Mark Fidrych was relevant for only a year. But his brief flight was so memorable, it made him one of baseball’s most beloved characters.

A new book by Doug Wilson, The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych, examines 1976, when the Detroit pitcher flew higher than everyone else. And then what happened when injuries quickly grounded his career.

In a review in the Los Angeles Daily News, Tom Hoffarth writes:

This is such an easy sell. Go to a publishing house, pitching them a story on how you’ll reconstruct  the life of one of the most beloved big-leaguers in the last half century, a guy who always had a grin on his face and a mop of curly blond hair, talked to baseballs on the mound, shook hands with teammates after they made great plays, got on his knees to smooth over the dirt to his liking, and was linked to a beloved Sesame Street character.

How do you not buy into that?

However, there was more to Fidrych:

It was also not fair to label him a “flake,” as one writer pointed out then, because that was too easy an adjective.”Fidgety Fidrych” was what this writer called him. Go back to his childhood, and may would have described him as “a little wild, a little eccentric, definitely extroverted, and a fun-loving guy.” These days, someone like him might be labeled with ADD.

His Tigers teammates immediately took to him as he entered the rotation. Although, there’s still the quote attributed to teammate Bill Freehan: “This kid is from Boston? Shouldn’t he be more sophisticated?”

And finally:

Wilson spends only four paragraphs at the end of Chapter 9 to explain Fidrych’s accidental death in 2009 (the fourth year anniversary was April 13).

Maybe it’s fitting. It’s not something we even want to think about.

As Tigers manager Jim Leyland said about Fidrych in 2009: “You can talk about Ty Cobb or anyone else, but for one year, he was the biggest impact star in the history of the Tigers. For that one year, he was bigger than anybody in the history of the game.”

********

A reminder: If you love baseball books, check out Hoffarth’s 30 books in 30 days series on his site.