I was 12 in 1975. It was scary time for me. We moved to new house across town in northern Michigan. I had moved from my friends and was going to start Junior high that fall. I did not know the kids in the new neighborhood. As a 12 year old I was self conscious and intimidated to meet them. They all knew each other. My parents must have sensed this as they bought me a clock radio. The equivalent to today’s Ipod. I spent many nights with my earplug firmly in place listening to Ernie Harwell broadcast games. I loved it when I could pick up his games from the west coast as I knew they would go late into the night. At twelve, I didn’t realize it but I was falling in love with the game of baseball.
By the end of the summer I had met the neighborhood kids, Danny and Steve Pudvay, Mike Kuhn and Kevin Terdal. Later I would meet the Richards’ brothers and Keith Shephard and Scott Childs. We would play baseball and football and other games in the field beside our house. We were always pretending to be our favorite Tiger players like Aurelio Rodriguez, Tom Veryzer, and Phil Mankowski. Kevin Terdal was always a Yankee rather than a Tiger as his great uncle was Bill Dickey the great Yankee catcher. He would be Willie Randolph or some other Yankee. And this just reinforced my love of the game.
In 1976 I started the season again listening to the Tigers on the radio and buying baseball cards. 1976 would be the first year I completed the full set of Topps baseball cards. Not in the set that year was the guy who everybody wanted a card of and would make our summer, Mark Fidrych.
Fidrych literally came out of nowhere. He was so unexpected that Topps did not even have a card of him even in the multi player rookie cards! These where the cards that had four players you usually had never heard of from four different teams. So we followed the Bird on TV like the Monday Night Baseball game against New York; in the papers where I also got an iron on transfer to put on a t-shirt; and certainly on the radio through Ernie Harwell and my clock radio.
It was a wonderful summer to be a baseball fan. The Tigers were not a great team except when the Bird pitched. Then they could and did beat anybody. When the Bird pitched it was magic. We thought he was crazy yet cool. At first we thought he was talking to the ball but then found out really he was talking to himself and focusing himself to pitch. He got on his hands and knees and groomed the mound. No one ever did anything like that. But more then all that, when you heard or read interviews with him you could see he was a lot like us kids. He had the same reactions we had to some of the questions. He was hounded for autographs. When a writer asked him what was the strangest thing he was asked to sign he said one girl asked him to sign the t-shirt she was wearing and he said no. We all thought that was hysterical that anyone would ask someone to sign a t-shirt they were wearing! His reaction was just like ours. We related to him. He was a few years older than us so we kind of saw him as a kid like us playing baseball with men and beating them! Certainly we knew we couldn’t do that but it made your imagination ask you what if you could beat the big league guys.
Yesterday I heard he died at his farm in Massachusetts. It struck me like no other player or celebrity death. It struck me like finding out an extremely close childhood friend who you have not seen in years has died. His death is very personal. I have not told my wife my feelings, it is that personal. I always assumed The Bird would be there as I grew older. He was part of the neighborhood. He was part of my adolescence. I don’t think anyone who was around my age when The Bird came onto the baseball scene will feel anything less. I still have my clock radio in the garage and listen to Tiger games on it when I am working in the garage. Today the Tiger game is rained out. So today I have been listening to one of my favorite songs from that time on my Ipod. The song is “Magic” by Pilot.
