“It’s the same principle as a flat-sided Wiffle ball,” he said. “You hold the ball with the scuffed side opposite to the direction you want it to break. It takes no talent whatsoever.”
Why don’t you do it?
“My real stuff’s still too good,” said Flanagan, who won 23 games with the best left-handed curveball in the American League and a fastball in the 90s.
Then, seriously, he said: “I can understand why they do it and I can’t swear that I won’t ever do it, but I still hate it. [Once] when I was hurt, I got to the point where I actually took the mound thinking I’d cheat that day. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought, ‘If you’ll do this now, just to have a little better chance to win, what won’t you do eventually?’
“I guess I just felt too conspicuous out there.”
Conspicuous to whom?
“Myself, I guess.”
Flanagan always called his job description “fool on the hill” and wore a T-shirt under his uniform that said “Dead Goat Saloon.” Even as a player, you’d see him reading serious novels. Once, asked what he would have done if he were not a baseball player, he referred back to the old John Belushi skit on “Saturday Night Live” and said, “I think I’d have made an excellent Killer Bee.”
Flanagan was a first port of call for Orioles with problems because he had had his share. “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars — on stars where no human race is,” New Hampshire’s Robert Frost wrote. “I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places.”
Sometimes, Flanagan wore a black suit in summer, and his humor bore the etymology of the root word that described it: “mordant.” But what those who knew him best will recall — first and erasing all else — were his eyes crinkling to a slit with laughter and, behind those eyes, a bone-deep desire to give, even for things not asked, while taking little.
After years of frustration, when the O’s won the ’83 World Series, Flanagan said, “Now we got what we all wanted: a highlight film with a happy ending.”
This week, we don’t get the happy ending, but we can keep our highlights, our memories, of the life and the man, which still shine brighter than any trophy.
Loading...
Comments