Return of the Bird

News a couple of weeks ago that the Baltimore Orioles will feature the goofy, grinning cartoon-bird logo on team caps next season for the first time since 1988 made me grin just as goofily. It’s a feel-good image in and of itself, but more than that, it hearkens back to the days when the following the Orioles was fun.

The cartoon bird reminds me of the great teams of the 1970s, when future hall of famers Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Frank Robinson were being profanely pushed to the limits of their talent by Manager Earl Weaver, himself later enshrined in Cooperstown. It brings back images of Memorial Stadium rocking to cheers led by bearded, beer-gutted cab driver Wild Bill Hagy.

Which obviously is why the team brass has dusted off the cartoon bird, supplanting the “ornithologically correct” bird associated with the reality of 14 straight seasons of losing under the bungling yet defiant ownership of Peter Angelos. Team ownership won’t change in 2012, but perhaps the Orioles’ fortunes somehow will, the cartoon bird’s reappearance is meant to suggest. Anyway, how’s about turning that frown upside down and joining the impish bird in a break from all your worries? Why not simply crack open a cold one, sit back and enjoy the game, whether you’re watching at Oriole Park at Camden Yards or at home on your TV?

Presumably this was a marketing decision many months in the making. It probably had nothing to do with the suicide of Mike Flanagan this past August. But for me, there’s a connection that’s more sweet than bitter.

Flanagan was a mainstay of the Orioles pitching staff in late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the American League’s Cy Young Award as its most outstanding hurler in 1979, a year in which his team came within one victory of winning the World Series. In a 17-year major league career spent primarily with Baltimore, he won 167 games. He threw the last pitch by the home team at Memorial Stadium in fall 1991, then retired the following year.

Flanagan served as the Orioles’ pitching coach for two seasons in the 1990s, as the team’s executive vice president for baseball operations from 2006 to 2008, and as an Orioles broadcaster for many of the years in between. He broadcast games until late August of this year, in fact. When, on his property in the Baltimore suburbs, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thereby ending his long career with the team and his 59-year association with the planet.

Why did he do it? Reports conflicted. Money woes apparently were a factor. But some sources suggested he also was despondent about the franchise’s long slide from relevance, and perceptions in some quarters that he’d been part of the problem. It’s hard to imagine where Flanagan got that, since, for most Orioles fans, the blame begins and ends with Angelos. It’s difficult to imagine an unkind word having been uttered about Flanagan, an earnest, hard-working, wry New Englander who always stood out as an island of competence in a sea of miscalculation and outright haplessness.

The suicide shocked most everyone, even people who’d known him well. Not so much his wife, who vaguely alluded to demons of long standing. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man whose pain is so deep, whose perceptions are so warped, that he thinks self-negation is the only way out?

But let’s say money was part of it, and losing another part. And let’s assume that, like pretty much every other middle-aged man, Flanagan mourned, to at least some degree, the loss of youth. Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that he felt his best days were long past. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that, until the very moment his long-shrinking Happy Place vanished entirely, that portal in his mind opened out onto a long-gone ballfield located several miles from the Inner Harbor, where Flanagan was still a pitcher in his prime, in tip-top shape statistically, physically and on the balance sheet. Where his team won far more often than it lost. Where the hats were goofy but the baseball wasn’t.

Mike Flanagan won’t be back at Camden Yards next spring. But his talisman, his ornithologically incorrect little buddy, will be. And that somehow makes me smile. The cartoon bird won’t make a lick of difference in the standings, of course. If the team improves at all, real-life ballplayers will make that happen, not some animated mascot. But the bird’s reappearance will make a difference to me. It will feel much more like a tribute to Flanagan than did the memorial patches the players wore on their uniforms in September. It will feel like a breezy reminder of a happier time.