Flannery Expects 100%, Nothing Less

Great Expectations.

No, not Great Expectations II. We’re not talking about a sequel here.

This was the Padres’ season of Great Expectations. This was the year the fast finish of 1988 and the acquisitions of Jack Clark and Bruce Hurst would make this a team to beat rather than a team to be beaten. Thus far, it has been the opposite.

And so what begins this afternoon against Chicago might be called Great Expectations, The Second Half.

This notion got Tim Flannery exercised during his exercises Wednesday at an afternoon workout that, for the players, essentially began the second half of the season.

Indeed, I looked up Mr. Flannery because of a rare keynote address he delivered to his teammates in Pittsburgh last Saturday, when the local heroes found themselves 10 1/2 games behind and eight games under .500. Because the Padres proceeded to close the proverbial first half of the season with back-to-back victories, it seemed appropriate to examine the gist of his observations.

Did he use a “win-one-for-the-Bipper” exhortation?

Or a Lombardi-esque harangue about winning being the only thing?

Or maybe this was bombast about going to and through the wall?

None of the above.

It had to do with expectations.

Expectations gnaw at Flannery, at 31 the senior Padre in terms of years with the club (seven full and parts of three others). A different “E” word is of more consequence to him.

Effort.

“Actually,” he said, “that talk was probably for me more than anyone else. I was feeling the game wasn’t fun. And I thought maybe the guys were feeling that because we weren’t winning or in the division lead that they were failures. Sometimes, expectations are put on people and I just didn’t want the guys to feel that they were failures because of someone else’s expectations.”

He has seen the same syndrome in friends who have never made it to the big leagues.

“To this day,” he said, “they have chips on their shoulders because they didn’t make it. They didn’t measure up to someone else’s expectations. If they gave it their best, they did not fail.”

Now, folks, we are getting to the gist of what Mr. Flannery had to say. Now we are at his favorite “E” word. It may initially have sounded as if he were an apologist for failure, delivering a recipe for rationalization.

Far from it.

“You prepare yourself and give 100% and do your very best,” he said. “Do that and you are a success. You don’t have to be pressured by expectations, trying to reach expectations to be successful. When you’re done, when you walk out the door, you don’t want to say you regret that there were a couple of years you might have played harder. You want to be able to say, ‘Thank you, I gave it all I had. I have no regrets.’ ”

Tim Flannery will be able to say that. He has had to give it all he had to be here this long. He was born of a preacher and raised with an ethic that measured success in terms of effort and values rather than anything as expendable as money. He put that upbringing together with a 160 pounds spread over 5 feet 11 inches and turned himself into a major league ballplayer.

“I would like to have been an All-Star second baseman for 15 years,” he said, “and I thought I was gonna be. I wasn’t, but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t a success.”

It might be argued that Flannery has been allowed to enjoy a career in which his popularity and, OK, limited expectations sheltered him from pressure. That would be wrong, however, because he has gone to almost every spring training with his job on the line, and not too many pressures are greater than that. And there were those years when personages such as Juan Bonilla and Alan Wiggins were lost and he was thrown into the breach.

“I didn’t know how to deal with the pressure, especially with Dick Williams on me, so I figured the only thing I could do was play hard,” he said. “If that wasn’t good enough, they could find someone else.”

So far, they haven’t found anyone who can knock him off the roster. And, you look at the numbers halfway through 1989, and the man is hitting .265. I can’t think of too many people on the roster hitting much better than that, Tony Gwynn always excluded.

Perhaps Tim Flannery was the perfect man to deliver such an oratory. He was not saying he was the only guy putting out the effort it takes. Hardly. This was a moment more for personal sharing. This was a guy everyone in the room knew was there only because he cared.

“What’s done is done,” he said. “You can’t make up 10 1/2 games in one night or 100 points on your batting average. People have said this club can win the pennant. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. But we can play 100%.”

But, Tim, what about those expectations?

“Forget ‘em,” he said, “or put ‘em on the shelf and look at them at the end of the year.”