Baseball’s ‘Woke Hillbilly’ had more songs to write

Night had fallen, the mood was in turmoil, and the songwriting baseball coach rounded third base and headed home. Twice in the fall of 2020, doctors advised the seriously ill Tim Flannery to say goodbye to his family. Both times he refused to surrender.

The right arm that sent so many San Francisco baserunners home during the Giants’ three World Series titles from 2010 through 2014 delivered a final coda.

The road back from the brink was as unlikely as the man himself. An infielder turned popular coach, Flannery was always something more. A musician who carried a guitar on the road, a surfer who posed with a board on one of his trading cards, he had no choice but to stand out in the tight-lipped world of Major League Baseball.

After devoting himself fully to philanthropy and songwriting in his baseball retirement — his foundation has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-bullying causes — he had more people to help and more stories to tell. So giving in to a life-threatening staph infection was not an option.

Fate and Flannery eventually came to a standstill during his grueling three-month battle against the infection, but doctors still warned him that he might never walk again. He developed sepsis and required two back surgeries to remove abscesses and damaged tissue. He went home with a tube that delivered antibiotics into his heart. That was the easy part, because his wife of 42 years, Donna, administered those doses.

Finally, with a walker in hand, while his little granddaughter Jade rode shotgun on the bar, he made a deal: 25 times up the ramp, slow, 25 times back, painful, and Jade would be rewarded with an ice cream sandwich .

On particularly productive days, she scored two.

“I’ve definitely changed my life,” Flannery, 65, said recently one afternoon at a neighborhood cafe near the beach, a familiar twinkle – to live – back in his eyes. He had rehearsed for two hours earlier that day. He would soon finalize details for the next show with his band, the Lunatic Fringe.

“I’ve seen moments and things much more clearly,” he continued. “And you try to create good thoughts and try to remember this moment here. Because if I ever go back to that situation, I want to try to take as many good memories and good hallucinations with me as possible.”

His hospital stay was horrible. “Vicious,” he said of the time he spent tied up so he couldn’t harm himself or others. The hospital was two miles from his home, but every look out his window brought more distortion. Not all of his visions were terrible. His friend Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, made an appearance. And so does another friend, Jimmy Buffett.

The significance of those particular visits would later become clear, convincing Flannery that they were no coincidence.

Authentic

Through more than four decades of baseball and music, first in San Diego and then in San Francisco, Flannery became a beloved player, coach and troubadour – a character – for his endearing gift of leaving a piece of himself with everyone he encountered.

“Authentic,” said Flannery’s bandmate and producer, Jeff Berkley. “He’s exactly who you think he is. He’s not trying to pretend. He’s not trying to be from Kentucky; he’s from Kentucky. Until he stopped drinking, man, he took moonshine everywhere he went. He’s a total hillbilly. He wears that term with pride. He’s probably the first woke hillbilly.”

Because Flannery felt that some baseball fans viewed his guitar with suspicion during his years in San Diego, he initially wanted to keep that part of his life a secret when he agreed to coach Bruce Bochy in San Francisco.

“I was going to come in as the third coach and not let anyone in,” Flannery said. “I thought, ‘Nobody’s going to tear my heart out.’”

But in 2011 his music came to the forefront when he Love Harder project in response to the horrific beating of Bryan Stow, a Giants fan who was attacked in the Dodger Stadium parking lot on opening day in 2011. With the foundation, which has a mission against bullying and violence, Flannery has helped raise approximately $100,000, primarily through shows with the Lunatic Fringe, to offset the Stow family’s medical expenses.

“Hey, I hit nine home runs in the ’80s,” Flannery said. “I can’t just write a check.”

But he could write, play and sing.

Stow, now 54, suffered serious brain injuries in the attack and now lives at home with his parents in the Santa Cruz area. He is taking memory and mobility courses at a local community college and learned on Father’s Day that he would become a grandfather.

“Flan was one of the first to step up and help Bryan. It was just amazing,” said Ann Stow, Bryan’s mother. “And he has always been that way throughout Bryan’s journey. Flan and Donna are such an important part of our family.”

In total, the Love Harder Project has raised approximately $360,000 in Flannery’s ongoing fight against bullying and violence.

Air and water

Despite what some advised him early in his career, Flannery would never choose baseball over music.

“Like I had to choose between air and water,” he said. “I have to have both.”

Although Flannery grew up mostly in Anaheim, California, his family came from the hills of Kentucky. His uncle, Hal Smith, was a catcher who hit a three-run homer for Pittsburgh in the eighth inning of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. If the Pirates’ bullpen had had the 9-7 lead, Smith would have been a hero have been. Instead, the Yankees evened things out and Pittsburgh’s Bill Mazeroski won the game and earned immortality.

Smith, who played for 10 seasons, regularly carried a Gibson J35 guitar on the road. When Flannery signed professionally at age 19, he followed suit.

Flannery’s first manager, Roger Craig, told him to focus on baseball instead of playing guitar, but the instrument remained his constant companion. Children were born – Daniel is now 37; Ginny, the mother of Tim’s three grandchildren, is 35; Kelly is 32 – and the guitar was there for everything.

“If it was a crazy day, that guitar would calm him down,” Donna Flannery said.

Another uncle, George, convinced Flannery that playing music wasn’t enough and that he should record his songs to tell the stories of his family’s lives. Among them is “Pieces of the Past,” a tribute to Flannery’s preacher father, Ragon, who was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. Jackson Browne and Bruce Hornsby performed on the recording.

On his musical journey, Flannery has opened for Buffett and Emmylou Harris. Weir of the Grateful Dead came into his life at a benefit for Stow, and Walker, the outlaw country legend and longtime hero of Flannery’s who wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” also befriended him during their years in San Francisco.

“The great thing about the Bay Area, one of the greatest blessings, is that I found a place where they understand that you can be an artist and still coach thirds,” Flannery said.

Playing through pain

When the pandemic hit and the world shut down, Flannery retreated to a retreat he calls his “tree house” in the mountains north of Santa Barbara.

In his cabin there is no electricity, no telephone service and the water comes straight from a well. The staph infection that nearly killed him started, he thinks, when he was building cages to protect the potatoes, corn, tomatoes, okra, spinach and various other vegetables he planted there.

“You have to put everything in cages because there are animals,” said Flannery, who retired from coaching after the 2014 World Series but remained in baseball doing television analysis until 2019. “I’ve never done anything like this before. because I never had summers off. Somehow I got cut off, or the ground came in.”

As a former baseball player, when the back pain struck, he thought he would just play through it.

“I would take four Advil, drink a large cocktail and usually wash it down with a bottle of wine to dull the pain,” he said of his nighttime regimen.

But one afternoon he fell asleep, hard, on the deck, and woke only because it was dinner time for his dog, Buddy. Stubborn as his owner was, Buddy nudged and licked Flannery until he came to. If that hadn’t happened, Flannery said, he would have died right there. Instead, the two somehow drove to his home in the San Diego area, where Tim collapsed and was taken away by paramedics.

As he recovered in early 2021, Susan Walker called one day. Her husband, Jerry Jeff, had died of cancer in October, and she invited Flannery to perform at a celebration of life in Luckenbach, Texas, that June. At the time, he couldn’t even sit up to play his guitar, but he was determined to make it.

The memorial concert was Flannery’s first performance since his recovery, and both men Flannery had visited in the hospital played roles, only in spirit. Weir, who was supposed to be in Luckenbach before travel problems kept him from doing so, called just before Flannery went on stage. And Buffett, who died this month, was there in person.

“Hey, you look just like Tim Flannery, only older,” Buffett teased.

The old coach, at Susan’s request, played a Walker original titled “Last Song” and a tribute Flannery wrote for his friend, “Last of the Old Dogs.”

“I think I kind of stunned people,” Flannery said. “I don’t know how it happened, and it was all outside of me. When I came out, the whole crew had tears in their eyes.”

Donna Flannery said she finds her husband “a nicer person these days, nicer to everyone.”

As one of the lines in a song of his says: On the other side lives kindness.

And so the man who was told to leave his guitar at home and focus on baseball has hung up his spikes. And he will continue to try to make the world a little bit better.

“When I play, I pray before every show that the great translator, the Holy Spirit, comes and takes everything I say and turns it into what people need and puts it in their hearts,” Flannery said. “And a few days later, when you start hearing from people, yeah, there’s a reason I’m playing.”