One day in the early 1980s, former Detroit Tiger Howie Bailey and his roommate, fellow pitcher Larry Pashnick, popped over to see what Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was up to, since he lived in the same apartment complex.

Fidrych had snuck home a bunch of fireworks from the ball park and, after a little brainstorming, the three agreed it would be cool to shoot them straight up Fidrych’s fireplace.

“Me and Bird ran out the slider because we wanted to watch it go out the chimney,” said Bailey, who was playing for the Evansville Triplets, Detroit’s Class AAA affiliate.

“We heard this ding, and we looked up at the chimney, and there is this rain cap on top of the chimney. We didn’t notice that. The next thing you know, you hear a ‘woooosh.’ Larry Pashnick is still sitting near the fireplace, and we hear him yell, ‘ahhhhhhhh!’”

“We run back in, and the whole inside of the apartment has turned green, blue and red. Pashnick is sitting there, and he can’t hear anything. Then we started shaking up beers and putting out the fire. The next day, Bird comes over and says, ‘You have to help me clean this apartment up a little bit.’ A little bit? We are in there, and it looks like a bomb went off. He said, ‘I’m going to lose my security deposit.’”

The rowdy days and nights in professional baseball are long gone for the man who pitched in the Tigers’ organization from 1979 to 1984, including three seasons with the parent club from 1981 to 1983. But Bailey, 54, has plenty of stories to tell about his life as a professional baseball pitcher.

It was raining and 36 degrees the morning of April 12, 1981, and Detroit pitching coach Roger Craig told Bailey he would have to wait to make his Major League debut because it appeared the game was going to be canceled.

“He came back about an hour later and told me, ‘You are going to have to start warming up,’ because we were playing,” said Bailey, who gave up one run on two hits before John Mayberry slammed a three-run homer off him in the sixth. The Tigers lost 6-2.

Bailey’s final career record with the Tigers was 6-9 with a 4.88 earned run average spread out over three years, with most of those coming in 1983, when he finished 5-5.

“I was excited in my first game, but once you are on the mound, it is like a hundred times before.”

Bailey pitched his final Major League game nearly 30 years ago, on Oct. 1, 1983, against the Milwaukee Brewers. What he misses most is the energy needed to play in the Majors.

“You were in constant motion,” Bailey said.

Not that he doesn’t have plenty to do these days. Bailey, 54, and his wife, Tammy, live in West Olive, where they have a 10-acre blueberry farm, two horses and three cats. Tammy said they like to sleep with the windows open when it is warm outside and listen to “summer’s symphony” — the sounds of the blowing wind, crickets and occasional wild turkey.

Since retiring after the 1984 season, Howie Bailey has become a packaging supply company owner and a world champion skeet shooter. The blueberry farm is waiting for him when he gets home from his Buy-Right Tape business in Grandville.

He said it seemed like everyone had a blueberry farm when he and Tammy moved into their neighborhood, so he figured he would have one, too.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it,” Bailey said. “Working in a blueberry field isn’t work. To me, it is nice to be out there wandering around.”

Bailey had plenty to learn about farming, though. The 1975 graduate of Grand Haven High School grew up in downtown Grand Haven, not on a farm.

“There are (dozens) of growers around here, and we talked to a few people,” Bailey said. “The toughest thing about it is that if you ask 10 people, you find out that you have 20 different ideas. Guys will tell you,

‘I did it this way, but if I could do it over again, I would do it this way.’”

The couple brought in four beehives to pollinate their blueberry crop, turning Bailey into a guy who can talk about bees dancing.

Bees have their own language, he said, and communicate with each other through movement known as the bee dance. The dance provides direction to their food source.

“These bees will be in the hives for four months during the winter time,” Bailey said. “A bee life is like six to nine weeks, so there are three or four new lives that have occurred during this time. They go out in the spring and come back to the hives and tell the other workers where the pollen is by the bee dance.

“They know how to do the bee dance. That’s why scientists say that communication is in their DNA.”

Bailey is one of four children born to Evelyn and the late Howard Bailey. His dad kept the kids active after supper, playing baseball and football.

“I have three sisters, and every day after dinner, they did the dishes, and my dad and I threw a baseball in the driveway, or we would throw a football if it was football season,” Bailey said. “We would just play catch and catch up on the day. We did it all the time. We would take a piece of chalk, and he would draw an outline of home plate. We always played catch.

“I wasn’t very good at baseball. I couldn’t hit.”

Bailey didn’t pitch on a regular basis until his senior year at Grand Haven. He later pitched for Muskegon Community College before transferring to Grand Valley State, where he played for former pro pitcher Phil Regan. Regan referred Bailey to Bob Sullivan and the Grand Rapids Sullivans, a top amateur team. Sullivan also was a scout for the Tigers and hooked him up with Detroit in 1978.

Bailey played under hall of fame manager Sparky Anderson with legendary Tigers Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson. His brother-in-law, Brad Suchecki, is a former Grand Haven High School baseball coach, and Bailey helped him out. But Bailey said he has never had any desire to coach beyond that, although he has plenty of knowledge and stories to share.

“I was pitching with the bases loaded against New York’s Graig Nettles,” he said. “There were two outs and I had thrown a 2-2 slider and it was a perfect pitch on the outside, and I even started the half-step to the dugout because I knew I had punched him out. The umpire is looking at a rookie pitcher and a guy with possibly hall of fame credentials. He didn’t swing, so he didn’t get rung up. The next pitch was up and in, and he did swing and strike out.

“I got into the dugout and (Tigers outfielder) Champ Summers says, ‘You knew he was swinging, right?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, he isn’t getting paid to get a walk.’ I started to realize right then, they want to see him jacking the ball.”

Bailey was traded to the Baltimore Orioles after spending the 1984 season in Detroit’s minor leagues. When the Orioles asked him to report to the Eastern League, he realized that his career was over and retired.

“All of the guys get the same news,” Bailey said. “Some get it in little league or in junior high or high school or college, or A ball, Double A or Triple A. I ended up in the big leagues when they said, ‘You know what? You aren’t that good. Take a hike.’

“But everybody gets the same news. Sooner or later, you aren’t talented enough to be there.”

Not that that news was easy when he got it.

“It is more difficult when you are 28 than when you are 8,” he said.

When Bailey moved back home to West Michigan, he brought his love of a good time and practical jokes with him. Not even young family members are safe from Bailey when he is in the mood for a joke.

“We had our nephews out to our farm, and he raced them up a dirt hill, but he didn’t follow them up the hill,” Tammy Bailey said.

“They are yelling, ‘Uncle Howie, Uncle Howie, we beat you. Uncle Howie? It smells funny up here. Why does it smell funny?’

“It was a manure pile. He had them play King of the Mountain on a pile of manure.”

Suchecki said Bailey often includes his sons on his adventures.

“We had to try out Howie’s new sleeping bags that he bought at an Army surplus store,” Suchecki said. “Myself, two of my boys and Howie went out camping on Bailey Farm, and it was the middle of the winter. We had to dig up the snow to the ground so we could lie down. Another time we went up to Manton in four feet of snow to try out our new snowshoes.”

There was one more thing Bailey brought back from Detroit — his competitive fire.

It didn’t take Bailey long to find a second sport to pursue once he retired. He began competitive skeet shooting in 1985, and he went on to win two world championships in Savannah, Ga., in 1990. He has racked up 11 state championships, and in August, he was inducted into the Michigan Skeet Association Hall of Fame at the Detroit Gun Club in Walled Lake.

Mike Forbes, who coached the Grand Valley State University hockey team to a national championship last season, met Bailey at the North Ottawa Rod and Gun Club, and they were teammates on the all-state team for eight years.

Forbes knows what it takes to be a professional athlete, having played professional hockey with Edmonton, and he sees that quality in Bailey.

“Everything is fun and games until you put him in a competitive environment,” Forbes said. “He has a laserlike focus.

“You can see why he was a successful pitcher when you watch him shoot skeet. That has to do with his competitive spirit and focus. That’s what I noticed right away. When the stakes get high, that’s when he is at his best.”

Suchecki also shoots with Bailey.

“We would go out duck hunting, and he is the only one I know who is happy when we don’t shoot anything. Then, he doesn’t have to clean anything,” Suchecki said. “As long as he is shooting, he is happy.”

Five things to know about Howie Bailey

• Bailey proposed to his wife, Tammy, in the back of his truck while attending a skeet shooting competition at the Detroit Sportsman Congress in 1987. “I had just said to him, ‘When are you going to ask me to marry you,’ and when I turned around, he had the box in his hand with the ring,” Tammy Bailey said.

• Who was the toughest hitter Bailey faced in his Major League Baseball career? Bailey said he doesn’t remember ever getting out Steve Balboni, a first baseman for the New York Yankees.

• Bailey is a member of the Holland Area Bee Keepers Association.

• Bailey roomed with Kirk Gibson during his rookie season in Detroit in 1981. The two rented a home from Ron LeFlore, who by then was playing for the Chicago White Sox.

• Bailey’s final season in the Major Leagues was 1983, and he hasn’t been back to a Tigers game since. “I never go to baseball games,” Bailey said. “I’ve watched so many baseball games. You had 30, 40 games in spring training, 160-some games in the regular season, 100 more in winter ball, and then spring training started three weeks later.”

Bailey downplays his baseball career, saying “It’s not like I played for 20 years.”

Tammy Bailey said she didn’t know about it when they met at a skeet shoot in July 1985. Her father, the late Dr. Perry Greene, an orthopedic surgeon, enjoyed skeet shooting and had teamed up with Bailey at the U.S. Coast Guard Shoot.

“I had arrived at the shoot to watch my dad, and I said, ‘Who is that guy squaded with my dad? Maybe my dad will introduce me to him,’” Tammy Bailey said. “So we ended up meeting, and we went out on our first date that night.”

Greene asked his daughter the next day if she knew Bailey had pitched for the Tigers.

“I said, ‘No he didn’t.’ My dad said, ‘Yes, he pitched for the Tigers,’” Tammy Bailey remembers. “I said, ‘Dad, you have the wrong guy.’ That’s how much I knew about baseball.

She says her husband typically won’t bring up his baseball career unless someone asks about it.

“He is very humble,” Tammy Bailey said. “He will never be one to bring up what he did in the past, which I find to be a very endearing quality.”

Tammy Bailey pulled open a kitchen drawer and pulled out a stack of envelopes about 12 deep. Bailey still is receiving autograph requests all these years later.

“This is the fan mail he received just last week,” Tammy Bailey said.

Most of the letters included baseball cards, requesting Bailey’s autograph, including one from Jimmy Montenegro of Jupiter, Fla. The card he sent had Bailey’s photo, along with fellow Tigers Dave Rucker and Marty Castillo, and ‘Future Stars’ was written across the card’s front.

“Your hard work and style won me over,” Montenegro wrote.

“He will sign them all and send them back,” Tammy Bailey said.

Bailey said it amazes him that he still receives fan mail.

“I watch football and baseball, and I watch guys like (Detroit pitcher Doug) Fister now, and I say, that guy is throwing nice,” Bailey. “But, to hold someone in high regard, like a movie star … when you get around it, you see it’s nothing special.”

E-mail the author of this story: yourlife@grpress.com