Weekend Post: RIP Frank Robinson

So sorry to hear of baseball great, Frank Robinson’s passing this week. He was 83. There are lots of tributes to Frank on the net, praising his many on-field accomplishments and the barriers that he broke. I want to talk more about Frank Robinson as a person.

Frank was the manager of the Baltimore Orioles when I joined the team as one of their announcers. I had heard that Frank could be, uh… prickly. I had only met him once before. When I got the job I flew back to Baltimore for a press conference and had dinner with him and a few other Orioles officials. He was very pleasant, somewhat low-key. Hardly a volatile figure.

One of my responsibilities was hosting the manager segment of the daily pre-game show. I would huddle with the manager and lob questions for five minutes. It was early in spring training, maybe the third or fourth day. We were in Dunedin to play the Blue Jays. I wandered into his office about two hours before game time with my trusty tape recorder. The door was open, he was finishing up a conversation about hockey with some people I didn’t know. I sat patiently on the couch and waited until they finished their conversation and left and said to Frank, “Hi, wanna do the manager’s show?”

At that point he exploded. “You’re so pushy!” he yelled at me. “Joe Angel (my predecessor) was never that pushy! What’s so goddamn important that I’m keeping you from that we have to do this NOW?” I said, “Lunch.” He instantly dropped the anger and then said, “Oh, then let’s do this.” Clearly, he was just testing the rookie. I guess three years in the minor leagues taught me not to be intimidated by players and managers.

From that point on we got along great. A few weeks later, on Opening Day in Baltimore I arrived at the park way early to get the manager’s show. I knew it would be a media circus. And I was right. We did the interview, I brought it up to the booth, and got the bad news about an hour later that something had gone wrong with the recording. It was unusable. I had to go back down and re-do the manager’s show. Now understand that Frank didn’t love doing the manager’s show in the first place. I thought, “He’s going to kill me.” But nope, he couldn’t have been nicer and even pushed off some other interviews to do mine.

And those manager’s shows were always good because Frank was very candid. I could ask him any question and he’d answer honestly. And this was during a period where the club was terrible and fans were lobbying for his head. He would take the blame for mistakes and not sugar-coat the club’s performance. Most managers would just deflect and speak in a series of clichés. Not Frank Robinson.

One reason Frank and I got along was our shared sense of humor. A side of Frank that most people didn’t know was that he could be very funny. He had a terrific dry wit. So just shooting the shit with him was very entertaining. (By the way, one night he and I went to dinner on the road, he paid for the meal with his credit card, and I said to him “You realize your signature on the slip is worth more than the cost of the meal?”)

Another thing you didn’t know (unless of course you read my book, IT’S GONE… NO, WAIT A MINUTE! – available on Amazon for like one cent), Frank was antsy on flights. So to kill time he would become essentially a flight attendant. He would go up and down the aisle and ask if you wanted anything to eat or drink. Just imagine, the great Frank Robinson, Hall of Famer, MVP in both leagues, was bringing me a Coke and sandwich.

A couple of months into the season Frank was fired as manager but hired to work in the front office. I’m not sure what his responsibilities were, but let’s just say he had a lot of time on his hands. My family was still back in LA (they moved out later in the summer) so I had nothing to do all day when the team was home. One day I decided to get to the park real early and noticed that Frank was in his office. I popped my head in to say hello and he invited me in. We talked baseball for about an hour before I had to go. He said “Stop by anytime,” and to make a long story short – for the next month or so I stopped by practically every day. I can’t begin to tell you how much I learned during those sessions or how fascinating it was to hear his war stories. And a day didn’t go by when I didn’t think to myself, “Holy shit! I’m sitting here talking to Frank Robinson.”

He was a brilliant, fearless, complex, passionate, kind, and funny. He was a gifted athlete. He was the ultimate competitor. And if I ever needed honey roasted peanuts on a flight I could always count on him.

RIP Frank Robinson, although I prefer to forever think of him as MVP Frank Robinson.