(Photo: Robin Buckson, Detroit News)
A certain year in Tigers history is jabbing at a guy’s mind a couple of weeks before spring camp blooms in Florida.
It is 1976.
It was early in the Tigers’ rebuild, eight years before 1984’s fireworks, and not much was expected from manager Ralph Houk’s gang in America’s bicentennial year.
But by May a quirky guy had emerged:
Mark Fidrych.
We knew all about him, at least personally. About how he talked to baseballs. About his nickname, The Bird.
But we never saw coming the pitches, the mastery, the phenomenon that all of baseball and any world alongside it was about to discover during a baseball summer that yet ranks as one of the game’s all-time marvels.