MLB All-Star Mark Fidrych passed away in a truck accident on April 13, 2009. This is how author and sports historian Clayton Trutor remembered him.
Speaking of MLB history, you can learn about some Atlanta Brave history from Clayton’s book, Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta – And How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports.
Clayton Trutor Remembers Mark Fydrich
Growing up in Vermont, I was raised to believe that Mark Fidrych was one of ours.
I think I got this idea from NBC.
The producers of Game of the Week during the late 80s seemed to dust off the same highlight and blooper reels every time they faced a rain delay. The only rain-delay clip I recall highlighted “The Birdman’s” antics on the mound during that bicentennial summer. It featured close-ups of Fidrych talking to the ball before befuddling another batter with his cockamamie pitches.
Fans in the Motor City and even those in opposing ballparks showered the young, duck-fluff-haired righty with affection for marching around the mound after outs and manicuring the rubber before every inning.
Seeing Fidrych again always prompted someone older than me in the room to reminisce about “The Birdman’s” one great season and to imitate his wing-flapping windup.
Their Mark Fidrych stories always ended with the arm trouble that sabotaged his career. The more knowledgeable the raconteur, the more likely they were to add an epilogue about his new life as a farmer in Massachusetts. News of his death last month prompted a whole new round of recollections.
The weather in Vermont abbreviates a fella’s time on the diamond, forcing the region’s ballplaying fraternity to rely heavily on fantasies of playing under the lights rather than coming up clutch in an actual game.
The baseball season in New England, particularly Northern New England, is about as short as anywhere in the country. I told a friend of mine from California that we Vermonters play a sixteen-game high school baseball season. He claimed that out there they play more games than that in February.
The Birdman Rises To The Top of MLB
Baseball is a year-long commitment, meaning they must not have a lot of three-sport athletes out there. Conversely, the pitching staff for my high school team spent the winter as the front court on our basketball team. In spite of the privations faced by New England baseballers, Northborough, Massachusetts’ Mark Fidrych became the American League’s best pitcher in 1976 and an instant, idiosyncratic icon in the perpetually embattled city of Detroit, Michigan.
“The Birdman” wasn’t from Northern New England and he wasn’t quite from rural New England. Northborough was a bit more country in Fidrych’s youth than it is today, but the community of 14,000 serves primarily as a Worcester suburb. It wasn’t a chore for rural New England to lay claim to him.
So few big-time ballplayers emanate from our diamonds. We’ve got Carlton Fisk. His hardnosed, North Country stoicism earned him a permanent spot in the hearts of Boston and Chicago White Sox fans as well as a plaque in Cooperstown. His birthplace of Vermont and his home state of New Hampshire both lay claim to him.
“Spaceman” Bill Lee settled in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest after quitting the Montreal Expos. His transition from big-league cities to Craftsbury, Vermont wasn’t particularly difficult. Lee’s oddball brand of libertarian socialism meshes well with the state’s competing egalitarian and anti-statist impulses.
The Granite State produced Steve Balboni too, a man whom God put on this earth to be a designated hitter in the pre-steroids era American League. We’ve produced a few other good ones: Bob Tewksbury, Len Whitehouse, Larry Gardner. Yet the addition of Mark Fidrych to Northern New England’s list of local heroes adds another kindred spirit to our all-time roster.
Like Fisk and Lee, what really made “the Birdman” one of ours were his idiosyncrasies.
Fidrych remade the mound in his own image. He didn’t simply go out there and throw. He understood that professional baseball is a form of entertainment, one which provides more space than other sports for its participants to craft their own peculiar style.
Like “The Birdman,” we Vermonters, and to a lesser extent Granite Staters and Mainers, don’t really fit in with the rest of the country. We’re east coast, but we’re not urban. We’re a small state, but we’re profoundly rural. We’re full of farms, but our farms have little to do with the gargantuan feedlots that cover the rest of the continent.
The kids leave Vermont. They leave rural Massachusetts too. The bright lights of Boston and New York draw many of the best and brightest away, but the real oddballs among them end up back here eventually, bringing oddballs from other places along with them. It’s my guess that our laid-back approach to being a little different drew Fidrych back home once his playing days ended.
Clayton Trutor Bio
Clayton Trutor holds a PhD in US History from Boston College and teaches at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.
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