Ages of Defiance

"To this day I don't know how I missed him," Robinson said. "Never did it before and never did it afterward.

"I don't think I've ever been able to see perfectly after that. My eyesight wasn't as sharp after that. Seeing and reacting was never the same. At bat, I used to pride myself on being able to see a pitch, start the bat and then stop it. I could never do that again like I did. The ball itself was never as sharp, as in focus, as it used to be."

Still, he led the Orioles to pennants in 1969, '70 and '71 -- and Brooks Robinson took care of the 1970 Series with his glove and bat.

"I learned something about Frank in spring training at Pompano Beach," former Washington Senators pitcher Jim Hannan said. "I threw a changeup to him and he hit the ball down the left field line. He hit it so hard I said to myself, 'It's going to go foul.' But it didn't. It went over the fence, over some bushes beyond the fence, over the parking lot and some school buses parked at the back of the lot, and then some palm trees behind the buses. I never, ever again threw him an off-speed pitch."

"Frank was the most intense ballplayer I've ever seen," said former Orioles manager Earl Weaver. "He played the game as hard as anybody. He never, ever gave up on an at-bat no matter what the score was. He'd get a big hit. He went into the stands in New York to make a catch. But what's important is, he did these things every day."

On this his 70th birthday, Robinson could be leading a life of leisure, celebrating in the sunshine of Southern California, where he lives in the offseason. But this is where he wants to be. His office is a cramped space amid a labyrinth of dank hallways beneath RFK Stadium's stands: golf clubs propped against a wall, newspapers stacked neatly on a corner of his desk. One day he was eating his favorite sandwich, baloney on white. He keeps the room dimly lit, giving it the feel of a bomb shelter.

Robinson hadn't planned to be in Washington. He accepted the offer to manage the Expos for one season after consulting, as he said he customarily does in times of change, with his wife, Barbara. (They have been married almost 44 years, and have two grown children.) "She always tells me, why do you ask for my advice when you know you're going to take the job?" Robinson said.

One season has turned into four seasons, he said, because he has enjoyed "the players and the effort that they've given me."

There's another reason he wants to keep his uniform: The game is ingrained in him.

He took to it in Oakland, where his mother relocated from Beaumont, Tex., a few years after he was born, the youngest of 10. At the time, Oakland was a baseball hotbed. Robinson played on a neighborhood field near his house on lower Myrtle Street in west Oakland, now a light industrial area. In his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1982, he recalled his days as a sandlot kid, even then sliding into second base, breaking up double plays. "That's the way baseball is supposed to be played," he informed his Cooperstown audience. The drawback was that he would rip his pants and scrape his left leg repeatedly, drawing blood.

"That field," he explained, "was covered by asphalt."

An Oakland man named George Powles, an employee of the city's recreation department and a teacher at Oakland's McClymonds High, would be a major influence on Robinson, who was only 8 when his father died.