Mike Flanagan was Baltimore Orioles royalty. He won the hearts of a passionate fan base with the talent and guts he displayed on the mound. With his intelligence and wit, Flanagan should have been a media star in his post-baseball career.
But he wanted more.
Flanagan, who was found dead at 59 at his home Wednesday of what was ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was the arm that led the great Orioles teams from 1979 through 1983. He won 23 games and the Cy Young award in 1979 and even in an injury-filled season came back to help the club win the 1983 World Series.
The left-hander pitched hurt throughout his career.
“He always seemed to have something physical going on,” Scott McGregor, his counterpart on those great Orioles pitching staffs, once told me. “One year he blew his Achilles out. The year he won the Cy Young he lost the whole muscle behind his left shoulder. He was a gladiator.”
If so, Flanagan may have been the funniest gladiator ever to enter the arena. His wit was legendary. Back in the days when pitchers were driven from the bullpen to the mound, Flanagan said, “I could never play in New York. The first time I came into a game there, I got in the bullpen car and they told me to lock the doors.”
Flanagan retired after the 1992 season, and his second act should have been as a media star. But he wanted to be part of the game. He had ideas, visions of what a baseball organization should be like. He spent many hours preparing his thoughts and plans.
He bounced between two one-year stints as pitching coach and two stops in the broadcast booth as a color analyst for Orioles telecasts while the franchise sunk to the bottom of baseball.
Flanagan, though, believed he had a plan to lead the franchise he loved out of those dark times and convinced owner Peter Angelos to give him the chance to do that — first in a co-general manager-like role with Jim Beattie in 2003 and then as the executive vice president of baseball operations in 2006.
But Flanagan’s dream turned out to be a nightmare, and he was out of the picture after 2008 and back in the booth for a third time. He was never able to fix the dysfunctional organization. Maybe it was his ideas that didn’t work. Maybe it is the virus that seems to infect everyone who comes into contact with the Orioles franchise.
The franchise will honor Flanagan with several symbols, including flying the Orioles flag in the right-field flag court at Camden Yards at half-mast the rest of the season.
They should keep it at half-mast until the Orioles become a franchise fans can be proud of again. That’s what Mike Flanagan wanted.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
