We are our family. The influence of our parents, grandparents and ancestors runs deeper than just their mix of DNA. Some try to escape that power, some embrace it. Even in their own day it is still a variation on a theme. Tim Flannery is his family. He has listened to the muse of their echoing voices and written his own life. He is a Californian with a penchant for Appalachian moonshine. He is Irish with a vein of Cherokee. And living as a Leucadian, the locals would say he is a surfer with baseball stuck in his head set to a Kentucky bluegrass soundtrack.

When a kid in a dirt lot shags a high hopper near second base, slips it to the shortstop who tags the bag and shoots it to first for a double play, the fluidity of motion is captivating. When the same boy goes home, and granddaddy can pitch a mean batting practice and his uncles relive their big league days around dinner, baseball becomes life.

Flannery grew up hearing his uncle’s golden day in the World Series. His Uncle George Smith played for the Baltimore Orioles, but his Uncle Hal Smith played for the ’60 Pittsburgh Pirates. That year was a memorable fall classic. It went down to game seven. In the eighth inning, the Pirates were down by two until Smith smashed a three run homer to put the Pirates ahead. The Yankees would answer with two runs in the top of the ninth. The Bronx Bombers had outscored the Pirates in the series 55 to 27. But in those endless combinations that are baseball, Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off homer would stun the Yanks. It was Casey Stengel’s last World Series. It would be the greatest disappointment in Mickey Mantle’s career. All Yogi Berra could say was, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” That game has been celebrated over and over in the Flannery household. Sometimes the stories are as good as the game.

In pro ball, sometimes the phone has as magical a ring as a bat. Flannery’s own call came in 1978. He missed it. He was out surfing. A blistering bat for the Chapman University Panthers, Flannery had been told he’d probably be taken in the fifth round of the Major League Baseball draft his junior year. When that call didn’t come, Flannery sought the solace of the sea.

“You have to remember this was before cable; you couldn’t get every game on TV,” Flannery recalled. An alumnus of Anaheim High School, Flannery had grown up a regular at the Big A. He had visions of being an Angel or at least on one of the storied teams he grew up hearing about. When he got back from surfing he asked his mom, “Did anyone call?” She said, “the San Diego Padres.” They had not even been on his radar and he replied, “the Padres, I remember them.”

Thus began a 25-year relationship with the Friars. He would play and manage Padres minor league teams on either end of his big league career. And when Flannery speaks of the minor leagues there is an affectionate look in his eye. Most college kids have to learn to tie ties or do spread sheets; Flannery got to pack his well-worn spikes and play baseball.

His best assignment in the minors was two years of Triple-A ball for the Hawaiian Islanders. Besides a .349 batting average it was paradise on many levels. “Surfing everyday, baseball in Aloha Stadium, some of the best live music,” Flannery said.

His three passions and perfect weather. Wherever baseball has taken him, he hunts out the best spots for live music. The island version of the pedal steel guitar drew him in, but the Hawaiian slack key guitar kept him coming back. On Oahu, a ringing phone has a harsh jangle. Flannery said, “Doug Rader called me in one day and said, I have some bad news for you, you’re going to the big leagues.” So he had to abandon Shangri-La to fulfill his dream.

One spring training early in his career, Flannery went to clear his mind with live music. He found the Dallas Collins band playing at the Stag and Hound in Yuma, Ariz. After a few songs, they invited him up to join them and a few songs into that, in walks the Padre brass. The worst advice he ever got in baseball was, “Keep your guitar out of the cocktail lounge.” A discordant beginning, but at least he’d found a band to play his wedding.

Flannery met his wife Donna while they were still in high school. It was love at first sight. Even though he had a girlfriend at the time, when he saw Donna he told his best friend, “I’m going to marry that girl.” He went on to Chapman and Hawaii, she to UCLA, but eventually his prophecy came true. Tim and Donna have been married for 25 years, which equals just about the same amount of time he was married to the Padres.

Flannery as a Friar was a hometown favorite. Only Tony Gwynn, Dave Winfield and Garry Templeton wore the Padres jersey longer than Flannery. Of that long tenure Flannery said, “In today’s game, that will never happen again.” His Flan-base was built by playing 11 years with the same gritty ethic his granddad had mining coal. He did his job. He didn’t complain. He went to the World Series in ’84 as a player and ’98 as a coach. And just like his granddad’s black lung pension, there should be some sort of compensation for the heartbreak of being an almost-made-it Padre.

After he retired as a player, he managed Padre farm teams. “Donna married me after I was in the majors so I took her back to the minors. Told her she had to earn it,” Flannery said with a smile. He came back to coach the Pads and then was a broadcaster learning play-by-play from Jerry Coleman and Ted Leitner. “I know that was an opportunity of a lifetime,” Flannery said. “Most players do color. Not many do play-by-play.” But the phone rang again.

It was an old friend with an agonizing offer. Bruce Bochy was heading north to manage the San Francisco Giants, and would Flan consider coming up to coach third base? “That was an opportunity of a lifetime too,” Flannery explained. “You don’t leave the game for four years and then get a call to be back on the field.” It was Halloween. “It was the hardest 24 hours of my life,” he said. It was Donna that helped him decide. “She saw that look in my eyes and said, “Let’s do it.” And besides Boch, Flannery has former Padres, now Giants, Dave Roberts, Ryan Klesko and Mark Sweeney to make him feel at home.

But leaving Encinitas, if only for a season, is as hard as trading in SD for SF. “You can forget how special this place is.” Before heading to the fog, Flannery took a beach run the length of Encinitas. Somewhere around Swami’s, “six hardcore surfers” were just coming out of the waves and shouted at Flannery, “Flan, were gonna miss you man.” Another hollered, “It’s so great you’re getting back on the field!” So with a “Keep Leucadia funky” sticker on his guitar case he left for the land of the Giants.

His “hippie décor” China Basin apartment will be unbelievably quiet compared to home. The Flannerys have three kids and, “everybody who doesn’t have parents are here on the weekends. At least we know where our kids are,” Flannery laughed. When the exuberance becomes too much, Flannery hides in his late model Airstream next to the garage. “It’s quiet and I put a flat screen in there.” His buddies dubbed it the “rapture capsule.” He said, “It doubles as a green room on gigs” and he camped in it during spring training when he was working for KFMB. “I’d cook every night, play my guitar, wish I was home.”

Pretty much having ignored the advice to keep his guitar out of the cocktail lounge, it’s a sure bet Flannery will find a stage in Frisco. “I grew up singing. My mother was very musical. My mom’s side all played and sang.” His ball playing uncles carried guitars and wrote songs. It was “mostly Kentucky mountain music,” he said. Flannery plays guitar and bouzouki (an Irish cross between a guitar and a mandolin). Like any picker, the mere mention of Bill Monroe gets Flannery’s attention. There is a kindred bond between anyone who knows a Scruggs from a Skaggs. And like bluegrass itself, Flannery is a preacher’s kid. Neither bluegrass nor Flannery has been able to stray too far from the gospel. But if Kentucky is in his roots, California is in his soul. Flannery has put out eight albums. “Each CD is a phase in my life,” he said. If the influence of Monroe and the Everly Brothers show his Kentucky origins, then Gram Parsons and Merle Haggard seem to call to his California core.

His newly released “The Wayward Wind” is an anthology of what he has become musically. It is as hard to define as the man himself. There is Appalachian pluck, a believer’s hymn, some Encinitas honky-tonk and a little So Cal penitential rock. The CD premiere on February 10 was at the La Paloma Theater, of course, and right up front Flannery said to the loyal locals, “I don’t know why I’m so nervous; most of you hear us singing on the front porch.” Steve Poltz opened for Flannery, a good friend and a hard act to follow. And renowned resident songwriter Jack Tempchin gave Flannery’s tenor voice a break about half way through. Flannery introduced Tempchin (“Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Slow Dancing”) as a mentor and “a little whacked out like the rest of the people who live in Leucadia.”

For a few blessed hours Tim Flannery and The Enablers brought down the sold out house. The Enablers (Donna named the band) are Doug Pettibone who plays every kind of guitar imaginable and was off to tour with Lucinda Williams, Dennis Caplinger on fiddle, banjo and mandolin (anything with strings really) who recently lent his world famous talents to Eric Clapton’s Road to Escondido, Jeff Berkley on percussion, sometimes guitar and as producer is the chief enabler, Randi Driscoll, Barbara Nesbitt and Tom Flannery.

As a songwriter, Flannery appreciates craftsmanship in others. He takes songs he can identify with and in some way makes them his own. It is the ultimate homage to a songwriter. He’s covered John Prine, Steve Earle, Graham Nash, Gram Parsons, Gillian Welch, and Matt Manning and that’s the short list. The La Paloma was filled with “blood harmonies” when he and his brother Tom found that high lonesome sound on a duet of the traditional “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.” And again when his mother Joyce came on stage for Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz.”

It was a perfect Encinitas Saturday if a hard good-bye. A balmy winter night, a waxing moon, live music at the La Paloma and a line of friends out the door for a bittersweet farewell. Flannery won’t forget us soon. After a song or two he said, “I’m gonna sweat, bear my soul and then ask you to take care of my town while I’m gone.” We will Flan, we will. •