Few players have made a stronger visceral impression on me than seeing young Alfonso Soriano. I remember watching him early in 2001, when the Yankees came to Fenway Park. He was a touted prospect who hadn’t done anything in the majors, but he looked like he was going to be a star. Watching the Yankees warm up, I remember that my eyes kept finding him, kept getting drawn to him. He looked like he was going to be great.
Alfonso Soriano wasn’t great. He was a very good player for a very long time, but he had deficiencies in his game. He was old for a rookie, and he wasn’t really suited to play the infield. He had a tendency to be lazy, to not concentrate. At his best, he has the skills to be one of the game’s best, but Soriano was too often indifferent, and baseball is cruel to the indifferent.
This isn’t about Alfonso Soriano, of course. This is about Frank Robinson, who passed away yesterday at the age of 83.
I wasn’t alive for any part of Frank Robinson’s playing career, so I cannot speak to what kind of a player he was. Or I can, but only to the numbers and reputation. His numbers are great. In an era that was almost preposterously rich with outfielders (Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Snider, Yaz, Kaline, Clemente), Frank Robinson more than held his own, winning two MVP awards and a Triple Crown, and leading five teams to the World Series. He was a terrific competitor and an important trailblazer. By any measure, Frank Robinson was one of the all-time greats.
I wasn’t alive when Robinson became the first black manager in baseball, and I have no discernible memories of his years as the manager of the Giants, Orioles, or Expos. The only vivid remembrance I have of Robinson is from his last season as the manager of the Washington Nationals, and while it’s a minor remembrance in a rich and storied career, I’ve thought about it a lot over the years.
It concerns Alfonso Soriano.
I said that Alfonso Soriano looked like a star in 2001. He had a star-making moment in Game Seven of the World Series that year, hitting a solo homerun off Curt Schilling in the 8th inning to break a 1-1 tie. Alfonso held serve the next season, mashing 39 homers and stealing 41 bases for a Yankees team that won 103 games. He went 38/35 the next year, and then was traded nearly straight up for Alex Rodriguez (I think there might’ve been cash considerations).
After two years decent-but-not-impressive seasons in Texas, Soriano was traded to the Washington Nationals, who were looking for a star player to make attractive to fans a lineup whose star attraction was Nick Johnson.
The Nationals, recognizing that Soriano wasn’t a serviceable defensive second baseman, wanted him to play in the outfield. Soriano wanted to play second base. A minor standoff occurred, with Soriano sitting out a couple spring training games before the Nationals threatened him with disqualification, which would mean a forfeiture of both his salary and his free agent status at the end of the season. Soriano caved.
By that point in his career, Soriano had gained a reputation as a slacker, as a non-hustler. He had pissed off Rangers management by not running out grounders, and there were a couple times when he’d knock one off the wall and have just a single to show for it, because he thought he had a homer.
Two games into the 2006 regular season, Soriano hit a high pop-up. This was at Shea Stadium, and Soriano didn’t bother to leave the batter’s box. When he got back to the dugout, Robinson politely pointed out where on the bench Soriano could enjoy the rest of the game. ‘Politely’ isn’t the right word: Robinson made sure that Soriano knew he was getting benched, and why.
I am not, by nature, particularly deferential to baseball’s old school. I like bat flips and bombast, and I am skeptical when people bring the subject of intangibles into a game that has plenty of tangible elements and events.
But in the specific case of Robinson v. Soriano, I thought Robbie did everything exactly right. I thought Robinson’s handling of Soriano were the actions of a great manager, and those actions have influenced how I’ve thought about managers in baseball ever since.
Alfonso Soriano was a star. In coming to Washington, he was joining a team of castoffs and hopefuls, the dregs of a team that had been strip-mined and then migrated from Montreal a year earlier. The team won 81 games the year before, a feat that surprised everyone. The Nationals were a young team with almost no identity but some promise, playing in a city that still hadn’t made up its mind about them.
Putting this not-very-delicately: Soriano came in to the situation in Washington like a grade-A jackass. He was going to be a free agent at the end of the season, and he came in acting like the team was lucky to be graced with his presence. He came in making demands: Soriano wasn’t going to move positions because it would help the team, because that’s not what a star does. He wasn’t really on the team: he was just making a cameo in DC before something better came along.
Robinson, with two actions, relayed to Soriano that acting like an entitled jackass just wasn’t going to be an option under his watch.He communicated that Soriano had two options: get in line as a member of this team, or go home.
Many managers would have failed this scenario. Many managers, faced with a star player bitching in spring training, would sit on their hands and wait, and pray that the problem would resolve itself. Robinson didn’t wait: he acted immediately and decisively. Robinson had a team on the upswing, and he wasn’t going to let the issue of where Soriano was going to play fester until it polluted the team. He recognized the problem and dealt with it before the season started. Soriano was going to play outfield, or he wasn’t going to play anywhere.
And when Soriano didn’t run out a pop-fly during the second game of the season, Robinson benched him. The message is easy enough to interpret: everyone on this team is going to make the effort. No one is exempt.
I wasn’t writing about baseball in 2006, but I was starting to think about baseball a great deal, in a deliberate way. I followed the standoff between Soriano and Robinson, and I remember thinking at the time, "if he doesn’t quit, Alfonso Soriano is going to have a big year."
It was an instinctual thought, but I had a sense that Soriano had found, in Robinson, the first manager who had ever really challenged him, the first manager who had taken the chance of really pushing him.
And…it happened. After being benched by Robinson, Soriano had the best season of his career. He crossed the elusive 40-40 mark easily, hitting 46 homeruns and stealing 41 bases.
More significantly, Soriano became a greater player. Prior to coming to the Nationals, Soriano had always been one of those annoying leadoff hitters who never walks: he had walked 33 times in 2005 and 33 times in 2004. Under Robbie, his walk rate doubled to 67 free passes. And Soriano, a defensive liability at second base, excelled in the job of reluctant outfielder, pacing the league in assists (22) and double plays (9), both by wide margins. By all metrics, the 2006 season was the best of Soriano’s career.
I have no idea how much credit Robinson should get for Soriano’s 2006 season: I am only speculating. My belief is that Robinson, in those two decisions early in the season, ended up painted Soriano into a corner: he couldn’t be a prima donna making demands as the star of the team because Robinson wasn’t going to let that happen, and he couldn’t slack off until he cashed in as a free agent, because Robinson wasn’t going to allow that. Soriano was going to have to make the effort, and he was going to have to be a decent teammate. That was his only way out of the corner.
That is speculation, but it’s shaped my thinking about baseball tremendously over the years. It’s a hard thing to manage professional athletes, and it’s hard thing to organize a team so that the individual parts can come together and win baseball games. Management is an area of the game that sabermetrics has a great deal of difficulty accessing, and so it’s one of the areas we tend to shy away from. That’s probably for the best, but we’re missing something that is interesting.
Frank Robinson gave me a way into thinking about that side of the game. Maybe I’ve thought about it too much, and maybe I’ve granted it too much importance, but I’m grateful to have had the opportunity.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidFlemingJ1, and by e-mailing him at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.