The game had been in a downward spiral since the ascendance of pro football in the 1960s. It was a radio game in the television age, too slow and static for the visual medium. Football had all the telegenic action, the violent collisions and powerful athletic moves. Baseball was your father’s game, your grandfather’s, and such continuity was no asset to the generational rebels of the baby boom.

That was the conventional wisdom, and as usual, by the time the trend became conventional wisdom it was already losing steam. Pro football had become dominated by defense; the six lowest-scoring Super Bowls were all played between 1969 and 1975. (The NFL would soon change its rules to create more crowd-pleasing offense.) Meanwhile, the 1975 World Series between Cincinnati and Boston featured perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played, its sixth, in which both teams overcame three-run deficits before Boston’s Carlton Fisk launched a post-midnight, twelfth-inning home run off the Fenway foul pole. Free agency would arrive in the baseball offseason of 1976-77, bringing winter headlines to the summer game as big-name signings provided a publicity boost.

Still, baseball was somewhat short on youth appeal when Mark Fidrych first took the mound for the Tigers in 1976. Fidrych changed that. He was a kid who couldn’t sit still. He leapt over the baseline on his way to and from the mound. He ran around to his teammates to shake their hands after good plays behind him, even in the middle of an inning. He got down on his knees to groom the mound’s dirt with his hands. He talked to the ball, or seemed to – he insisted that he was just talking to himself about the game situation (not unlike Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham). He was nicknamed “The Bird” because his lanky frame and explosion of blond curls gave him a distinct resemblance to Big Bird from “Sesame Street.”

Kids loved him; he seemed just like them. Grownups loved him; he was having so much fun out there, playing a game on the highest level with the spirit of sandlots past.

And oh, how he could pitch. In his first major league start, he retired the first fourteen batters, and took a no-hitter into the seventh before allowing his only two hits and one run in a complete game win. He threw complete games in twelve of his first thirteen starts, three of them eleven-inning affairs. He captivated the nation in a Monday Night Baseball win over the Yankees, with cameras capturing every idiosyncrasy and Howard Cosell gushing his praises. He started the All-Star Game for the American League on the strength of his 9-2 record and 1.78 ERA. He finished the season at 19-9, with a major-league leading 2.34 ERA and 24 complete games.

He had turned 22 during the season. He was the most popular player in baseball. And, for all intents and purposes, he was done.

In spring training 1977, he tore cartilage in his knee, delaying his first start until May 27. Despite the obvious need for caution, manager Ralph Houk let him pitch complete games in seven of his first eight starts in a 34-day span. Fidrych was 6-2, 1.83 at the end of June, but made only three more starts before shutting down for the season with tendinitis in his shoulder. He started three games for Detroit in 1978, four in 1979, and nine in 1980, compiling a 4-6 combined record. He spent three more years trying to recapture the magic in the minor leagues, but stepped away in ’83, at age 28.

The study of baseball statistics called sabermetrics was barely in its infancy in 1976. Bill James’s Baseball Abstract was a staple-bound collection of numbers (no text), with circulation in the low three-figures. No coach, manager, or commentator had yet uttered the words “pitch count,” much less criticized them or overworked them into a cliché. Still, it’s hard to look at Fidrych’s game logs on baseball-reference.com and not scream. Why was a 21-year-old, generally on three days’ rest, throwing so many complete games? Why would you push him into extra innings five times? Today, no manager would consider letting so young a pitcher throw 250 innings. And even that figure underestimates his true work rate, because he didn’t make his first start until the Tigers’ 24th game in 1976; the concentrated abuse was more like what you’d face in a 290-inning season. (Don’t get me started on those 69 innings in 34 days in ’77, when he was fresh off a knee injury. Had Ralph Houk never heard of Dizzy Dean?)

We do have sabermetrics today, and so we know that history is not kind to young pitchers who have high inning totals and few strikeouts. (Fidrych struck out just 3.5 batters per nine innings in ’76, second-lowest figure for a pitcher with so low an ERA since 1961.) Pitchers who rely on fine control struggle when injury or pain forces even a slight change in their mechanics; hard-throwers have more of a margin for error. The Bird may have been headed for a brief time in the limelight no matter what; is it truly better to burn out than it is to rust?

The excitement Mark Fidrych brought to the diamond in his rookie season helped pull the sport out of its mid-century torpor. It’s a shame that baseball couldn’t have taken better care of him in return.