Guest blog: The Bird will always be the word

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | 11:33 a.m.

Editor's note: Billy Johnson is president of the Las Vegas Wranglers hockey team and an occasional guest blogger.

It’s remarkable, at times, how the world works.

Late last week, while sitting at restaurant over lunch, a television above a bar was showing a highlight reel of former St. Louis Cardinals great Ozzie Smith. In many of the highlights an old friend, pitcher Bob Tewksbury, was serving up one of his irresistible off-speed pitches that was reversed into the bounding chopper that became the blank canvas for The Wizard’s imminent artistry.

Out of the blue, as they say, Tewksbury called the next morning to catch up. Because I was a mascot in the late 1980s, he has referred to me as “Bird” for two decades. He now teaches younger Red Sox talent to do what he always did best which is, essentially, think. Define that as you may, but key ingredients are priority and propriety.

Long before any thought of a career in sports and in a tiny backyard, I was a 10- or 11-year-old boy combining the batting stance of Johnny Bench with the chicken-wing flap of Joe Morgan to create my own “style.”

And when pitching I talked to the baseball.

Growing up in the shadow of the Big Red Machine made me a baseball fan. But tuning into Monday Night Baseball just to see Mark Fidrych made me happy. He appealed to the kid within the kid. The mid seventies, as far as baseball was concerned, were my formative years.

The real Bird was every kid’s idol. We could identify. He seemingly had no regard for -- or cognizance of -- what was accepted behavior. He celebrated and he showed it. He had no need for convention. He was grateful and he showed it. He had no filter. He was just a kid, and he showed it.

His eyes were wide and if he had ever heard the advice “act like you’ve been there” he ignored it. He was one of us.

I, like every kid I knew, copied The Bird’s glare to the plate – shoulders square to the catcher’s mitt, bent at the waist and cradling the ball with both hands. But none of us knew what to tell a baseball. We just knew we had to tell it something because Fidrych did. I vaguely remember asking the ball to end up in the strike zone. The outcome was, seemingly, out of my control.

Fidrych would later say he didn’t talk to baseballs. He was, in fact, talking aloud to himself. He would verbalize what any situation was at any given time. Something akin to, “OK, I have runners on the corners and a 2-2 count ...”

As far as his fixing the mound with his hands, he once rhetorically asked how else does one repair the “other guy’s holes. I’m not going to call in the grounds crew every inning,” I think I recall him saying.

In retrospect it was a real kid’s logic. That’s why kids got it. Our parents got it because, in the mired mid-1970s, they embraced being entertained by their televisions again.

And that’s why such a flash of an all too brief major league career is burnt into one of my favorite memories as kid. If I recall correctly, he played for 20 seasons and started every All-Star Game. Of course I don’t recall correctly. That’s revisionist’s history, or in the least, what I wish was true.

No more than four weeks ago I searched on line for Mark Fidrych to see what he was up to.

It’s remarkable, at times, how the world works.