FRANK ROBINSON DIES AT 83
LOS ANGELES — Hall of Fame outfielder Frank Robinson, the only major leaguer to be named most valuable player in both the National and American leagues and the first AfricanAmerican to manage in the big leagues, died Thursday in Los Angeles after a long illness, according to Major League Baseball. He was 83.
Robinson rose from the sandlots of Oakland to become one of baseball’s most feared sluggers — his 586 home runs rank 10th on baseball’s all-time list.
“Frank Robinson’s resume in our game is without parallel, a trailblazer in every sense, whose impact spanned generations,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “He was one of the greatest players in the history of our game, but that was just the beginning of a multifaceted baseball career.”
Robinson, who was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1982, spent more than 60 years in baseball, 21 as a big league player from 1956 to 1976, 16 as a manager for four franchises, and more than a dozen in a variety of executive roles, most recently as a special adviser to Manfred and honorary president of the American League.
He left his most indelible mark as a player, a wiry strong, 6-foot-1, 184pound power hitter who had a .294 career batting average, a .389 on-base percentage and a .537 slugging percentage and was a 12-time All-Star.
“I don’t rank guys, but I’d put him right there with the best ever,” the late
Earl Weaver, the manager in Baltimore when Robinson played for the Orioles, said in 2011. “And he’d be a lot higher in those ranks if not for some of the artificial home runs that came out of those bats.”
When Robinson retired as a player after spending three of his final seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers (1972) and the California Angels (197374), he ranked fourth on baseball’s all-time home run list, behind Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. He has since been passed by six others, including the Angels’ Albert Pujols. Three of those players — Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa — have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs.
“Frank Robinson and I were more than baseball buddies — we were friends,” Aaron, 85 and a longtime rival, said Thursday. “Frank was a hard-nosed baseball player who did things on the field that people said could never be done. I’m so glad I had the chance to know him all of those years. Baseball will miss a tremendous human being.”
Robinson was one of the game’s most ferocious competitors, first in Cincinnati, where in 10 seasons he won National League rookie of the year (1956) and MVP (1961) honors, then in Baltimore, where he led the Orioles to World Series titles in 1966 and 1970.
He won American League MVP and Triple Crown honors in 1966, leading the league in average (.316), homers (49) and runs batted in (122). He won World Series MVP honors that October, hitting two homers in the Orioles’ fourgame sweep of the Dodgers.
Robinson was a force in the batter’s box, hitting for average and power, and in the dugout and clubhouse, leading by example and infusing his teams with grit.
He expected nothing less than maximum effort and intensity, from himself and his teammates, and he backed down from no one, especially opposing pitchers, all but daring them to knock him down by crowding the plate.
“He hated all pitchers with a passion,” said Elrod Hendricks, a former Orioles teammate who died in 2005. “They were trying to take money out of his pocket and food out of his family’s mouths.”
The late Gene Mauch was said to have fined his pitchers when he managed the Philadelphia Phillies for throwing at Robinson because such tactics only served to motivate him. Still, Robinson was hit by pitches 198 times in his career, leading the league in that category seven times.
“Pitchers did me a favor when they knocked me down,” Robinson told Baseball Digest in 2006. “It made me more determined. I wouldn’t let that pitcher get me out.”
Born Aug. 31, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas, Robinson was the youngest of 10 children in what was essentially a singleparent household. Robinson’s father deserted the family when he was an infant, and his mother, Ruth, struggled to provide her children with the necessities.
When Robinson was 4, his mother moved the family to West Oakland, and it was on the playgrounds near his home on lower Myrtle Street that Robinson’s hard-nosed approach to the game was formed. Even playing pickup games as a youngster, he would slide hard into second base to break up double plays.
“That’s the way baseball is supposed to be played,” Robinson said during his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1982.
The only problem, noted Robinson, who starred at Oakland’s McClymonds High, was that he would rip his pants and scrape his left leg repeatedly. “That field,” Robinson explained, “was covered by asphalt.”
Whether it was the racial taunts and death threats he endured as a young player — Robinson was arrested in 1961 after he waved a gun threateningly in a dispute with a restaurant employee in Cincinnati — or a comment by former Reds general manager Bill DeWitt, who called him “an old 30” when Robinson was traded to Baltimore in 1966, Robinson seemed to play with a chip on his shoulder.
“I don’t think it was a chip; it’s just that he was so intense,” Weaver said. “Frank never gave up an at-bat. I don’t care if we were losing 10-0 or winning 10-0, each time he walked to plate, it was him against that pitcher, and he wanted to win the battle every time.
“The way he slid into second to break up double plays ... that could be construed as a chip. But that’s the way the game should be played. You play as hard as possible and don’t give up anything.”
Robinson slid so hard into former Chicago White Sox second baseman Al Weiss in 1967 that he was knocked unconscious when his head hit Weiss’ knee. Weiss suffered a broken leg on the play.
“Frank Robinson,” wrote former Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, “always went into second like a guy jumping through a skylight with a drawn Luger.”
Pride and competitiveness were among Robinson’s trademarks as a player, but they may have been detrimental to his managerial career, which began when the Cleveland Indians made him Major League Baseball’s first African-American manager in 1975.
His tactical skills weren’t the issue in Cleveland, where Robinson served as playermanager for two seasons before being fired in 1977, or in San Francisco, where he managed the Giants from 1981 to 1984.
“Robinson had problems dealing with anyone less talented and less intense, which was just about everyone,” former Times national baseball writer Ross Newhan wrote in 1989.