‘The Bird’: A gift to baseball

Dallas Morning News: Mark “The Bird” Fid-rych lasted only a few years on the mound but left behind a lifetime of entertaining memories. Who can forget him smoothing the dirt with his bare hand. Stalking about the field and rushing out to congratulate teammates on good plays. Talking to the baseball so it would know where to go, for goodness’ sakes.

Anyone who was a baseball fan in the 1970s — and The Bird swelled that number — wore a sad smile as we marked the death recently at 54 of a phenom who came along at just the right moment.

World Series

Despite an outstanding 1975 World Series, Cincinnati over Boston, baseball had grown stale after those big years of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, when the New York Yankees set the standard. Love them or hate them, everyone followed those great Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra teams, along with the dozens of other national-hero stars of the day.

Those golden years had faded by the ’70s. The national pastime, it seemed, moved too slowly for a society fast-forwarding through cultural changes. Civil rights. Feminism. Environmentalism. Baseball had fallen behind, no longer capturing Americans’ imagination.

Then, for one of those unexpectedly brief moments, a tall, gangly kid threw on a Detroit Tigers uniform and electrified the masses. Dubbed “The Bird” for his resemblance to the Sesame Street character, he gave in equal doses of talent and eccentricity.