Harbaugh lives out dream, throws first pitch before Tigers' game
DETROIT -- Jim Harbaugh has had a hugely successful career in football.
Tuesday, though, he got to live out his real dream.
The Michigan coach, wearing the No. 20 jersey of his idol, Mark Fidrych, threw a high fastball to Brad Ausmus before the Tigers took on the Pittsburgh Pirates.
"This is very exciting, because I've never thrown a first pitch at any venue, and now I'm doing it for the team I grew up watching," Harbaugh said in an animated press conference. "My dad, my brother and I used to come to games in the 70s and we'd watch the game, and then we'd hang out at a bar/restaurant where all the players hung out."
Before Fidrych, Harbaugh's Tigers hero was Gates Brown.
"My dad grew up with Gates in Ohio, and they were friends all through high school," he said. "So he was around all the time, and he was my hero."
Because of Brown and Fidrych, Harbaugh didn't grow up with football at the front of his mind.
"I wanted to be a major-league shortstop, or a pitcher, or a catcher," he said. "That was the dream."
Sadly, that died with the accidental help of his father Jack, who turned out to be a great football coach, but a terrible hitting instructor.
"I was hitting .417 during my senior season until my dad came back from Stanford with the Charlie Lau hitting method," Harbaugh said. "He had gotten it from the baseball coach out there, and we went to the cage on it and worked and worked. It was all about chopping down on the ball."
Lau is considered one of the greatest hitting coaches of all time, having turned George Brett into a Hall of Famer, but things didn't work for Harbaugh.
"I had a complete power outage," he joked. "For the rest of the year, which was the rest of my career, I couldn't get the ball out of the infield."
It wasn't until he was coaching at Stanford decades later that he figured out what happened.
"I ran into the same baseball coach, and we were talking about the method," he said. "When he demonstrated it, I asked him to do it again. He had this follow-thru where his hand came off the bat that my dad had never taught me. We only had half the method."
As it turned out, Harbaugh ended up doing perfectly well with football, but he's never lost his love for America's pastime.
"I've got my glove today, and we've got good seats to get another foul ball," he said. "I've got 20 in my life, and I'm ready to get another one."
