Ages of Defiance

Written Off as Old at 30, Robinson Was Traded and Won a Triple Crown. Today at 70, He's Managing Just Fine.

Frank Robinson is bemused by some people's notion that he's on his last legs, just because they carry him with a hobble. He turns 70 today, an age when he could be occupying himself by drinking coffee and reminiscing. Instead, Robinson's bright-eyed look suggests that he is living entirely in the moment and it's a moment he doesn't want to end.

"If I had my druthers, I'd get a multiyear contract, for the next three years, and then that would be enough managing," Robinson said. "Then I would like a position in the front office of the organization with authority to make decisions. I want an area of responsibility, a significant one. I don't want a token job. I don't want to collect a check. If that's the case, I don't want to be involved.

"That's what I'd like. I'd like to manage this ballclub for three more years."

Robinson's life has been baseball. And as he told a Senate committee in April, "I don't think retirement is good for individuals." Whether the soon-to-be-named Washington Nationals owner believes Robinson is good for the team remains to be seen, but he is having the time of his life even if his hair is gray, his gait has slowed and the ferociousness with which he played the game is left to memory and museums devoted to heroic tales of the ancient and the dead.

In deciding whether to keep Robinson as manager, it might behoove the new owner to look beyond what he has done lately -- keeping Washington surprisingly competitive all summer after producing two winning seasons out of three with the bizarrely handicapped Montreal Expos. The new owner might look back a little further to remember what happened when another of Robinson's employers thought his usefulness was behind him.

That was 1966, approximately yesterday in Robinson's mind.

Mention that year to him, and he responds as quickly as he used to swing a bat. Gruffly, sarcastically, he says: "That's when I was an 'old 30.' " Those were the words Robinson recalls Bill DeWitt Sr., then Cincinnati Reds owner, using as the reason for trading him to Baltimore. For a decade, the spindly yet powerful outfielder embodied the "Big Red Machine" years before the team ever took on that name. Over those 10 seasons with Cincinnati, he hit .303 and averaged 32 home runs and 101 RBI. He had been the National League rookie of the year in 1956, and the league's most valuable player in 1961, when the Reds won the pennant. In the season before the trade, he hit 33 home runs and drove in 113 runs, batting .296. Robinson thus was flabbergasted to learn -- by a phone call in the middle of his dinner -- that he suddenly had grown "old."

Old, eh?

The season of '66 belonged to Frank Robinson to a degree that established him as one of baseball's greatest players ever.

He hit 49 home runs, won the Triple Crown and was named the American League's MVP and the MVP of the World Series after the Orioles swept the Los Angeles Dodgers.

That year, 1966, of all his years in baseball, which includes 21 as a major league player and four managerial stints, best defines Robinson's very reason for being, which exists to this notable day in his life: to go all out in every game until opponents feel nothing but sorrow in their hearts, and to do it every day until he has done what he set out to do, winning all there is to win.

"What drove me all year long really was to show the people of Baltimore and the organization that they got a good player," Robinson said. "I knew I could still play. But Bill DeWitt made it sound like I couldn't play."