BALLPLAYERS | TEAMS | CHRONOLOGY | TODAY | BOOKS | NEWSLETTER | ERRATA | FAQ
|
What's New?
Browser Button
Get Published!
Team Pages
The Ballplayers
Bookshelf
The Chronology
BaseballLibrary.com
|
The Robinsons excerpted from Chapter One: My Life in Baseball
Frank Robinson and
Brooks Robinson were two of the finest players I've ever been associated with. Frank was blessed with great natural talent. But he, like all the great ones, came out and worked at his job. If we were working on something as a group, he did it right and he urged others to do it right if they weren't. That's what you have to do to be a truly great player.
I'd put Frank up there with all the other all-time greats. He hit 586 home runs. He drove in more than 1,800 runs and he scored more than 1,800 runs. He hit for average -- he was a lifetime .294 hitter -- and he was just a great all-around player. In his six seasons in Baltimore, 1966-71, the Orioles won four pennants.
I can't say that Frank was the best player we had, or the best I've ever been around, or the best I ever saw, because we had Brooks and Boog Powell on those clubs, as well as Jim Palmer and Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar. There were a lot of great ballplayers in the big leagues at that time.
That's like asking, "Who was the best player who ever played the game?" Well, whoever you say you're going to get an argument. You could talk about Joe DiMaggio, he was a complete player, there wasn't any question about it. But then somebody's going to say, "Wait a minute, what about Willie Mays? What about Babe Ruth? Ted Williams? Stan Musial?" You're talking about a group of people that you can't narrow down to one person. You can have an opinion, but even though you might say your opinion is fact, that doesn't mean it is.
The era that a particular player played in doesn't mean a whole lot. A good baseball player today would be a good player if he had played years ago. A good player of years ago would be a good player today. A good player is a good player. The type of player that someone is today, that's the type of player he's going to be wherever or whenever he plays. The fact that they played the game a little bit differently years ago doesn't take away from the individual player's ability.
Brooks Robinson was also a great player with tremendous natural ability. And Brooks took ground balls at third base every day. He practiced his job, and he practiced it correctly. Whenever I talk about Cal Jr. and Mark Belanger, I talk about how when they went out and took their ground balls, they took them correctly. They might have caught the ball one-handed, but they caught it properly. It was the same thing with Brooks. He went out and took his ground balls correctly, and when that same ground ball was hit in the game, it was automatic for him to approach it the right way.
Brooks wasn't blessed with a strong throwing arm, but he made up for the lack of velocity on his throws by getting rid of the ball quickly and being very accurate. He also had tremendous reflexes on hard-hit balls.
Brooks studied hitters and pitchers -- he knew how to play each hitter, and he knew the type of pitch that was being thrown in a particular situation -- so he was able to position himself better. That's being prepared to go out and play your game. He was a very intelligent player. You have to be intelligent if you want to be a good player, there's no question about that.
As I've said so many times, the defensive player has to be thinking: What am I going to do with the ball when it's hit to me? He goes over that before the play, before the pitch is made. As a player you have to do that consistently. That's how you become a good player.
|
