Word: fidrych
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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DURING HIS PHENOMENAL rookie year in 1976, Mark Fidrych shied away from the self-congratulatory stardom of major league baseball. When asked about his pitching with the Detroit Tigers, he would smile and say, "It's no big deal." When agents urged him to cash in on his success financially, he would answer, exuberantly, "I play baseball." And the fans loved him, they had never seen anything like him. Tall, gawky, like a stork out of water, Fidrych stepped on the field with a flurry of limbs, hair and mutterings. Not since Dizzy Dean bamboozled his way into the national...
...media was at a loss to explain the Fidrych phenomenon, though they attempted to conceal their puzzlement in a blitz of coverage. They asked Fidrych questions, but they werv unsure whether the inchoate answers they received constituted answers. They dug into his past life, talked to his cigar-chomping high school coaches, asked his mother his favorite dish, and visited his old stomping grounds at the gas station. Time and Newsweek featured him with their usual platitudes, running on about the "new baseball fad" or "the teenage symbol." But the more the media mucked and raked, the more they betrayed...