Robin Roberts: Gentle warrior

Robin Roberts was the son of a Welsh coal miner who emigrated to the United States in 1921, five years before Robin's birth. He excelled at every sport he ever tried, but in the 1940s baseball was king, even if it meant signing with the Philadelphia Phillies.

In Brooklyn, where I grew up, the Phillies were hardly worth the time of day, but Robin Roberts was special. You noticed when he was pitching, and, if it wasn't against the Dodgers (sometimes even when it was), you'd root for him.

Robby was the classic pitcher of the age. Staring down off the mound (but never glowering, like Sal Maglie), he'd swing his long arms back like a raptor stretching himself for flight, bring the ball down over his cap and across his chest, and put the full power of his thighs and legs into every pitch: the Spalding Guide windup. High cheese, a biting curve, and nothing else but the legendary control.

Roberts cut up the plate like your father slicing the Thanksgiving turkey. Pitching is after all simple, if you possess Hall of Fame talent and absolute command.

Long reign

Warren Spahn was the better pitcher over the long haul— better, over the long haul, than anyone ever— but Roberts was the best pitcher in baseball for six years, which is a long reign. He mostly won, sometimes lost, but almost always finished.

This was the great lesson I learned from Robin Roberts: Whether you're mowing the lawn or writing a book, you finish what you start. Roberts pitched 28 straight complete games at one point, almost as many as an entire league produces these days.

I remember a 12-inning game in which Roberts gave up seven runs, and won. Any other pitcher, even then, would have been lifted at half a dozen points. Not Roberts. He pitched until he won or lost.

It wasn't any easier to face Willie Mays or Hank Aaron in those days than it is to face Albert Pujols or Alex Rodriguez today. You can't pitch nearly 2,000 innings in six years without giving up something. In Robby's case, it was the hop on his fastball, which had deserted him by the time he turned 30. At that point he had to re-learn his game, and it was never quite the same.

Phillies in decline

Pitching for progressively worse teams, he bottomed out with a knee injury for the Phils team that lost 23 straight games in 1961, and 107 overall. The Phillies let him go with scant ceremony. But then, this was the franchise that had traded Grover Cleveland Alexander after three straight 30-win seasons.

Roberts caught on with the Baltimore Orioles, and produced three winning seasons. He took his shower after six or seven innings, mortal like the rest of us. He went back into the National League in the mid-'60s, and got to within 14 games of 300 career victories. He could still pitch.

Lefty Grove had been allowed to eke out an identical 14 wins to reach 300 in his day, and Early Wynn had been similarly carried only three years earlier. But no one was going to do Robin Roberts a favor. Robin Roberts was a union man. He was articulate and intelligent. He knew all about pitching sore, taking salary cuts, being shunted around as his skills waned, and winding up on the scrap heap.

If he'd have been a decade or so younger, Roberts might have established free agency instead of Dave McNally. What he thought of the steroid-shielding millionaires' club the Players Union became, he never said, at least for publication. Maybe it would have been something like, "I tried slavery, and it wasn't that much fun."

Post-Stalinist exile

The Phillies retired Roberts's number but never employed him. He became a superb college baseball coach, and made money (ironically enough) as a stockbroker. Affable and uncomplaining, he awaited rehabilitation like a post-Stalinist exile. Election to the Hall of Fame helped, and he finally became more or less welcome at spring training camps. Players sought him out, and fans always loved seeing him.

The Phillies never had anyone like him. Grover Cleveland Alexander went away to the Cubs and the Cardinals, a bottle tucked under his arm. Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game but couldn't nail down his generation's pennant the way Roberts did in 1950, when he started three of the Whiz Kids' last five games and pitched ten innings to get them over the hump.

Roberts stood up for his fellow workers; Bunning, as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, this year single-handedly blocked benefits for millions of unemployed workers.

The money question

Steve Carlton was a great and durable pitcher, and his 27-10 record for the last-place '72 Phillies was a greater accomplishment than Roberts' 28-7 season for a winning team in 1952. But Carlton was notoriously a hard case, and said not a word in public in his last decade in town.

Mike Schmidt rounded the diamond many a time without ever really getting to first base. Curt Schilling was his own brand name. Ryan Howard no sooner signed a $125 million contract than he forgot how to run out a double. And how, exactly, does one love a $125 million dollar man?

Robin Roberts helped to pose that question for us, though he could hardly have imagined the sums of money that slosh around baseball today. But Roberts himself remained the same man, and the same unique symbol of the game's bygone integrity.

I think I've said this before, but it bears repeating: America lost its way when the complete game in baseball became an extinct species. And now we've lost the man who finished those games.

Ave atque vale, Robby. The box score is complete.♦


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