Quit hits: The Bird
Sad news about Mark Fidrych for baseball fans everywhere. Its ironic that the mlb channel televised one of his games against the Yankees last weekend, and more ironic that I happened to turn it on at 6am PST (i’m not an avid mlb channel watcher nor am I ever up before 9am on a saturday). I was hung over and wanted something I could listen to on TV that didn’t require watching since I was trying to fall back asleep. I was annoyed because Fidrych was so captivating (I had never seen him pitch before for more then a batter) that I couldn’t fall asleep and instead had to watch the game. That’s how enjoyable he was to watch: hung over and on five hours of sleep, I couldn’t turn off a game he pitched in 30+ years old.
My tiger enjoyment began post-Bird… but it was obvious he was in the hearts of many fans. He passed what I call “the mom test”. My mom, while an avid sports fan, never really gets caught up in player history. She’ll know the players on the team and will have her favorites, but they usually drop from her vocabulary when they retire / are traded. But Mark Fidrych passed “the mom test” for me — she talked about how fun he was to watch, and that was in the mid-80’s. (The other player that passes the mom test — Wayne Gretzky, in a slightly different test — tells you the group Fidrych is in).