Frank Robinson Will Be Baltimore’s Manager Next Year, Club Announces

Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, the only black manager in major league baseball, will be back in the dugout running the Baltimore Orioles next season, the club announced Friday.

Robinson, 53, who also became the first black to manage a major league team 13 years ago, signed a year-to-year rollover contract, which assures him of a position in the club’s front office should he be replaced as manager.

The agreement gives the Orioles the option at the end of each season of keeping Robinson as manager or promoting him to the front office.

“If at some point, and managers have been known to be changed, we made a move,” said Roland Hemond, the Orioles’ vice president of baseball operations, “he (Robinson) immediately joins the front office in a very responsible position for a minimum of one year.”

The Orioles also announced Friday that scouting director Fred B. Uhlman has been named special assistant to Hemond, a position similar to the one Robinson held before taking over as the club’s manager.

Robinson, elected to the Hall of Fame in 1982, served as special assistant to the president in the Orioles’ front office prior to replacing Cal Ripken as field manager on April 12. He remained in a dual capacity briefly after being named manager.

“I don’t have a split role. I’ll be the manager,” Robinson said at a news conference Friday. “I’ll be coming into the office on occasion to learn and keep abreast of things, but it won’t be on a daily basis, as it was when I first came downstairs.

“I never said I had aspirations to be a general manager,” he said. “My goal is to go as far as I can, as an executive, a part-owner or whatever. I didn’t come upstairs with aspirations of being general manager but to learn the operations end of (the business).”