Game XI (For Real This Time): Twins @ Tigers

The Twins face a tough pitching foe, and we remember one of baseball’s happiest, briefest superstars.

Scheduled start time: 5:40 Central

Weather: Chance of rain subsiding, chance of temps over 47° is nil

Opponent’s excellent SB site: Bless You Boys

TV: BSNorth. Radio: Didn’t kill the video star

I saw this intro to an article by Brian O’Neill over at SouthSideSox:

[Note: this year’s “Know Your Enemy” will take a few different paths. We’re not always going to examine the pitching matchups unless notable. We’ll look at notable scoundrels, oddities, histories, and other aspects that make our enemies interesting.]

I had half-thought about making some snarky comment along the lines of “welcome to the club! I’ve been doing that at TwinkieTown for 10 seasons, now! And let me tell you, it’s brought me nothing but enormous wealth and a gigantic readership the world over!”

But, these articles by O’Neill are very good. I think people should read them. At least as many as ever read me. And if we both end up like Deadspin, well, it won’t be for lack of trying. It never was.

Today’s pitching matchup should be a doozy. You’ve got our good friend Mr. López, and Detroit’s positively filthy Tarik Skubal. Take a look at the “Percentile Rankings” on his BaseballSavant page. Look at this year’s, or last year’s. That’s an awful lot of red bars. Plus, he’s a lefty, and the Twins have struggled against lefties for some time.

Skubal throws an upper-90s fastball, a changeup, slider and sinker. Just that fastball/change combo wreaked havoc on hitters last year, when Skubal was recovering from flexor tendon surgery. Oh, and way back in 2020, Ron Gardenhire said “wait till you see this kid.” 2023 digits:

This week’s “different paths” will be about Mark Fidrych, AKA “The Bird.” In late 1976 and early 1977, he was the biggest new thing in all of baseball, and probably brought an extra 400,000 fans to Tiger Stadium (plus sellout crowds for road games). You can see some of his pitching style here, right in the first minute:

Drafted in 1974, Fidrych spent one year rising through the minors before making his first MLB start on May 15, 1976, against Cleveland. As Joe Posnanski remembered in The Athletic:

“I’ll never get over this,” Fidrych told reporters after the game, but really it was the reporters who would never get over it. You couldn’t take your eyes off the guy. He talked to the baseball. He talked to himself. He smoothed the pitcher’s mounds with his hand. He pitched with his tongue out. He was fidgety and jumpy and fun. “I really don’t know what I do out there,” he said.

Part of Fidrych’s appeal is that these odd mannerisms didn’t seem contrived or a way to attract attention. It was almost as if Fidrych were the first player from an international league Americans had never seen before (remember how stunned we were to discover the epic bat flips in Korean baseball?)

Not all opponents were charmed – not at first. This Rich Puerzer SABR article quotes Yankees All-Star Willie Randolph saying “you want to send a line drive right through his head,” and ill-fated Thurman Munson grousing “tell that guy if he pulls that stuff in New York, we’ll blow his —— out of town.”

You’d think that Fidrych’s pitching tics might have made him ineligible for today’s pitch clock, but you’d be wrong; Bill James’s 1977 Baseball Abstract actually found him to be the fastest-working pitcher in the game. Maybe sprinting full-speed to the mound made a difference? At least enough to offset the time he’d “waste” to go shake the infielders’ hands after a great defensive play?

Detroit, and baseball in general, caught Fydrich fever. For Detroit fans without much else to root for, this was unsurprising, but the national attention was sure quick. Fidrych made the All-Star team, won Rookie Of The Year, and was second in Cy Young voting. The once-relevant Rolling Stone had him on the cover – they’d never had a baseball player on before. Fidrych posed with Big Bird, supposedly where his nickname came from, although youth coaches had also noticed his tendency to sometimes bleat out strange sounds like an exotic bird.

(When he pitched against the Twins that year, Met Stadium released 13 homing pigeons from the mound, supposedly to throw Fidrych off. It didn’t.)

He’d thrown 250.1 innings and 24 complete games as a 21-year-old rookie. That wasn’t unusual for the day (San Diego’s Ryan Jones led MLB with 315.1 innings pitched), but it was a lot for a young arm. (Something to think about today, when so many pitchers are suffering from injury; however, as we’ve discussed, kids training year-round at an early age can hurt their long-term health, too. Nobody did that in Fidrych’s time, except Soviet hockey players.)

When Fidrych suffered a leg injury in spring training the next year, it was thought to be pretty minor. It might have changed his mechanics a little, however. Not long after he returned to the mound, Fidrych blew out a rotator cuff – although it wasn’t diagnosed until he saw Dr. James Andrews in 1985. Two years after his baseball career was over. Every time he’d attempted a comeback, opponents had shaken his hand. All of baseball wanted him to recover.

Still, Fidrych wasn’t bitter about it. “I’m living the dream,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Pablo Torre. He moved to a small Massachusetts town, near where he grew up, and married a woman whose family owned a restaurant there. He bought a dump truck which he loved, and used it on odd construction projects around town. Or filled the truck with garbage to feed his farm’s pigs. “It was good enough for me on the way up,” Fidrych told NPR, “it’s good enough for me on the way down.”

He’d die under the truck, in 2009, at the age of 54. Fidrych was doing some sort of repair with the engine running, and his shirt got caught in a moving part. This brought out a lot of memories from fans, sportswriters, and players alike. Al Kaline said “In the two years he was here … he was probably the most popular Detroit Tiger there has ever been.”

I really appreciated this quote from Posnanski, about a Monday Night Baseball game on national TV that drew America’s eyes to The Bird: “it’s the moment that made me love baseball. In the end, that gets at the heart of things. I am not nostalgic for those long-ago days when baseball was only on television on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. I am nostalgic for being young.”

And that’s a large part of what nostalgia is. It’s not wanting the past back, but to remember how we felt at the time. Like remembering the face of a long-dead family member, we’re remembering a time in our life we’ve grown distanced from. It reminds us that we were, and are, that person; we were, and are, alive.

A band that often specializes in baseball memories, sometimes bittersweet ones, appropriately named The Baseball Project, led off their fine second album with a song about Fidrych:

Enjoy the tunes, and the game.

Those of you who wanted Julien to get more opportunities v. LHP, today’s your day!