break out the cards at the next family get-together. They await deployment on my bookshelf, snug inside a tiny, slightly waterlogged box where they’ve been stored all these decades.

In creating categories for all those questions, I settled on three names:

hodgepodge
mishmash
odds ‘n’ ends

The point being: it’s all mostly random stuff, not neatly fitting into broad categories.

Sort of like this column, which has defied simple categorization over the 216 pieces that I’ve created since launching this Substack in March 2023.

Share