Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
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by the irony that he spent fifteen of his sixteen big-league seasons with the Reds and that they won a championship in the only season he missed, but his disappointment was understandable.
“You don’t know if we would have won if I’d been here,” said Nuxhall, who died in November 2007. “Those things you don’t know. In fact, it was a miracle year, from whatever people tell me about it. They weren’t that great of a ballclub, but everything popped into place, which is really what has to happen in a lot of cases. It just happened to fall that way, and they won the pennant.
“Sure, hell, I would’ve loved to have been here. That’s the dream of any professional athlete—to play for the world’s championship. Like I told some people at a banquet, I don’t care what you’re doing in sports as a team, your ultimate goal is to be in a championship, whether it’s Little League, municipal league, whatever. You say, ‘Well, I’m just playing for fun.’ Basically, I don’t buy that, because you know at the end of the season, somebody has to be the champion, and if you don’t have that feeling, then you’re wasting your time, in a sense. You might as well go jog or something.”
Perhaps DeWitt’s best move of the off-season was one he didn’t make—out of bed in the wee hours of the morning of February 10, 1961. DeWitt was called at his home by Earl Lawson, the Reds beat writer for the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star who’d been tipped off that Frank Robinson had been arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. Lawson told DeWitt that Robinson could be released at 8 a.m. if someone would post $1,000 bail, and the reporter admitted being “a little startled” when DeWitt said, “Well, I guess one of his friends will bail him out.”
Robinson had been arrested following the second of two altercations that night at a Cincinnati diner. He and two friends had stopped for hamburgers after a night of bowling and basketball and gotten into an argument with three youths. The cook called for help from two police officers who were eating in their cruiser. They came in and, while trying to calm the situation, referred to Robinson and his two African-American friends as “boys,” prompting one of Robinson’s friends to grow irate enough that the officers arrested him for disturbing the peace.
After he was bailed out, the three went back to the restaurant to retrieve their food—as did the two police officers. The officers left the restaurant and went back to their car while Robinson and his friends decided to stay and eat at the restaurant. At some point, Robinson looked into the kitchen and saw the cook looking at him and making throat-slitting gestures. That was the last straw for Robinson, who challenged the cook, as he described in his 1968 autobiography, My Life Is Baseball, co-authored with Al Silverman.
“He started toward me, with a butcher’s knife in his right hand,” Robinson recalled, adding that the restaurant layout prevented other diners from seeing the knife. “I saw him all right. He was coming at me with that butcher’s knife poised in his right hand.”
Robinson pulled a .25 Beretta—a small, Italian-made pistol—from his jacket pocket and held it in the palm of his left hand. He’d purchased the gun during spring training a year earlier, primarily because he often carried large amounts of cash and had to walk fifty yards in a dark area from where he parked his car to his Cincinnati apartment.
The cook stopped and yelled, “Hey, that guy’s got a gun,” bringing the officers back inside. Robinson slipped the pistol back into his pocket and lied when asked by one of the officers if he had a gun. They found it after frisking him and arrested him.
Robinson was as surprised as he was disappointed that DeWitt did nothing. Gabe Paul and Birdie Tebbetts had personally rescued Robinson after he became involved in a police matter during spring training in 1958. No charges against Robinson were filed after that incident, and Robinson understandably expected similar help from DeWitt after the later problem—even though the accepted practice at the vast majority of businesses is to leave employees to handle their own personal legal issues. That’s what adults do, and that’s what DeWitt made the twenty-five-year-old Robinson do.
That wasn’t the first time in their short relationship that Robinson had problems with DeWitt. They didn’t personally meet after DeWitt was hired until bumping into each other in the team’s downtown Cincinnati offices.
“When Mr. DeWitt took over the club, I just thought the right thing for him to do would be to at least call up the players, especially the ones who lived in town, and introduce himself, say hello, maybe talk a little with them,” Robinson wrote in his book. “But nothing. I met him by accident one day when I was in the office talking to the switchboard operator. He happened to come out of his office and saw me and introduced himself, the official greeting.”
Relations grew frostier during contract negotiations. DeWitt was a notoriously soft touch for sob stories and down-on-their-luck ex-players, and he gave everybody in the Cincinnati front office a 10 percent raise immediately upon taking over and gave them another one ten months later. But he wanted Robinson to take a pay cut before the 1961 season, while Robinson wanted to be paid at least as much as he earned in 1960.
“He said, ‘I hear you don’t hustle all the time,’” Robinson wrote. “I blew up. I said, ‘Have you ever seen me play?’ He said, ‘No, no not really, not over a full season.’
“Well, until you do, don’t tell me that I don’t always put out on the field. I do.”
DeWitt pointed out that Robinson seemed to play better when he was angry, and that DeWitt planned to keep Robinson angry throughout the upcoming season.
“He was going to keep poking me, keep me at the boiling point, he implied, to get the best performance out of me,” Robinson explained. “I left Mr. Bill DeWitt feeling that I had struck bottom in my career, and that there was only one way to go—up. I was wrong.”
No, that low point was the long night Robinson spent sprawled on the hard bench of a Cincinnati jail cell, with just his jacket for a pillow.
“The most disturbing thought of all, the one that haunted me all night long, was what the kids would think of me,” he wrote. “So many kids idolize big-league ballplayers. So many of them mold their whole lives around their heroes. What were they going to think? How were they going to react?
“And then it began to dawn on me that I had a responsibility to the game of baseball. Baseball had been good to me, and I had taken a lot out of it, but what had I given back? I felt a deep responsibility to baseball, especially to the young kids who look up to the players. I felt that I had let them down.
“For the first time, I began to realize that I wasn’t a kid any more, and that I had better stop acting like one. I knew that I had been wrong, dead wrong, all the way. But looking back, it may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. It matured me, it made me a better man. No, not a better man—a man. Let me put it that way because I don’t think I was a real man before.”
Robinson’s problems that night had started when the police officers called him a boy while he thought he was a man. By the end of the night, he was acting like one.
Not that his troubles were over. As he expected, he heard a great deal in spring training early and often about the incident. It started when he reported to camp and found a water pistol in his locker, left there by teammate Ed Bailey.
“Thanks, Ed, but I can’t use it,” Robinson said, playing along while handing the toy back to Bailey. “I’m on parole.”
When the Reds traveled to Bradenton, Florida, for an exhibition game against Milwaukee, Hank Aaron and Felix Mantilla serenaded Robinson from the Braves’ dugout, singing, “Lay that pistol down, babe, lay that pistol down.” Milwaukee pitcher Lew Burdette snuck up on Robinson and frisked him, reporting to Braves third baseman Eddie Mathews, “It’s all right, Eddie. He’s clean.”
Mathews, who’d gotten into a fight with Robinson the previous season, responded with, “Hey, Robby, I’m not fooling around with you this year.”
St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Bill White called him “John Dillinger.”
“He’ll probably get a lot of that