CRITICAL MASS

The nice-guy robber on 3rd

The best stuff happened when we were 12 years old. Movies were better when we were 12, music has never been as good as it was that magic season. There is something about the cusp of adolescence that makes us especially alert to the world and its pleasures and disappointments. When we are 12, we have the souls of artists.

When I was 12 - actually 11 years and 11 months - the Cincinnati Reds played the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. Off the top of my head, I can name the starting lineups for both teams. I can probably give you the batting order and pitching rotations. After 43 years, I remember that series - the last in which all the games were played in the daylight - better than any other, possibly better than any other sporting event of my lifetime.

Brooks Robinson was one of the best players of the 1960s. I didn’t know he was from Little Rock and I didn’t care, but I knew he’d won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1964 and his Orioles had won the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers (my father’s favorite team) in 1966 and lost it to the Miracle Mets in 1969. In those days, only one baseball game a week was broadcast nationally, but it seemed that Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek often broadcast from Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium.

Still, I was no more prepared than the rest of the country for what played out over those six days in October 1970, when the Orioles beat the Reds in four of five games. Robinson hit .429 over the series, driving in six runs on nine hits, two of which were home runs. It wasn’t just his bat that was impressive. He put on a remarkable display of fielding, spinning, lunging, diving and stretching, turning his rather ordinary-looking body into a machine that devoured baseballs. He handled 23 chances at third base while robbing the Reds of several extra-base hits. I can still see him backhanding a smash by Reds’ first baseman Lee May behind third base, then leaping and throwing back across his body - extended and torsioned like Baryshnikov. The ball skips on the turf of the new Riverfront Stadium and arrives in Boog Powell’s waist high open mitt a comfortable split second before May arrives at the bag. (Robinson was better, play-by-play man Gowdy noted, going to his left than his right.)

At a victory celebration, Orioles teammate Frank Robinson convened a kangaroo court session and fined Brooks a dollar for “showboating during the entire series.”

Before the 1970 World Series, I had an idea about who the best third baseman in baseball history might have been. I might have told you it was players I’d only read about … Pie Traynor or Jimmie Foxx (who played 141 games there during his 20-year career) or maybe Ron Santo or Ernie Banks or Eddie Mathews. Before 1970, I thought fielders were more or less interchangeable - some were better than others but what really mattered was how well a player could hit. After the 1970 series, I knew Brooks Robinson was the greatest I’d ever seen.

THE BROTHERS ROBINSON

I still believe that Robinson’s offensive numbers - like those of most who played the bulk of their careers in the 1960s - aren’t terribly impressive compared to those put up by players in the past couple of decades. He didn’t have 3,000 hits or 300 home runs. His lifetime batting average was only .267.

Given this, it seems a little odd that a new biography of Robinson has been published, especially since Doug Wilson’s Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, $26.99) contains no salacious gossip or revision of Robinson’s reputation as one of the world’s nicest people. In his preface, Wilson says he believes the reason Robinson had never been the subject of a full-length biography was because of the lack of controversy surrounding the man. “There were no tragic humiliations; no arrests, no public brawls with spouses, no hints of cheating, no substance abuse, or scandal …. He was unquestionably viewed as a squeaky-clean good guy ina time when attitudes were changing and other attributes were more celebrated ….”

Wilson goes on to write that he did not seek to involve Robinson in the book, that he intended an unauthorized biography from the outset. “I did not set out to blindly apply another coat of polish to the statue of a legend,” he writes. “It was my intention to do just the opposite; I wanted to find out if the legend was indeed fact, and print whatever I found.”

What Wilson found might seem anathema to book sales: He discovered that Robinson was a nice guy. He had always been a nice guy, from his days with the Arkansas Doughboys at Little Rock’s Lamar Porter Field through his brief career in the minors to his 23-year career with the Orioles, taking over the third-base job from fellow Arkansan George Kell in 1958. He was a nice guy even through what seems to be the only blot on an otherwise immaculate life - the failure of the Brooks Robinson Sporting Goods Co. in 1977, a financial misstep in which Robinson was arguably more victim than anything else.

Wilson interviews dozens of people who knew Robinson including Robert Nosari, Harold Ellingston and Tommy Lauderdale, who were his teammates on the Doughboys, and Buddy Rotenberry, Robert Baird and Marshall and Glenda Gazette, who were his classmates at Little Rock Central High School. Not one of them has a bad word to say.

When the fiery, proud black outfielder Frank Robinson was traded to the Orioles just before the 1966 season, it seemed there was some potential for conflict. Frank was an alleged troublemaker and a superstar who commanded more in salary than Brooks, who had been the Orioles undisputed team leader. How would the Southern boy - a graduate of the notorious Central High School - react to the interloper?

Frank and Brooks bonded famously, leading to a long friendship highlighted by a late 1980 Miller Lite commercial. In that spot, Brooks delivers the penultimate line: “Now I know we’re incredibly alike, but don’t be confused. We are not identical twins.”

Then, genuinely cracking up, Frank delivers the kicker: “I’m at least 2 inches taller than he is.” THE SELF-EFFACING LEGEND

I don’t know Brooks Robinson and, to be honest, I don’t have a tremendous desire to meet him. It’s always awkward to be pressed into the presence of greatness, to try to make small talk with the person who did those marvelous things all those years ago. He has told his stories, he has received the accolades, the statues have been built for a man devoid of what psychologists call “dark triad” traits. It has to be a little wearying. From Robinson’s perspective, he’s not a hero. He was just a baseball player.

Joe Falls, longtime Detroit-based sportswriter (whose columns in the Sporting News were as much a part of my childhood as NBC’s Game of the Week) once wrote of Robinson: “How many interviews, how many questions - how many times you approached him and got only courtesy and decency in return. A true gentleman who never took himself seriously. I always had the idea he didn’t know he was Brooks Robinson.”

Our culture is different from the one Robinson came out of and, in many ways, we are better off for that. We are more aware of the need to respect individual differences, we are less insulated from people with different backgrounds and perspectives. But we are also louder and cruder and more inclined to demand what we feel is our due. Our champions carry themselves with swagger; they thump their chests and glare. Selfishness is a virtue.

I am not inclined to believe that many successful people are also nice people. To succeed in most fields of endeavor, a little narcissism, a little Machiavellianism and maybe a touch of psychopathy are necessary. It doesn’t hurt to be ruthless. Mostly, our heroes are not nice people.

But Robinson apparently is; he apparently always has been. There’s something affirming in knowing that. Though Wilson’s book may suffer from a lack of dramatic tension, it presents us with a wonderful case study of how to live decently, of what we might call a role model.

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Style, Pages 49 on 03/23/2014

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