They don't make the truly quirky pitchers like they used to

Baseball's basic rules haven't changed in a century, but every generation has its own cast of characters.

In the 1970s and '80s, baseball produced a certain kind of pitcher who could capture the imagination of young and old. The game wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now, with every game on TV regionally and national games multiple times a week. You caught glimpses of those pitchers on highlights, Mel Allen's "This Week in Baseball," or NBC's Saturday afternoon game of the week. You heard them described during games on the radio. Maybe they made it to the World Series.

Those pitchers of the era were quirky in some way that felt unique. Two of them died this month: Luis Tiant and Fernando Valenzuela.

Tiant, the Red Sox stalwart, had that windup where he twisted all the way around toward center field before uncoiling to deliver pitches from multiple angles. And he had that mustache. Beards are everywhere now, but that era perfected the baseball moustache.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee was a teammate of Tiant's, both rotation fixtures for the 1975 team that took Cincinnati's Big Red Machine to seven games in the World Series. Lee was a freethinker who railed against baseball's conservative ways.

As Jim Prime wrote in Lee's SABR biography:

Lee enjoyed tweaking the powers that be and crafting controversial quotes. He once bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his organic buckwheat pancakes so that when he jogged to the ballpark he would be 'impervious to bus fumes.' … He angered the California Angels by suggesting that they could conduct their batting practice in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in town 'and never chip a chandelier.'

Mark Fidrych came along in 1976 and reinvented baseball in Detroit. He was a small-town kid from Massachusetts who didn't care that you didn't talk to the baseball or get on your hands and knees and sculpt the dirt on the mound to your liking. The year before, the Tigers hit bottom, trying to regenerate the roster while still holding on to a few players from the 1968 World Series winner and 1972 playoff team. Fidrych's arrival breathed new life into the franchise and set the stage for its rise in the 1980s, even though injuries meant he wouldn't be part of it.

Al Hrabosky was the most overtly unique of them all. He helped popularize the idea of the closer throughout the '70s in St. Louis and later in Kansas City. Nicknamed the "Mad Hungarian," he'd arrive at the mound late in games, and before he faced his first batter, he stomped behind the mound, talked to the baseball, slammed it into his glove, and stomped back to the mound with an intense glare meant to intimidate the batter. "I do things through him that I can't do as Al Hrabosky," he said. "He's insane, a menace to society. But he's just on the field when I'm pitching."

Valenzuela didn't have a quirky personality - but he wasn't like anyone else. He wasn't a beanpole 20-year-old when he arrived. He was left-handed, and they always look kind of quirky. While Tiant looked back at center field in his windup, Valenzuela looked up to the sky. He threw a screwball, which was more common then, but still kind of exotic. You would imagine how you had to turn your wrist to accomplish something like that and it seemed impossible. He electrified Los Angeles in 1981, which is hard to do in the place that's literally the entertainment capital of the world.

Today's game has its personalities, and it's loosened up on how it treats those personalities. You can flip a bat now without facing a fastball in the earhole in your next plate appearance. You can scream on the mound after a big third out late in a close game. Maybe that's the difference. It was a statement back then to go against the norm, whether you meant to or not. Fans loved their buttoned-down stars, but they really loved those quirky personalities who stood out at a time when the culture itself wasn't always sure what to do with them.

Guy Spurrier is the theScore's features editor.