There Is No Cat - The Bird Is The Word

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002

The Bird Is The Word

I got a neat new toy today, an Eye TV, which turns my Mac into a TiVO-like video recorder. And thanks to my actually having a look at TV schedules for the first time in ages, I was able to catch this evening's installment of ESPN Classic's SportsCentury, which was about my favorite baseball player of all time, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. My family had moved from Detroit to Illinois by 1976, his magical year, but my brother and I spent the summer of 76 in Michigan, first with one set of grandparents and then with the other. That was just an amazing time. I still remember sitting with my Grandpa Brandi in the cottage up north and grandpa telling us that we just had to watch the game on TV, that we wouldn't believe this new pitcher the Tigers had. He groomed the mound. He talked to the ball. He ran around like a little kid, thanking his teammates when they made good plays. He played with a joy that had maybe never been seen in big league baseball before. And with that, we caught Bird Fever, just like the rest of the state of Michigan. I'm pretty sure that was the nationwide Monday night telecast that played a prominent part in the story told in SportsCentury, the one they describe as making Fidrych a star. I remember the two newspapers in Detroit printed up full page graphics one week with special ink that you could use to make Bird t-shirts. I still have mine.

There are two more airings of the Mark Fidrych SportsCentury. Set the VCR or the TiVO or the Eye TV to grab it. He was a special ball player, and 1976 was a magical year.

Posted at 12:26 AM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio