Greenfield Recorder sports editor Gary Sanderson was a friend of Mike Flanagan when they were at UMass together. He offered a nice remembrance of his friend who died Wednesday.

Had Mike Flanagan been told that Gary Sanderson would publish a story about UMass memories after his death, he probably would have flashed that wry, crooked grin I remember so well and quipped, “Bags? Uh-oh!”

But I’m not here to dust off skeletons in the closets of the 20 Ball Lane, Amherst bungalow we once called home. No, that is not my errand. Mike Flanagan was a serious ballplayer who kept his nose clean. No Animal House tales. Only good stuff. I only want to embellish the legacy of a man we called “Flan,” polish the legend of this former major league pitcher and Cy Young Award winner who committed suicide Wednesday at his Maryland home. He was 59. Too young. I knew him before he made it big. But the truth is that Flanagan was always big, which doesn’t mean physically large, just huge on talent. Anyone who played with or against him would agree. We all knew he had it and was destined to make it. He was that good.

“You really ought to give him a call sometime, I think he’d get a kick out of hearing from you,” urged a mutual friend who said my name had come up in a conversation with Flanagan in the past five years. “He loves fly fishing and would probably like to go out with you if he’s ever around.”

Well, that never happened. I figured a lot of “old friends” had contacted Flanagan over the years looking for tickets or other favors, and I didn’t want to be just another pest. Plus, frankly, I had little to offer. My serious fishing days were over in the early 90s.

It has been said that Flanagan and I were roommates, which is not true. Legends seem to grow with time. Actually, I was the man who took his Ball Lane bed when he departed for Baltimore Orioles training camp. I moved in after the start of the spring 1974 semester, sharing the small North Amherst bachelors’ pad behind Matuszko Trucking with UMass basketball guard Billy Endicott and two of my baseball teammates, righthanded pitchers John Olson and Chip Baye. I knew Baye because I had faced him in Legion ball and scrimmaged his Northampton High School football teams. My Ball Lane transition period was uncomfortable at first because Flanagan was still in town until mid-February, so there was an interim period of a few weeks when I was moving in and hanging in limbo. But we got through it with aplomb. Flanagan was always easy going, affable and funny, a great, fun-loving guy. The last time I saw him in person was during the 1974 UMass spring baseball trip to Miami Beach. We were playing Biscayne College, which served as the Orioles’ minor league camp, and he stopped by to sit on our bench and watch the game with O’s teammate Mike Boddicker. The last time I spoke to him on the phone was in the early 1980s, when Chip Ainsworth and I were doing a weekly radio talk show on Greenfield’s WPOE, AM-1520. I’d get his phone number from his father, Manchester, N.H., mechanic Ed Flanagan, and set up a time to call him for an on-air interview. I don’t recall if we ever did interview the man, but we probably did.

Flanagan’s dad, a former minor-leaguer himself, was an average Joe. There was nothing average son Mike. He never ceased to amaze me with his extraordinary athletic skills, could do anything he put his mind to. Take pinball, for example. He was a master. We lived just around the corner from a jock bar then known as Mike’s Westview Café. The place was busy seven nights a week and Flanagan often stopped in to have a few beers, socialize and play pinball. He loved “Big Indian,” one of those classic old machines that tilted, had flippers and bumpers, bells and whistles. He’d enter the bar after supper, say 7 or 8, and leave the machine a few hours later with so many free games racked up on the board that people would play “on him” until closing. No lie. That game fared no better against him than hitters. He dominated.

People have often asked me to rate Flanagan as a pitcher. He was a lefty and I did face him a few times with no success in live practice drills. I remember arriving at Earl Lorden Field for practice in the fall of 1973, checking the daily hitting schedule and finding my name among the three hitters who would face the phenom. On the one hand, I thought it unfair. I was trying to make a team against stiff competition, with about 140 candidates vying for 40 slots. Why did I have to face the best pitcher in New England? But on the other hand, the fact that I was slotted against him was flattering. It told me I was being seriously evaluated. I only vaguely remember the at-bats. Flanagan’s control was excellent, the best I had seen, and he gave you little to work with. Your choices were basic: hit it where it was pitched or strike out and look foolish doing so. Your only chance was a mistake. He made few. My recollection is that I hit two ground balls to second base and a pop-up caught by the shortstop in short center field. I didn’t embarrass myself, but he got me out. The name of the game.

Flanagan was a fine-tuned precision machine, the likes of which I had never faced. I had seen scarier fastballs. Amherst’s Tom White first comes to mind. You could hear his heater as it exploded past your face, the high ones rising, the low ones dipping. When Whitey was on, it was a victory to foul one off. No lie. He was that overpowering, a lean, mean, 6-foot-6 lefty with a nasty fastball. But he didn’t have Flanagan’s confidence, command or repertoire and fizzled out in Double A. He probably would have made it as a one-pitch short-reliever in today’s specialized game.

I actually had the opportunity to “catch” Flanagan informally a few times on the frozen, gravel Ball Lane parking lot. He and other pitchers sometimes begged to throw on warm winter days and I’d accommodate them by putting on a glove and squatting to offer a target. The other guys could be erratic and leave welts and bruises, but I swear Flanagan rarely missed by more than the width of the baseball. He was that fine, whether throwing his tailing fastball, the big 12-to-6 curve or a tighter breaking ball he’d use to cut the corners with two strikes on the batter. His command was so good — even for those off-season, parking-lot sessions — that I wouldn’t have hesitated to catch him sitting naked on a five-gallon pail in a paved lot. No one I ever faced could hit spots like Flanagan. In and out. Up and down. It was the skill that separated him from the rest.

Flanagan probably could have made it as a big-league hitter. Too bad he didn’t play in the National League, where pitchers hit. He would have done some damage. Few people who own his baseball card likely know he was not only one of the Cape Cod League’s best pitchers in 1972, he also was among the leaders in home runs. Check it out if you doubt me. I believe it’s true. Which reminds me of a night during the 1973 UMass season when I drew Flanagan’s ire after midnight. Limping on a sprained ankle that had ended my season and required two-a-day physical-therapy ice sessions, I flopped down at 20 Ball Lane late on the Friday night before a key Saturday doubleheader and hung around with the fellas for an hour or two. Flanagan was relaxing in a worn, dusty stuffed chair like you see out by the road with a "free" sign on it. He was watching TV and joking around with the rest of us. His mood changed when he discovered I needed a ride back to my frat house and begrudgingly offered his services. Let’s just say he wasn’t thrilled about the inconvenience. After dropping me off at Sig-Ep and speeding off, he went home to bed, awoke the next day and pitched a UMass game for the ages. Going against Yankee Conference rival Maine on short sleep in the opener of a doubleheader, he hit three home runs, drove in six runs, scored four and pitched a two-hitter with 10 strikeouts in a 10-1 win. The run he surrendered was unearned. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s a piece of the UMass Flanagan legend, for him, just another day at “The Earl.”

Baseball wasn’t the only sport Flanagan excelled at. He was a pretty fair country point guard on the 1971-72 freshman basketball team that finished with the best record in UMass history. Other notable players on that team that finished at 15-1 included Endicott, John Murphy and Jim Burke. Julius Erving was a junior playing his final varsity season before signing with the Virginia Squires of the new, short-lived ABA. Rick Pitino was a sophomore guard. A Flanagan teammate on the freshman team was South Deerfield’s late Rickey Boron, a friend of mine who was a year ahead of me at Frontier Regional School. Boron was Frontier’s first 1,000-point scorer back in the days when the milestone meant something, before the 3-point shot. He was the sixth or seventh man on the Redman team and had quite a reputation as a free-throw shooter capable of throwing in 100 straight almost anytime. One day after practice at Curry Hicks Cage, late UMass coach Jack Leaman approached Boron to tell him he’d heard about his free-throw-shooting prowess. He then issued a challenge: “I’ll rebound until you miss.” That too became UMass legend when Boron tossed in more than 200. Talk of the feat apparently didn’t faze Flanagan a bit. Boron, who reportedly beat NBA Hall of Famers Sam Jones and John Havlicek regularly in free-throw contests at summer camps where he was a counselor, once told me that Flanagan was his toughest opponent. It was Flanagan’s confidence and Boron’s diffidence that balanced the competition. Flanagan would step to the line and throw in 50 or so, then playfully needle Boron until he missed. Boron wasn’t hesitant to admit that Flanagan could psych him out. You just can’t beat confidence, and Flanagan oozed it.

Apparently, Flanagan recognized his basketball limitations quickly at UMass, though. When playing for the Toronto Blue Jays in the late 80s, he told a Toronto Sun beat writer about a memorable practice against Erving that set him straight. “I really didn’t know much about Dr. J until I came down on a fast break and pulled up to take a jump shot,” Flanagan told the scribe. “Dr. J was nowhere in the area but, out of nowhere, he blocked the shot and nine players were running the other way. First thing I thought? Better work on my slider, because this is a whole different level of play.”

I could go on forever. There are so many yarns I could spin about Flanagan, all of them stitched with thread from which legends are wove. But let me limit it to a couple anecdotes from a 1974 Amherst Common fair. The month was probably October and Flanagan, a pro ballplayer, was in town during the offseason to finish up his degree. Our UMass baseball team had returned from a Saturday doubleheader at Dartmouth College and I was headed downtown with two teammates when we bumped into Flanagan outside of Boyden Gym. We stopped to talk and he decided to accompany us to Barsellotti’s for a couple of beers before checking out the fair. We figured we could horse around and get a bite to eat. When we passed through the gate in a festive mood, a clown juggling three wooden balls over to the side caught Flanagan’s attention. He walked up to him, studied him for a minute or two and requested a quick lesson. The clown obliged by slowing down a bit to demonstrate technique, then held out the balls with a why-don’t-you-try-it challenge. Flanagan accepted. After a few mess-ups, Flanagan surprised the clown and us by figuring it out and juggling like a veteran court jester. That, I will never forget. The guy was blessed with extraordinary hand-to-eye coordination.

It gets better. Later that same night on the midway, we came upon a loudmouth carnival barker sitting on the plank above a dunk-the-dink tank. The dink dude was hollering out insults like, “Hey, chicken wing or noodle arm, give it a shot” and other barbs intended to lure in suckers. He clearly didn’t know what he was dealing with when our foursome approached. There we were, four ballplayers — three pitchers, one a pro with pinpoint control — and they were offering three throws for a buck. Baseballs, no less. Though short on cash as students usually are, we couldn’t resist the tease. Most enticing was the fact that the dink wasn’t even wearing a wetsuit. He was about to pay a stiff price in the bitter autumn air. Within 10 or 15 minutes on that blustery night, the unfortunate dink had been dunked many times, was turning a light shade of blue and shivering so hard that we could hear his teeth chattering from where we stood outside the booth. He finally cried uncle, pulled in a replacement and wrapped himself up in a couple of wool blankets. The scene really tickled Flanagan’s funny bone. He laughed hysterically and tossed a few good-natured verbal harpoons at the shivering soul as we departed.

I guess that's how I want to remember “Flan,” with that infectious laugh and cool, calculating confidence. Don't bore me with the portrait those who didn't know him are painting in the press following his tragic final act. In my view, he checked out his way. As a friend, I must accept that.