My Friends Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson

I sometimes reflect on how baseball, a game I was not very good at, has given so much to me. It seems antithetical, but it is true. The game has always had a hold on me and always will. If I tried to describe all the ways the game has blessed me, this would be a book rather than an essay. But friendships forged around the game are a large part of it, and in my case, I've been more fortunate than most. Two special friendships have been with now one hundred-year-old Eddie Robinson and Dr. Bobby Brown, who passed away at the age of ninetysix on March 25, 2021. Eddie is the oldest living major leaguer, a designation I hope he holds for a long time, and Bobby was in the top ten before he died.

The two of them had a special relationship; they first met in 1946 when they played against each other in the International League. Both eventually ended up in Fort Worth with a bond unique to old ballplayers. My good fortune is that I was eyewitness to their friendship for the last sixteen or so years through our semiregular dinners which have always included Eddie's wife Bette, Bobby's wife Sara until she passed away, and my wife Julie.

But to harken back seventy-five years, Eddie Robinson was returning to baseball after a three-year hiatus to serve in the Navy during World War II. He was a big, lefty-swinging, twenty-five-year-old from Paris, Texas, who wasn't even sure he could still play baseball, thanks to a botched leg operation he'd had while in the service. He'd had a cup of coffee with the Cleveland Indians in 1942 before he enlisted but the Indians sent him to their Triple-A affiliate, the Baltimore Orioles in the International League for 1946. There he dispelled any doubts about his baseball future by leading his team in hitting with a .318 average while slugging 34 home runs and driving in a league-leading 123 runs.

Bobby Brown, on the other hand, was a twenty-one-year-old bonus baby the New York Yankees signed out of the Tulane Medical School for a record $52,000. The Yankees assigned him to the Newark Bears in the International League, their top farm club, for his professional baseball debut. Bobby quickly proved that he was ready for that level of competition, batting .341 with a league-leading 174 hits. His batting average was second in the league to Jackie Robinson's .349, who was making his professional debut and integrating baseball that season with the Montreal Royals. With those numbers, it is not surprising that the league MVP selection was a three-horse race among Brown and the two Robinsons, with Eddie garnering the award.

Bobby remembers conversing with Eddie a little when he got on first base, which must have been quite often given his batting average. But his main memory of Eddie from that year is of a gargantuan home run that Robinson smacked against the Newark Bears in Baltimore. The Orioles were playing in Baltimore Stadium, which was actually a football stadium, because their baseball park had burned down. As a result, it was oddly configured with a very short left field while right field seemed to go on forever, similar to the LA Coliseum where the Dodgers played when they first moved to the West Coast in 1958. The only difference was that the Orioles didn't bother to put up a fence in right field.

One afternoon Eddie got a hold of one and, according to Bobby, smashed a ball about sixty feet over the head of Bears right fielder Hal Douglas. Eddie was never known to be fleet of foot (he had ten stolen bases in thirteen years in the big leagues) but he circled the bases and was sitting in the dugout by the time Douglas managed to get the ball back to the infield. Bobby was still amazed by that clout seven decades later.

Not surprisingly...