What does a person do with the Mike Flanagan story? How can one encapsulate the end of a man who might have loved his town and its team too much for his own good?
Flanagan, who apparently killed himself Wednesday at least partially because he was despondent over the perception in Baltimore that he helped along the deterioration of the Orioles, was remembered as the funny, clever, artful left-handed pitcher who was connected sinew and marrow with the Orioles when they mattered greatly.
It takes a bit more research to find out that he was also one of Peter Angelos' many general managers, and he learned that there's only so much that a general manager can do, and that amount is much less than it used to be. The chain of command travels in different directions, and the level of luck, bad and good, is higher than it used to be.
But fans still think general managers are the most direct and clear link to a team's successes and failures. Flanagan's seven teams as the general manager, 2002-08, were the ones that cemented Baltimore as a sub-mediocre team without an escape. Six of the seven Flanagan Oriole teams finished behind New York, Boston and Toronto, and in 2008 when the O's were passed by Tampa Bay, he was dismissed.
Seven years of .439 baseball, with no reasonable hope of getting better when he left in 2008 and returned to the broadcast booth. He evidently felt the eyes of others' disapproval on him all the time -- "He didn't fix it. He made it worse. He's one of Angelos' guys."
And let's be honest, Peter Angelos' running of the Orioles has been the very definition of .439 baseball. But Flanagan had worn the bird, both on his shirt and on his heart, so his failure bored into his soul. Friends and relatives agreed that he struggled with the way people viewed him in relation to a thing he loved with such fervor.
He never truly learned that baseball has morphed into a gypsy's world, where the only permanent thing is impermanence, and the ability to develop calluses is now a survival skill. The Orioles mattered too much to Mike Flanagan, and while we all speak about the nobility of a one-team guy (despite parts of four seasons in Toronto, he was an Oriole through and through), there are psychic tolls for those who embrace that one team too tightly.
There will be links forged that take Mike Flanagan back to Donnie Moore, the Angels' reliever who killed himself two years after surrendering a crushing home run to Dave Henderson in the 1986 American League playoffs. The pain of that moment became an avalanche for Moore that only death could free.
Maybe there are analogies to draw; that will be best illuminated by those who knew both men intimately and would be willing to share portraits of their friends' endured agonies. Those who draw more grand conclusions without knowing them are forever doomed to know far less than they think they do.
But Flanagan is dead today, by many accounts because baseball had bored its way into his brain, and the game's inherent cruelties did to him what they did to Donnie Moore. It is a game of failure, and the coping with it, that defines a man, and those who care most run the greatest risk.
Flanagan inhaled the Orioles, and a Baltimore that lived and died with them. That time is no more -- too many losing years, too many years watching the Yankees and Red Sox spend their way out of the solar system and into a perpetual state of contention. Toronto has kept its nose above the Orioles as well, and Tampa Bay has been better for four years now.
And with no escape evident to anyone, the instinct to blame all those who were part of the past is great, and understandable. Only Flanagan couldn't endure the opprobrium, because the Orioles mattered too much. His life had become defined by them, and they had not done their part to nurture him as he tried to nurture them.
And in the end, it consumed him in the most horrible way imaginable. In the days to come, we figure to learn more of Flanagan's life and death. It's possible that we learn that the Orioles weren't the central cause of his torment. But those who knew him best think it mattered a great deal, and unless there is a reason to doubt them, their explanation ought to be sufficient.
Their explanation is that Flanagan loved the Baltimore Orioles and what they stood for when he was an important player. That has changed, and he couldn't change it back, or make people understand that he tried all he knew to change it back.
It ends as a tragedy that is too easy to romanticize. Fact is, the Orioles consumed Mike Flanagan. Whole.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.com
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