(6 of 8)
Birdie had not only chosen his position, he already had the nickname that would last through his lifetime. Strangely, it had nothing to do with his thin, querulous voice. A doting aunt, cooing over his cradle, had made the less-than-flattering comment: "Why, he's got lips like a bird." The name stuck. It was years later that Birdie's raucous shriek gave it extra meaning. (Once when playing for Detroit he got thrown out of a game for no apparent reason, and Umpire Bill McGowan confessed: "Birdie, I've got a splitting headache, and that voice of yours just kills me.")
Without Incident. As soon as he got to high school, Birdie started playing semi-pro basketball. He found time for football, too, and by senior year he was also elected All-State quarterback. But baseball was the game he liked best, and he spent his summers playing with semi-pro teams in the mill towns of Massachusetts. Big-league scouts began to notice him; the Yankees even offered him a $5,000 bonus if he would skip college and sign with their Newark farm club. But Birdie's widowed mother insisted that her two sons and one daughter had to get all the education they could. So Birdie finally signed with the Detroit Tigers. His reasons were perfectly practical: the Tigers not only offered a bonus, they promised to let him finish college and to pay him a minimum of $200 a month while he was there.
Birdie had his choice of several athletic scholarships, but he finally chose Providence College where he could play baseball under Jack Flynn, an old Pirate infielder. He thought of becoming a doctor, but he gave up his pre-med courses for a philosophy major when he learned that lab work would interfere with baseball practice. For all his athletic activities, Birdie was a good student, and he almost graduated cum laude. "All I needed," he says, "were a few percentage points, and I lost those in a couple of dance halls in Providence. It was worth it."
Once Too Often. After graduation, Birdie signed with the Tigers and began a three-year tour of the minors that took him to New Bedford, Mass., Springfield, 111. and Beaumont, Texas. By late 1936 he was up with the Tigers and learning his trade as catcher under one of the best ever, Mickey Cochrane. Busy as he was, picking up every baseball trick he could, Birdie still managed to let his fast lip lead him into more than his share of fights. "I wasn't any good at fighting," he says. "But it seems as though I could never convince myself, because I was always in the middle of things."
In 1942 Birdie enlisted in the Army, earned a commission, and soon was getting his first crack at managing. From Texas to Tinian he managed service ball clubs. When he came home, teetotaler Tebbetts had "a great big intestinal ulcer," a sure sign that he was temperamentally suited for more managing, for a job that could guarantee further digestive difficulty and extend to him the dubious privilege of changing his shorts in a private clubhouse cubicle.