The Tigers' Mark Frydrich

THE BOB DYLAN OF BASEBALL

By Ken Kelley

The Bird is the first baseball rockstar.

Never before have fans hooted, howled and demanded (all 52,000 of them- no one dared leave the park) that the pitcher reappear and take a bow after a winning effort. A bow, hell-they wanted him to pitch two more innings. ("More, more, more . . .")

The people in the vanguard of this ovation were not unlike the Bird himself: ' same age, same lifestyle, same life context. It was someone just like them out there- they knew it. Bird knew it. and it was a mutual celebration when he finally appeared at the dugout and waved, barefoot, to the stands. The older folks-well, they stayed because they got a kick out of all these  kids being enthusiastic and everything. And to see it, they didn't have to listen to that goddam loud music- this was baseball, the national pastime, after all.

Not everybody among the luminaries who call themselves sports writers in this town see things this way, I might point out. Indeed, the Bird's emergence as the Motown Phenom was kept carefully under wraps by the likes of Dan Ewald, Jim Hawkins, and Dean Joe Falls until suddenly the Tigers had to turn 15,000 fans away from the park two weeks ago when he pitched against the Yankees' Ken Holtzman. Suddenly, whoopdedoo, enough copy couldn't be printed .Everything from his neck size to his favorite beer to his attitude on dual exhausts and double overhead cams consumed, and will continue to consume, the pages of our two daily beauts. "Bird's Got a Chick," drooled Bill Gray, village idiot, on the front page of the News (the young woman to whom the news so graciously referred had the good sense to tell him to hang it).

Ever venal on the commercial hot sprint,--the News and Freep even printed iron on decals of the Bird in action, after a good 10,000 bootleg (that s, Bird got no bread) T-shirts (and even underpants!) were sold outside the stadium by enterprising sharpsters. With typical accuracy, the News showed him as a left-hander, no doubt so they can denounce him as a communist should he ever lose two games in a row.

Now consider the case of Jim Hawkins, perhaps the most widely read (which is not to say prolific) baseball writer in town. Jim is about 38 going on 56, stands about 5'4", weighs maybe 135 pounds, with an extra five pounds of fat around his cerebral lobes. A fathead, in other words. Maybe it's because he hangs out with all those tv sportscasters, but for some reason Jim always looks like he's wearing pancake makeup. Maybe it's just the years of hanging out under those clubhouse lights.

Anyway, Jim's current philosophy is that Bird is kind of "flakey." You know, he talks to the ball, he wriggles around, he puts some body english into his action, he looks like he's excited about what's going on ("It's war," says Bird about pitching. "It's you trying to kill them before they try and kill you"). Ken Holtzman, now, that's Jim's kind of pitcher -bland, methodical, that vague look of the android about him, and of course he wins games too. Never mind the Dizzy Deans or the Mordecai  Browns or the Shoeless Joe Jacksons of auld lang syne -men whose panache and flair made the game the national pastime to begin with. No, to Jim, these are the soporific seventies, and all Bird's "childish antics" will be outgrown when he blah blah blah. It must be noted, though, that Bird's moved up a notch in Jim's book since he became Detroit's most exciting star. Before he  was "flakey," Bird was "bush."

Detroit fans know just how lucky they are that Bird is actually pitching here. If he had grown up in Detroit, he wouldn't have stood a chance of being signed by the Tigers (unless he did some time in Jackson Prison). All Detroit's sandlot stars can be seen displaying their talent among the various division contenders in both leagues. But having survived the Tiger farm system, it's just amazing that Bird didn't go the way of Mike Marshall, Woody Fryman, or the numerous other stellar the Tiges, under the cunning helmsmanship of GM Jim Campbell, have donated to enemy rosters. And why the surprise, fellow fans, that Campell refuses to up  Bird's pittance from sixteen grand a year? A penny burned is a penny  earned, after all. Just imagine if Bill (The Midget Mavin) Veeck or Charlie Finley (who astutely tried to create funky images for his pitchers- "Blue Moon" Odom, "Catfish" Hunter) had their paws on the Bird.

Bird could care less. After all, he's more surprised by all this than anybody. All he wanted out of life was some good times and some fast engines to work on. You know, to be a nice regular fellow. Shit, 1 6 grand is a lot more than he'd be making right now as a grease monkey.

Over the coming months, you're going to be finding out more in-depth hot stuff on the Bird- his shoe-se, his favorite color, does he like his meatloaf with or without ground corn flakes-and the chief angle, after he wins each game, will be along the lines of "Will Success Spoil the Kid?" That's the starting premise (pouncing point). Our hapless gobbledegook (Messrs. Hawkins, Ewald et al.) will be courageously sniffing cobwebbed corners to prove that, yes, just like the rest of those people, Bird has old out. But that's okay, because this is America and that's what he's supposed to do anyway, like the Bicentennial says, Just so you don't think he's different or anything. Or if he is, it's just for show. Underneath it all, he's just as numb as you or me, folks.

But those in the know- and there are lots of us, in fact enough of us to drive geeks like Hawkins out of town- know the real stuff, and that's what our man is. Only someone as dumb as the Action Line people at the Free Press ask if the Bird's for real. Of course he is- but are you?