New, Mellow Frank Robinson Smiling Through a Rough Season

So: It’s three hours before game time and some guy who looks like Frank Robinson, who sounds like Frank Robinson, who’s wearing Frank Robinson’s uniform is slouched on the couch in Frank Robinson’s office kibitzing with reporters. They keep calling him Frank and he keeps answering their questions like the manager of the Orioles should. Still, it’s hard to believe it’s him. Because this guy is funny. This guy has a rubbery face and eyes that pop. This guy is doing riffs with bang-bang comic timing.

Mel Proctor, who broadcasts Orioles games for Home Team Sports, wanders in and plops himself down in the manager’s chair. “I feel strange sitting in this chair,” he says.

“I feel strange sitting in this chair,” Frank Robinson says.

The other Frank Robinson, the Hall of Famer, was such an intimidating presence that teammates were scared to face him after making what baseball calls a miscue. Robinson the husband frightened his wife’s friends so much on the telephone they forgot who they were calling. Robinson the first black manager in baseball once chewed out a scribe so vociferously that a bootleg copy of the tape still makes the rounds.

Joe Angel, one of the O’s radio guys, arrives to tape Robinson’s pregame show.

“Well, Joe, what are we going to talk about?”

“There’s lots of good things,” Angel says. The Orioles had won for the 14th time the night before.

“Yeah,” Robinson replies. “We don’t have time to cover it all.”

“Well,” Angel says, persevering, “the three-run home run visited us for the first time last night.”

“We can’t count on that,” Robinson says, grinning. “We don’t get two men on.”

He starts to giggle and starts to apologize for starting to giggle. “I’m getting carried away,” he says.

He shifts carefully in his seat. On Day 18 of The Longest Losing Streak at the Beginning of the Season Ever, Robinson ruptured a disc in his back while taking batting practice in an attempt at levity. He has tried everything, including four days in the hospital and acupuncture, to keep himself upright since.

“Maybe you can get acupuncture for the team,” Gordon Beard of the Associated Press says hopefully.

“Yeah,” Robinson says, pointing to the delicate spot between his eyes. “We’ll put the needles right there.”

Who is this man? And why is he laughing?

He is manager, after all, of a team on pace to lose 118.48 games this year, a team that lost its first 21 games of the season. When The Streak finally ended and someone asked what he had learned, he smiled and said, “You can’t lose ‘em all.”

“I’d like to keep my sanity,” he says. “I don’t want to go to a crazy house someplace. So sometimes you laugh. But not that often.”

Still: This is Frank Robinson we’re talking about.

“I’m dumbfounded,” says Rick Vaughn, Orioles media relations director.

“It’s certainly a new Frank,” says Brooks Robinson, who played six years with him in Baltimore. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Nobody mellows that fast,” says Barbara Robinson, his wife.

Over his desk hangs a pair of red boxing gloves inscribed “Orioles, Keep Punchin’!” “No,” Robinson says, winking at a reporter, he hasn’t used them yet.

Still: Everybody keeps waiting for the real Frank Robinson, the old Frank Robinson to reappear. “Timmy, you waiting for me to explode?” he says.

Tim Kurkjian, beat writer for the Baltimore Sun, nods and says, “People ask me all the time, ‘How can Frank be this way?’ It’s the only way he’s ever been. He’s always been Bill Cosby to us.”

Robinson giggles and rolls his eyes and puffs his cheeks just like, well, Bill Cosby. “Yeah,” he says. “I wish I had the taxes he pays.” He cackles some more. “I’m just a sit-down comedian.”

One definition of hell for a gamer like Robinson might be a lifetime of managing the Woes. He grins at the suggestion. “I don’t know my definition,” he says. “I’ve never been there.”

Sure? “Sure,” he says smiling.

If you’re going to Memorial Stadium looking for Robinson Agonistes, forget it.

“This is me,” he says. “This is not me the way I used to be when I was here as a coach and a player, as they used to know me. This is me now. This is me this time around. One thing I’ve never been able to do is hide my feelings. If I’m mad, I’m mad. If I’m happy, I’m happy. If I’m upset, you’ll know it. I’m not constantly hurting because this team is losing.”

He shakes his head. “All these people saying, ‘Gee, I can’t believe it. It can’t be you.’ Makes me feel like I should apologize. I’ve just changed.”

He is sitting (carefully) in his upstairs office behind a polished desk in a leather chair in front of pictures of his gilded youth. This is where he works as special assistant to the president, where he came to work every day tailored and Guccied until the Orioles fired Cal Ripken Sr. after losing the first six games of the season and asked Robinson to take over. Now he comes to work every day tailored and Guccied until it is time to go downstairs and put on the double-knits. The upstairs Frank and the downstairs Frank are as different as the new and old Frank, which may not be a coincidence, since, he says, it is time and perspective that have changed him.

He came to the Orioles in 1965 with a reputation as an extraordinary outfielder and a troublemaker. The team’s 18-year dynasty began with his arrival. Though he ranks among the best players ever in almost every statistical category, he will always be known as the first black manager in baseball, the man who hit a home run in his first at-bat as manager-player of the Cleveland Indians. Now 52, he has written a new book, “Extra Innings,” chronicling his life as a black man in baseball, his years as manager of the Indians and then the San Francisco Giants, and his efforts to establish the Baseball Network, an organization devoted to increasing minority hiring in the national pastime.

It is five hours before game time. Robinson swivels in his executive chair, fielding a call from an irate fan demanding to know why Frank Robinson said first baseman Eddie Murray is getting booed because he’s black.

“Frank Robinson has never said that, sir. Do you know who you’re speaking to, sir? You’re speaking to Frank Robinson, sir.”

“Geezus,” he says, hanging up.

The confusion over who he is runs fan-deep. People saw him “as a hard-nosed guy, a no-nonsense guy, take nothing from anybody, want players to play the way I played, perfectionistic, a guy that didn’t tolerate any mistakes, wouldn’t take an excuse, non-communicator, get upset with players, jump down reporters’ throats, wouldn’t tolerate dumb questions. That’s the way people see me. Non-smiling, non-giving. I just feel people looked at me and passed judgment without getting to know me.”

Not that he made it easy. “That’s my defensive mechanism to keep people away,” he explains. “I’m a shy person. I am.”

Ben Moore, the executive director of the Baseball Network and Robinson’s friend, says he noticed a change in the spring of 1987, when “Frank went over to (former Pittsburgh Pirate) Willie Stargell and said, ‘What’s happening?’ and ‘Let’s talk.’ Then he said to me, ‘I talked to Stargell.’ I was in shock. I said, ‘You did?’ Then I talked to Stargell and he said, ‘What got into Frank?’ ”

Now everyone’s talking about how dignified, how accessible, how graceful he has been through this humbling season. “Are they saying I wouldn’t have handled it the same way before?” he says, demanding an answer. “Are they?

They are. “And they’re right, because I wouldn’t have. At Cleveland or San Francisco, I would not have handled it this way.”

Robinson says the change was gradual, evolutionary, that he knew what he was getting himself into here, that he never had to show this side of himself before. “What I’ve been able to do this year that I wasn’t able to do in Cleveland and San Francisco is let that game go and look forward to the next one. I didn’t have that before.”

Friends say it’s because he feels secure with the Orioles in a way he never did in Cleveland and San Francisco, where he battled with the front office and felt undermined by his superiors; because he read the criticism of his managing style and decided to do something about it; because he finally learned not to judge his players by the standards he set; because, after all, these dreadful O’s aren’t really his team.

“It’s my team because I’m managing it,” he says. “Is it my team per se? No, it’s not. I didn’t select all these players that are here.”

Moore says Robinson was devastated by his dismissal from the Giants in 1984. He vowed that if he ever managed again, it would be a good team, a competitive team, a team that is everything the 1988 Orioles are not. He said he would not manage again without a two-year contract. He leans forward on his desk and smiles when reminded of this pledge. “I lie,” he says.

His family did not want him to take the job. “That’s an understatement,” he says.

“I don’t mind him managing, but this team?” Barbara Robinson says. “You’ve got to be a glutton for punishment. He’s got to be able to go home and eat. It’s very hard to eat after the game. I mean, you want it to go down.”

She worried about his health, the grind. And besides, she says, “I love him being in a suit and tie.”

Predictably, her objections held no sway. “It’s in his blood. I think it was always his dream to manage this team. He came full circle there. He became an adult there, a leader. He always had a love affair with that team and that city.”

Robinson says, “I would not have taken this job under these conditions anyplace else. This organization is in trouble right now. It had given me an awful lot. It gave me recognition nationally as a player. Whenever I was out of work or needed a job, I was hired here. It was never, ‘Sorry, Frank, we don’t have anything for you.’ They gave me the opportunity to be an executive with the idea of teaching me baseball operations and one day maybe the possibility of being general manager, if not here, someplace else.”

Though everyone says he always wanted to manage the Orioles, Robinson emphatically denies it. What he wanted was to be general manager of the Orioles. “You’re right,” he says.

His first act as manager was to soothe Cal Ripken’s sons. “At the time, I don’t think anything would have made it easier,” says Cal Jr. “But I remember. He didn’t have to do it. That meant something to me and I’m sure to Billy. As time went on, that meeting may have had more meaning. Just for the fact it happened.”

Most of the Orioles are too young to know the old Frank except by reputation. They figure he’s always been like this. “I heard from some of the Giants that he was tough on young pitchers because he demanded so much,” pitcher Jeff Ballard says. “Well, he hasn’t been tough on me, and I’m a young pitcher.”

“Probably deep down he can’t figure us out,” says outfielder Larry Sheets. “We put together three or four good games and then we go off the deep end someplace. I guess sometimes you just have to wait and mold in a quiet manner.”

“If he came in and yelled after every loss, he’d have to do a hell of a lot of yelling,” says rookie Pete Stanicek.

Even owner Edward Bennett Williams said, “Jump ‘em.” Robinson remained calm. “As long as they’re giving me the effort, I’m not going to jump them,” he says.

He’s really lost it only once, after the 16th defeat of The Streak, in which the Orioles trailed 9-0 at the end of the first inning. “This game it was like, ‘We don’t care what happens,’ ” Robinson says. “ ‘We’re losers, we lost, we are losing and we are going to continue to lose.’ ”

He closed the door and said a thing or two. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” pitcher Mike Boddicker says.

Robinson says if he thought it would do any good he’d do it more often. “If I felt talent was there and it wasn’t coming out, then you better believe I wouldn’t be smiling and sitting here nice. Then they’d see the old Frank Robinson, and you’d be scared walking in that door.”

He pauses, catching himself. “It’s not to say we don’t have talent, but I know and can admit -- we admit -- we don’t have the talent to compete with top ball clubs in this division or in the league this year.”

When the record reached 0-18, the coaches decided it might cheer everybody up to see the old guys try to do what the young guys couldn’t -- hit. So they took batting practice. “I knew I should not have done it,” Robinson says. “I didn’t have the heart, maybe the guts, to say ‘no, I can’t do it.’ ”

He winces, then grins. “I came up short. Warning-track power. It didn’t quite go out. But I knew my back had gone out.”

He smiles again. “Anything for the team.”

It had gone out once before, while he was playing tennis in 1980. He says he took 10 Darvons and 30 muscle relaxers a day. This is nothing compared with that.

Of course, there was the night he had to go into the clubhouse and lie down during the game. And there were times he couldn’t get up the dugout steps. And there was the numbness in his legs. But you gotta play hurt. “Right,” he says.

Finally, he checked himself into the hospital. Barbara, who divides her time between their homes in Los Angeles and Baltimore, says, “I called on Monday and he said nothing. Tuesday he went into the hospital. I called and said, ‘How does your back feel?’ He says, ‘Fine.’ I said, ‘If you’re fine, what are you doing there?’ ”

Doctors told him two years ago that he needs hip replacement surgery. He told them he didn’t have time in his schedule. They have also told him he should have back surgery before the end of this season. Nobody who knows him thinks that’s a good bet. “He’d have to not be able to get in a wheelchair and roll out to the mound,” Barbara says.

Robinson says he has not decided whether he wants to return next year and does not yet know what guarantees the team would have to make to keep him. Orioles President Larry Lucchino says those decisions will not be made until the end of the season.

“You’re out there to have fun,” Robinson says. “We’ve only had fun 18 times this season so far. That’s not very much fun.”

It’s possible, he says, it could “get so bad where I would say, ‘I don’t want to put up with this.’ ” But his wife doesn’t believe that’s likely to happen.

“The fire’s there,” he says. “It’s not hidden. It’s just much more controlled than it used to be. I don’t know if it’s on the back burner or the front burner or sitting on the side cabinet. But it’s there. It’s not to say it won’t come out, it won’t explode and you won’t see the old Frank Robinson.”

In the meantime, he keeps moving the pieces around (such as they are), encouraging the players to be the best they can be, even if that isn’t very good, doing the old soft shoe. “Only ‘cause I’m hurting,” he says.

This historic season isn’t even half over, and already it seems forever. Ultimately, he says, “it would be only fair to judge Frank Robinson by the way he handled the situation, the way he conducted himself.” He stands carefully and lowers his voice, growling with mock jock intensity, “Now I’m going downstairs and put on the uniform and kick some a--. I’m gonna raise some hell. I’m going to find the old fire.”