Announcements

New Course,
Just Released!

Mark has been referred to as the World Football League’s researcher extraordinaire.  This week on the Good Seats Still Available podcast, Mark tells the story of the Detroit Wheels, perhaps the only World Football League franchise from its inaugural 1974 season that stood out more for its own brand of woeful ineptitude than any other franchise in the league.  And get the book that tells the entire story, Nothing But a Brand-New Set of Flat Tires: The Sad, Sorry Saga of the Detroit Wheels of the World Football League.

Frank Robinson, Hall of Fame Slugger and First Black Manager,
Dies at 83

Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame outfielder who hit 586 home runs and became a racial pioneer as the first black manager in the major leagues, nearly three decades after Jackie Robinson broke modern baseball’s color barrier playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.

Major League Baseball announced the death but did not specify the cause. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Robinson was in the late stages of a long illness.

Playing for 21 seasons, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles, Robinson was the only winner of the Most Valuable Player Award in both the National and American Leagues.

He was an intense and often intimidating presence, leaning over the plate from his right-handed stance, daring pitchers to hit him (which they did, 198 times), then retaliating with long drives, “pounding pitchers with fine impartiality,” as the baseball writer Roger Kahn once wrote. He broke up double plays with fearsome slides.

by Richard Goldstein
Reprinted from The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2019

Frank Robinson won the American League MVP in 1966; a year covered by Mark R. Millikin in his book The Glory of the 1966 Orioles and Baltimore