Fifteen-year-old Mike Sparaco and his buddy, Bill Wheatley, had made plans to meet two girls for miniature golf on Sunday, May 8, 1966. Instead, they got stood up. Not a great feeling, but it happens. On the teenagers’ dejected walk home, however, a greater fate—there is no other word for it—intervened.

While cutting through the parking lot at Memorial Stadium, a roar erupted, causing them both to glance up. Suddenly, fans in the top row of the bleachers began yelling and gesturing toward them.

“We thought, ‘What’s going on?’” Sparaco recalled in a 2016 interview with The Sun. “Bill said, ‘Maybe somebody hit one out.’ I said, ‘Great, maybe we’ll get a new baseball and play with it.’”

The first car he peaked under was a white Cadillac and there was the ball, almost but not quite in reach. “No sooner had I crawled under to get it than all these people came running over. A guy with a transistor radio shouted, ‘Frank Robinson just hit that!’”

Robinson’s blast, off Cleveland’s Louis Tiant, who had tossed three straight shutouts to start the season, was like a scene from The Natural. Departing Memorial Stadium high above the leftfield line, the tiny sphere cleared the Colts’ press box before bouncing over a fence and rolling to a stop 540 feet from home plate.

The Orioles needed to sweep that day’s twin bill to vault into a first-place tie with Cleveland. Buoyed by 11,000 youngsters on hand for Safety Patrol Day, a record crowd of 49,516 watched the O’s take the opener, 8-2, behind Robinson’s first home run of the day.

Paced by his epic first-inning salvo off Tiant, they won again, 8-3, in the second contest. The feat so inspired the city that the team’s booster club, the Orioles Advocates, commemorated it. During a pregame ceremony a week later, they raised an orange flag with black lettering at the spot where the ball exited the park. It simply read “HERE” and flew until the O’s final season on 33rd Street.

More importantly, the moonshot put the American League—and Baltimore, then a Colts town—on notice that the O’s, known for their pitching and defense, were now a potent offensive force as well.

The O’s had acquired the veteran slugger in the offseason from Cincinnati, where Reds’ owner Bill DeWitt described Robinson as “not a young 30” after the deal. The words haunted DeWitt, who would sell the team at year’s end, and lit a fire in Robinson. He smashed a home run in each of his first three games in his new uniform. Still, this one was different.

As Robinson jogged to right field to start the next inning, public-address man Bill LeFevre announced the HR was the first ever hit completely out of Memorial Stadium. During a nearly minute-long standing ovation, Robinson tipped his cap several times.

The moment went beyond baseball. Not only had he spent a decade in Cincinnati before being told to pack his bags, he and his wife, Barbara, had confronted prejudice in buying a house in Baltimore, their adopted, racially diverse, but segregated city.

On the 50th anniversary of the mythic blast, Robinson called the ovation a seminal moment in his career. Hearing the cheering, the slugger told The Sun, “I felt like I really belonged in Baltimore.”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer.

“Bad trades are part of baseball—now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake?”—Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon’s character) in Bull Durham.

In early December 1965, when baseball news typically sprinkled the sports section like light snow, the Orioles and Reds announced a swap that would rank among the most consequential in the history of professional sports. So much so that, like Boston’s short-sighted sale of a certain larger-than-life Pigtown native to the Yankees, it became a part of baseball lore.

In Cincinnati, DeWitt framed it as forward-looking. Milt Pappas had won 16 games in ’63 and ’64 for the O’s. He was 26 and the team’s all-time winningest pitcher. The Orioles threw in Jack Baldschun, a solid reliever, and untested outfielder Dick Simpson. Suffice to say, none played up to the Reds’ hopes.

Robinson belonged in another class altogether. With guys named Mays, Mantle, Aaron, and Clemente. He had won Rookie-of-the-Year honors, an MVP trophy, and carried Cincinnati to the ’61 pennant. The year prior to the trade, in an era dominated by pitching, he mashed 33 homers and drove in 113 runs. DeWitt, however, a devotee of former Brooklyn Dodger GM Branch Rickey, believed “it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late.” He also maintained his club needed pitching, which was true. Left unmentioned was DeWitt’s contentious relationship with his star.

In Baltimore, the reaction was jubilation.

“Cannons at the four corners!” Harry Dalton, the O’s director of player personnel, shouted upon completing the deal, referring to the power-packed foursome of first baseman Boog Powell, third baseman Brooks Robinson, left fielder Curt Blefary, and the new slugger in right.

Considered one of the sharpest baseball executives ever, Dalton understood how Robinson would impact the O’s lineup. Batting behind him, Brooks and Boog drove in 209 runs. Behind them, Blefary added 23 home runs and another 64 RBIs. Frank? He won the Triple Crown (.316, 49 HRs, 122 RBI) and the MVP—the only player to win the award in both leagues until Shohei Ohtani accomplished the feat in 2024.

The Orioles took the pennant by a landslide nine games. Then, in one of the most dominating World Series performances ever, the O’s swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers. Robinson drilled a first-inning HR in the opener out west. Then another in the series-clincher here.

“Sometimes, you can point to one incident in a season as a big one,” veteran O’s reliever Moe Drabowsky recalled  to longtime Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg. “To me, when Frank hit that ball out of the stadium off Tiant, it galvanized the whole team. It was like, ‘We’re going to be tough to beat this year.’”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer. He leaned over home plate and defied pitchers to throw inside. Hit 198 times in his career, he gained a reputation for dusting himself off and getting his revenge with a retaliatory home run. (Don Drysdale, who Robinson homered off in his first at bat of the ’66 Series, was a familiar nemesis.)

Even at 51 in an old-timers’ game, after being accidentally knocked down by former big-league pitcher Jim Bibby, Robinson dug back in and put one over the fence. Similarly, Robinson was a menace on the basepaths, breaking up double plays like a linebacker. Early in his career, a hard, spikes-up slide into third base led to a scrap with Braves’ Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews, who blackened his eye with a right cross. Robinson had to leave the field, but, true to form, returned for the second game of the doubleheader and responded with a home run and decisive catch.

He had played in segregated environments in Utah and South Carolina in the minor leagues, places where he wasn’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. Those experiences and others may have hardened his exterior as a young ballplayer.

But, raised in hardscrabble Oakland, California, he was never a go-along-to-get-along type. Neither, coincidentally, were two guys he played ball with growing up—Bill Russell, who became the first Black head coach in the NBA in 1966—and Curt Flood, the Black centerfielder who challenged baseball’s reserve clause and set the stage for free agency in the 1970s.

Robinson, of course, would become baseball’s first Black manager with Cleveland in 1975—and win AL manager of the year honors for helming the O’s 1989 “Why Not?” run. One thing Robinson let his new teammates know was that he didn’t believe in fraternizing with the enemy. The O’s were a little too congenial for his liking.

“If somebody was talking on the field with one of the opposing players, Frank would say, ‘Why do you go out and talk to those guys when in five minutes, you’re going want to kick their butt?’” Powell says. “‘Take them out for dinner after the game. They’re not your friends on the field.’ And he was right and we stuck to that.”

Robinson, who did not lack for a sense of humor despite his fierceness between the lines, also instituted and served as the presiding judge of the team’s Kangaroo Court. With a mop over his head and a broom handle as his gavel, Robinson dispensed fines for mental errors and botched routine plays.

“We only did it after games we won so there’d be no hard feelings. If you threw to the wrong base, it cost you a dollar,” Powell says. “It wasn’t the dollar. It was that someone was paying attention [to your mistake] and you knew it. That was the edge Frank brought to the team.”

“What did Frank mean to the Baltimore Orioles franchise?” Jim Palmer mused, phoning into a MASN show shortly after his ex-teammate passed in 2019. “He put us on the map.”

In fact, Drabowsky’s prediction that the O’s would be “tough to beat” in ’66 after Robinson’s parking lot shot proved an understatement. During Frank Robinson’s playing career in Baltimore, the O’s were the best team in pro sports and maybe the best baseball club ever.

From 1966 to 1971, they won 100 games three times, captured four pennants, and took a second World Series in 1970. (Not incidentally, Drabowsky, who tossed 6-plus innings of scoreless relief in Game 1 of the ’66 Series, played a significant role on several of those clubs.)

To be clear, the Orioles were a very good baseball team before Robinson came over. They finished third in the 10 team AL in ’64 and ’65. And they didn’t just have “cannons at the corners” in ’66. They had Hall of Famers at third in Brooks and at short in Luis Aparicio. And future All-Stars Paul Blair and Davey Johnson stepping into full-time roles in center and at second.

The O’s themselves weren’t sure they needed Frank Robinson. A fourth future Hall of Famer, 20-year-old Jim Palmer, was set to join 23-year-old standout Dave McNally in the rotation.

“When the trade was announced, I was sorry to see Milt go,” Powell recalls from Florida as the 2026 preseason gets underway. “He was a friend, teammate, and a genuinely good pitcher.”

Indeed, Pappas finished with 209 career victories. “I respected Frank, we all did,” Powell says. “But we didn’t know Frank.”

The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Robinson had carried a rep in Cincinnati as a difficult guy. That changed quickly. As far as his new teammates were concerned, it was love at first sight. Robinson later commented the city might not have been ready for him, a reference to the housing bias, “but the Orioles were.”

“The day he arrived at spring training, he hit one after another into the palm trees,” Powell says. “I still remember telling Etch [catcher Andy Etchebarren], standing next to me, ‘We’ve taken a step up.’ Frank fit in right from the start. We liked the way he was and didn’t want him to be anyone other than who he was.”

Robinson’s issues with the Reds management stemmed from racial prejudice, salary disputes, and his outspoken personality. Pete Rose later said the club gave him grief for becoming too friendly with Robinson and Vada Pinson, another Black ballplayer. When fans and the Cincinnati media gave Robinson a hard time during the ’65 slump, it convinced DeWitt he could move him without too much blowback.

Meanwhile, Baltimore Afro-American Hall of Fame baseball writer Sam Lacy, civil rights groups, and Black fans had pushed the O’s for years to sign Black players. For their part, the Orioles acknowledged they hoped Robinson would appeal to the city’s “Negro” community.

The team’s leader when he arrived was the guy whose last name he shared. Brooks Robinson’s soft-spoken modesty and civility endeared him to everyone—never more so than when Frank Robinson joined the club.

A six-time All-Star, Brooks had earned his own MVP in 1964. The addition of another superstar, a Black slugger who’d been labeled “a troublemaker” by his previous club, could’ve potentially disrupted the team’s chemistry. But while Frank dealt with remnants of legal segregation in Baltimore, his acceptance in the O’s clubhouse was a non issue. (On the cusp of the World Series, Mayor Theodore McKeldin appealed to bar owners to ignore state law allowing them to ban Black residents: “I find it a distasteful piece of irony that I must make this plea in light of the fact that without Frank Robinson, a person who could be excluded by such business, we would probably have no World Series.”)

In his 1988 autobiography, Extra Innings, Frank said race relations on those Orioles teams were unlike any other club he played for. Brooks and Frank dressed next to each other for the entirety of their six years together in Baltimore, setting the tone for the team. The pair became known as the “Robinson Brothers” and after their playing careers, made a Lite Beer commercial playing off their names and similarities, clarifying, however, “we are not identical twins.”

The images of Brooks and Frank—one from Little Rock, Arkansas, the site of pitched segregation battles, the other from the birthplace of the Black Panthers—standing shoulder to shoulder, hitting in tandem in the heart of O’s batting order spoke volumes during the Civil Rights era.

“I suspect Brooks was the key reason why, for the first time in my 14 years of professional baseball, Black players and white players had drinks together and meals together when we were on the road,” he wrote. “Not every single night, but two or three times on most road trips. None of the players really invited me, Paul Blair, or Sam Bowens to join them. But Brooks might ask me where I was going after a game, and not knowing the restaurants in most American cities, I might say I wasn’t sure. Then Brooks would say something like, ‘Well, Boog, Jerry [Adair], Curt, and I are going over to this restaurant.’”

Winning helps, and Orioles fans responded in kind, embracing the club as never before. The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Jim Melonas, whose son, Mark, raised a replica HERE flag at the old Memorial Stadium site—now a recreational field—on the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s home run, grew up in Hamilton. He had started his freshman year at the University of Maryland when the O’s met the Dodgers. He and his friends squeezed into a VW Beetle to greet the team at then-Friendship Airport after they won the first two games in L.A. Then they followed the team to Memorial Stadium.

“Somehow, we got stuck between two of their buses, and were waved into the team parking lot,” Melonas, who went on to a career in business, enthusiastically recalls. “We ended up helping carry some of the players’ bags. It was one of the best moments of my life.”

Though there was an encore. Days later, a girlfriend invited him to Game Four. Her father had an extra ticket. “Frank Robinson’s home run sailed two rows over our heads in left field.”

“Do I remember Frank Robinson coming to Baltimore?” asks Rev. Alvin Hathaway, who grew up with Elijah Cummings in West Baltimore and recently led the restoration of Thurgood Marshall’s elementary school. “I was at City College High School from 1966 to 1969. Those were the Orioles’ hottest years. I worked at Memorial Stadium part-time. Not only do I remember Frank Robinson, I was selling popcorn when Louis Tiant threw that ball that he knocked out of the park.”

Hathaway highlights how accessible Robinson was, as well as the city’s other pro athletes. “You’d see him and his wife, Barbara, at Cross Keys, around town. They were a regal couple. That era of sports figures were community-minded people. He embodied it.”

Hathaway also notes Baltimore was a Colts’ town prior to ’66 in the city’s white—and Black communities. For good reason. “They won championships, and had personalities like Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Willie Richardson, John Mackey, Lenny Lyles. When Frank came in, this was a homerun guy, and you coupled him with Paul Blair, and things started to shift in terms of African Americans being attentive to the team.”

Academics were important at City College, but so were sports, Hathaway continues, adding he worked 15 to 20 ballgames at Memorial Stadium a year. He carried popcorn because it was light.

“I wanted to see the game,” he says. “I was on left field side when Frank stepped in against Tiant, who came up with that big windup. It was tense already when he threw that pitch, and man, and the next thing, all you heard was ‘pop!’ Everybody turned their head. I dropped my tray. I couldn’t believe how hard he had hit that ball. I still can’t.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

ven though he’s wearing enemy colors, Ed Soth is greeted the same way he usually is when he walks into Robbie’s First Base—with some good-natured ribbing.

“We’re going to stop letting you in here with that hat,” says Robbie Davis Jr., half of what might be the most well-known Senior-Junior tandem in the world of Baltimore sports . . . memorabilia. “How’d you get to be a Yankees fan?”

The conversation that ensues is similar to ones that take place in bars, at barbershops, and during ballgames every day: a group of old friends shooting the breeze about sports. The fact that it happens to be taking place in what is likely the world’s only sports memorabilia/mail service store just adds to the fun.

When Robbie Davis Sr., 71, opened the store in this small Lutherville strip mall in 1989, he had no idea that one day he’d be working alongside his sons, Robbie Jr., 43, and Matthew, 32. He didn’t know that the business would morph from dealing primarily with FedEx and UPS packages to making deals for Frank Robinson and Johnny Unitas autographs. He certainly couldn’t have imagined that the family would star in an ABC reality series and be featured in a Netflix show scheduled to drop this summer.

The exchange going down is exactly what has attracted television producers, audiences, and, most importantly, regular old customers to Robbie’s.

“I grew up at the old stadium, used to sneak in all the time,” says Soth, who often comes in to send packages and stays to hang out. “Want to hear a funny story?”

It’s a rhetorical question—everyone at Robbie’s is always up for a laugh.

“One day I was there, I’m 11 years old, and I’m sitting in the stands and Mantle is in the field,” Soth says. “Ball is hit, comes right to me, and I reach over and grab [it]. Ball hits me in the hand and falls to the [warning] track. Swear to God, Mantle walks over, picks the ball up, looks at me, and I think he’s gonna toss it up to me. That sonofabitch turned and walked away.”

Sitting at his cluttered desk behind the counter, Senior, as many people call him, lets out a belly laugh. From his slightly less messy desk a few feet away, Junior does the same.

“We have a lot of people who just come in and talk sports,” Junior says. “We get 85-year-old grandmas in here on a Monday morning talking Ravens. They’ll say, ‘Did you see that play that Lamar made?’ I can’t believe my ears. That’s what makes it cool.”

Robbie Davis Sr. grew up in West Baltimore, where, as he likes to remind people, he was a “really good” baseball player at Edmondson-Westside High School.

“I always tell my son that even though he got signed to a pro contract, I was better than him,” he says. “And he can’t refute it, because I’m the only one who’s seen us both play.”

After graduating, he served as a combat medic in the Army before going into the car business. At one point, he co-owned 12 dealerships in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Among them were All-Star Dodge and All-Star Chevrolet on Route 40. Orioles’ legends Brooks Robinson and Eddie Murray were among the athletes that did commercials for the dealerships, and Davis developed friendships with several guys on the team. When the O’s went on road trips, Davis would occasionally house-sit for Murray.

“Eddie Murray knew me before I knew who he was,” Junior says. “To me he was just a guy who was friends with my dad.”

One of Senior’s partners at the dealership collected baseball cards, and he took note when the man made some money buying and selling them. When he left the car business and opened a postal services store in Catonsville, then another in Lutherville, Senior put out a few boxes of baseball cards on the weekends.

Quickly, he realized that the Topps were topping his sales. He began buying and selling other brands that were hot at the time, like Upper Deck, and closed the Catonsville store to focus on the one in Lutherville.

 

“. . . THE BEST PART WAS GETTING TO BE AROUND PEOPLE THAT WERE AS PASSIONATE ABOUT COLLECTING MEMORABILIA AS WE ARE.”

 

“You never have a business where you can make money right away,” he says. “Well, the first month we opened up we were in the black.”

Perhaps his biggest challenge was keeping his sons from playing with his inventory. Where Senior saw an investment, Junior saw a pastime.

“He would buy all these unopened boxes and tell me, ‘Don’t open them,’” Junior recalls. “He would put them in our house in this room, and of course, I’m a little kid, so I’d be in there opening the packs because that’s what kids do. It’s no fun to just sit there and look at a box.”

A baseball addict from a young age, Junior played center field in college and was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers. When his career fizzled out in the minor leagues, he began working with his father in the store. As Robbie’s grew, the Davises began buying and selling all kinds of sports memorabilia: jerseys, autographed baseballs, seats from the old Memorial Stadium and Cole Field House. One of the most expensive items they acquired was a Babe Ruth signed baseball for $20,000. They later sold it for a tidy profit.

As their reputation continued to grow, more and more athletes started stopping by the store. Al Bumbry has been friends with Senior since they met in the mid-’80s. The Orioles Hall of Famer, who was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the Army during the Vietnam War, still drops in often.

“The store presents a very social, laidback, easygoing atmosphere,” says Bumbry, the 1973 American League Rookie of the Year and a member of Baltimore’s 1983 World Series championship team. “People don’t feel pressured there because Bob’s a people person. Once he connects with you and becomes friends with you, he’s one of those guys that I would take in the foxhole with me.”

Lewis Brown was a 15-year-old kid when he first went to Robbie’s.

“Senior, he likes to take chances on people,” he says. “I didn’t grow up the richest, so sometimes I’d be in there and I’d go, ‘Mom, I want to get this,’ and she’d say, ‘Well I don’t have the money for it.’ There was a Barry Bonds-signed baseball. It was like a hundred and some dollars. He was like, ‘Just take it, and when you get the money just come in and pay for it.’ Ain’t nobody does that.”

It took Brown, now 35, a few weeks to scrape together the money. When he returned to the store, Senior offered him a job. He’s been working there ever since. When he was trying to save $10,000 for a down payment on a house, Senior asked how he was going to do it.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know. I’ll figure it out,’” Brown says. “He goes, ‘I’ll lend you the money and you can just pay me back when you get it.’ That’s the type of guy he is.”

In 2010, the producers of the reality show Pawn Stars contacted the Davises with an idea. They wanted to film a series about the business and its cast of characters. The core four in the show would be Robbie Sr., Robbie Jr., Brown, and Robbie Reier, another longtime employee. There was only one problem: way too many Robbies. Thus, Senior became Senior, Junior became Junior, Brown became “Sweet Lou,” and the then-baby-faced Reier became “Shaggy.”

In 12 episodes of Ball Boys, the guys goofed on each other, debated sports, negotiated with buyers and sellers, and interacted with greats from the sports world. They played basketball with former University of Michigan Fab Fiver Jalen Rose. Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon fired footballs at them. The legendary running back Jim Brown came to the store, but of all the sports royalty they met, baseball’s hit king, Pete Rose, was their favorite.

After shooting a segment, Rose asked for a restaurant recommendation for lunch. When Senior told him the production company would only pay a pittance for their food, Rose whipped $10,000 cash out of his pocket.

“He’s the kind of guy that if you go to a bar you want to hang out with,” Senior says.

When Sweet Lou asked for a personalized autograph, Rose wrote, “To Lou, you big fat piece of shit.”

“I loved that,” Brown says.

The show ran for just one season in 2012, but it was rebroadcast for years after that and is still available on ABC’s app. It raised the store’s profile both locally and nationally—they still get customers who say they heard of Robbie’s from Ball Boys.

“It was awesome,” Junior says. “I liked being on TV, but the best part was getting to be around people that were as passionate about collecting memorabilia as we are. We met people from all around the country, and we got to share our stories.”

Bob Windsor, aka Burger King Bob, is milling about the store, going back and forth with Senior about . . .something or other. The two are old friends. They get together on Sundays to watch football at Windsor’s house, where he makes sure Senior always has chips to snack on and Hennessy to wash them down.

An avid collector, he’s bought everything from a Babe Ruth-autographed baseball to Michael Jordan’s shoes at Robbie’s. But the products aren’t what keep him coming back.

“If there was a pot belly stove and an old dog, you’d be there for hours every day,” says Windsor, whose nickname stems from his job as a “financial guy” for several Burger King franchises. “It’s that homey.”

That’s never changed at Robbie’s, but the preferences of memorabilia consumers are ever-evolving. After a down period in the ’90s and 2000s, cards are back in vogue. And not just baseball cards. These days, Pokémon is as popular as Paul Molitor.

“I had a kid buy two $8 packs and he got a $700 card in there,” Junior says. “That’s what these cards are all about now. It’s all about the gamble.”

That being said, there are some athletes whose appeal is timeless in Baltimore. Cal Ripken Jr., Brooks Robinson, Gary Williams, and Ray Lewis items always sell quickly. But there’s one athlete whose popularity Junior says is unprecedented.

“Nothing’s been like Lamar,” he says of the Ravens quarterback. “[Jackson] has been the biggest craze that we’ve seen in this business since we’ve been open. People can’t get enough of him.”

Although the Davises are hometown fans—they live and die with the Orioles and the Ravens—and love sports memorabilia, the business requires a sort of cold lack of sentimentality. Anything they acquire could be gone the next moment.

“People say, ‘Is this for sale?’” Senior says. “I say, ‘Come on, if it’s got a price tag on it, it’s for sale.’”

Still, there are a few items in which they seem to take special pride. Near Senior’s desk hangs a signed photo of Orioles Mike Morgan and Fred Lynn from the mid-’80s. Lynn’s note reads, “To Bob, the second-best ballplayer I know.”

“That’s because I always told him I was as good as him,” Senior says, chuckling.

Above Junior’s desk is another framed photo, this one with Lynn and Eddie Murray standing over Senior, who is sitting in a chair with his then-eight-year-old son, Robbie Jr., on his lap.

Neither of those items have a price tag.

On Thursday, Baltimore—and baseball as a whole—lost a legend as Frank Robinson passed away at the age of 83 at his Los Angeles home after a long battle with cancer. Not only did Robinson fulfill more roles than any other person in the history of the Orioles organization, but the former manager, player, and front-office executive was multi-faceted when it came to his character.

Maybe it’s presumptuous to think that Robinson, as a player, had any deep-rooted reason to position himself as head of the Orioles’ silly kangaroo court. He wore a white mop atop his own hair and levied playful small-dollar fines against teammates for things like base-running mistakes, talking to opponents, or anything else deemed an infraction. But it’s hard not to imagine that the light-hearted foolishness, with Robinson banging a baseball bat as a gavel, didn’t provide some sense of escape from the serious judgement he faced outside the refuge of the clubhouse.

This was a man who, when he was traded at age of 30 to an implicitly segregated Baltimore in 1966, couldn’t find a place to live because he was black. His wife phoned him in Florida during spring training to say she was about ready to move with their two children to California, where they had family, since many landlords refused to rent them a space.

The Robinsons ultimately settled in Ashburton, then a racially mixed, upper-middle-class neighborhood in the northwest part of the city, but only after Orioles owner Jerold Hoffberger asked members of his public relations staff to help the family find housing. Even still, certain shops, bars, and restaurants refused their entry.

As a boy, Robinson grew up in Oakland, California, the son of a single mother who raised 10 kids, and he found a sanctuary in sports. And as a teenager in the 1950s, he learned first-hand what it meant to be a black man in the South when he played in the minor leagues as a 17-year-old, hard-hitting outfielder in the Cincinnati Reds system.

As an adult, he was gruff, ferociously competitive, no-nonsense, and often hard to get to know. “I’m not sunny,” Robinson once told Washington Post writer Barry Svrluga. “I’m a quiet, kind of withdrawn person. I don’t mix easily with people.”

Yet, in Memorial Stadium, Robinson was both the court jester and king of the diamond.

Ten months after he settled in Baltimore and after several seasons in which the club got close to capturing an American League pennant, Robinson—an intimidating right-handed presence at the plate—famously got the Orioles over the postseason hump and led them to their first World Series championship.

“He made us all better,” fellow Hall of Famer Jim Palmer said Thursday night, and Robinson won the Triple Crown while doing it, leading Major League Baseball in batting average, runs batted in, and home runs.

The 1966 season was his greatest year, one of the best individual seasons in baseball history, and one that quickly cemented his legacy as a Baltimore sports giant and hero— even before the Orioles captured three more American League pennants and the 1970 World Series in his six seasons here.

But Robinson’s proudest accomplishment happened in 1975, nine years later, when he broke ground as the first black man to walk a lineup card to home plate, as the Cleveland Indians’ player-manager.

Just as the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier for players in 1947, Frank Robinson, unrelated but forever linked, did the same for minority managers that followed. But he was a reticent pioneer. Being the first African-American manager “was nothing compared to what Jackie did or what he went through, but it was important because I was the first and that meant the door’s open,” Robinson said in 2016.

He piled up accomplishments decade after decade. Robinson was the only player to win MVP in both leagues, with the O’s in ’66 and Reds in ’61, he was a 14-time All-Star and, when he retired in 1976, was fourth on the all-time home run list with 586, only behind Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Babe Ruth.

This Miller Lite beer commercial featuring the Brothers Robinson from 1980 is especially memorable too:

Robinson later managed the Orioles for four seasons, one of four teams he managed over parts of 21 years. He replaced Cal Ripken, Sr. as O’s manager in 1988 after an 0-6 start, lost his first 15 games and the team finished 54-107. The next season the O’s went 87-75 and Robinson was AL Manager of the Year.

As the Angelos family recognized, Robinson is the only person in O’s history to serve as a player, coach, manager, and front office executive. He also worked in MLB’s offices. And despite playing only six of his 21 seasons for the Orioles, and having statues of his likeness and jersey No. 20 retired in three different towns, he went into the Hall of Fame with an O’s cap in his first year of eligibility in 1982.

“The only regret I have about my relationships in Baltimore is that my playing career was too short there,” Robinson said during his induction speech, “but the love affair still goes on.”

Once he found a place to live, Robinson embraced Baltimore as his second home. Having a street named after him following the 1966 World Series win didn’t hurt. But most of all, as Robinson told The Sun in 2016, he hoped that his play and presence—we have to think the mop-headed kangaroo court judgeship included—helped change the racial biases in the city that he encountered upon arrival.

“I hope it did,” said Robinson, who is survived by his wife, Barbara, and daughter, Nichelle. “That was always on my mind.”

Blast From the Past

May 8, 2016
33rd Street

Fifty years ago today, Frank Robinson launched a home run off Luis Tiant that not only cleared the left field wall but 50 rows of seats, landing in Memorial Stadium’s parking lot. The only HR ever knocked completely out of the park in the Orioles’ history on 33rd Street, the titanic shot was considered such a momentous feat that Robinson received a minute-long standing ovation, and a week later, a flag reading “HERE” was placed atop the bleachers to mark the spot where the ball sailed from the park.

Memorial Stadium, of course, was torn down after the team moved to Camden Yards. However, a popular rec field has since replaced it, with home plate and left field closely aligned to the old diamond’s configurations. So, on this windy afternoon, local resident Mark Melonas is hosting a second flag raising to commemorate the golden anniversary of Robinson’s epic blast. The replica “HERE” flag that Melonas commissioned is even made by the same company that produced the original.

“I wasn’t born yet in 1966, which was also Frank’s first year with the Orioles. But my dad, who was 17 then, told me how much he meant to Baltimore,” says Melonas, 41, a furniture maker. Robinson, later Major League Baseball’s first black manager, led the O’s to their first World Series title that same year, delivering a 410-foot homer in the series-clinching 1-0 win at Memorial Stadium.

“I was sitting in left field that day,” recalls Mark’s dad, Jim Melonas, now 67. “It flew two rows over my head.”

---

Love of Country

May 15, 2016
Beason Street

The wooden trunk on the floor of this three-story, red-brick boarding house—once a way station for turn-of-the-century newcomers to America known as the Immigration House—reveals much of the building’s history.

Gold lettering on the trunk—one of the artifacts on exhibit at the new Baltimore Immigration Museum, which is hosting an open house this afternoon—reads “Bremen-Baltimore Sept. 25 Dampfer [steamship] Rhein.” It’s a telling inscription pointing to the historic Atlantic route that carried 1.2 million German and Eastern European immigrants to Locust Point between the Civil War and World War I.

Above the trunk, a black and white photograph shows a young man with a bushy mustache, a cap, and an overcoat sitting amid baggage shortly after arrival.

The culmination of years of work by Nicholas Fessenden, a former Friends School history teacher, and his wife, Brigitte, a German-born preservation expert, the budding museum documents Baltimore’s immigration saga, which has been largely overshadowed by New York’s Ellis Island. On this day, a steady stream of Locust Point residents stop by, as well as others interested in learning more about their city and possibly their family’s back-story.

“I’m German on my mother’s side,” says Frank Tewey, whose ancestors lived nearby. “My great-grandmother’s family told her, ‘Never marry a sailor, they all leave.’” But she did—another German immigrant named Gerhardt—and, indeed, he left, heading home to Deutschland to claim a small inheritance. He returned, however.

“My great-grandfather joined the German navy in order to come back and then jumped ship to be with my great-grandmother,” Tewey continues. “Good thing he did. One of their future children, my grandmother, had 63 grandkids when she died.”

---

Love Shack

June 3, 2016
Hollins Street

Behind the DJ booth, a pair of turntables, and stacks of metal record suitcases, Fred Schneider digs through his 45-rpm collection, handing old-school vinyl selections to host Rob Macy. It’s cramped and hot, and the packed house inside the Lithuanian Hall is twisting and shouting to some of the best—and rarest—greasy rock and roll, Motown, R&B, funk, and soul ever made.

Macy concentrates momentarily as he lowers the needle onto “You’ve Got My Soul on Fire,” and then nods and grins as he lifts off his headphones. “This is sick,” he says, referring to Edwin Starr’s 1973 single.

By midnight, the air is so heavy with perspiration that women are lifting the matted hair from their necks and pinning it atop their head even as they keep moving. It’s mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, but more than a few Gen Xers have come to see Schneider, the famous party-chasing frontman for the new wave B-52s, who broke out in the late ’70s and early ’80s with hits like “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho.”

The vintage recordings behind the first-Friday-of-every-month Save Your Soul dance party—launched two decades ago—are both an homage to the music Schneider loved as a teenager and the organizing principle behind his retro, bouffant-sporting band.

“Word apparently got to Fred that Baltimore had one of the top soul dance parties on the East Coast,” Macy says. “So we invited him and he was game. He’d bought some records and he wanted a place to play ’em.”

As the evening turned to the wee hours of the morning, the 65-year-old singer, who doesn’t appear to have slowed much, hit the dance floor more and more.

“I was showing them all how to boogaloo and shing-a-ling,” says Schneider, who still manages to convey a certain intoxicating blend of Southern-influenced civility and randy mischievousness when he smiles.

“It helped that I was a little bit tipsy.”