Pitching With a Broken Wing
Fidrych spent the next seven years trying to come back from the arm injury, most of that time in the minor leagues. He did get 16 more starts in the big leagues from 1978 to 1980, but was 4-6 with a 5.67 ERA. He last pitched in the Major leagues in 1980. He had one final, glorious start on September 2, 1980, when his Tigers beat the White Sox, 11-2. Fidrych pitched nine innings, allowed two runs (0 earned) and eight base runners.
He also won the final start of his career on October 1, but it was a pedestrian five-inning/four earned run effort that was a victory primarily because he was supported by a good offense. The Tigers won the game 11-7.
Fidrych never pitched again in the Major Leagues, but did spend three more years in AAA. The first of those years was with Evansville of the Tigers organization, and his final two seasons were with Pawtucket, the Triple-A franchise of the Boston Red Sox. In 254 1/3 innings with Evansville and Pawtucket during these final three seasons, Fidrych was 14-16 with a 6.12 ERA. His career ended at the age of 28.
A couple years into retirement, Fidrych learned that he had a torn rotator cuff, which he had tried to pitch through for seven painful years after the initial injury. As mentioned above, the narrative is that Fidrych hurt his knee and altered his mechanics, which led to the injury. That may be true, but his workload has to be considered as well.
If Fidrych’s “dead arm” was due to altered mechanics from the knee injury, you have to wonder how he had been so effective in his first eight starts. During this stretch, he was as good as he’d ever been. He had a 1.83 ERA. It doesn’t appear that anything was wrong. He had also started 37 games in his young career and completed 31 of them, while averaging 8.6 innings and 34.1 batters faced per start, a workload a young pitcher hadn’t endured in more than 30 years. The last time a starting pitcher 21 years old or younger had faced as many as 34 batters per start was 1940, when a young Bob Feller endured that heavy workload. The knee injury in spring training may have been a factor, but the sheer number of pitches thrown by Fidrych in his first year-plus in the big leagues was likely just as a big a factor in his torn rotator cuff.
Next: The Legacy of The Bird