Frank Robinson Quotes

I started in the lowest league in baseball, and I worked my way all the way up to Triple A and then to the big leagues. I never reached the level that I thought I would reach as a player. But that's the way it goes. So then I started from the bottom as a manager, and I worked my way up to managing the Dodgers for 20 years.

If you're in the minor leagues, you want to get to the majors.

I've kind of looked at my whole career as a spring training invite.

I'd rather play in the major leagues and have some bad games than play consistently good ball in the minors.

At my growing years of 18 to 21 years old in the Minor Leagues, I dreamed of being a Philadelphia Phillie.

Everybody in the minor leagues - if you're a player, an announcer, whatever - wants to be in the big leagues.

I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I'd like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.

Going back down to the minors is the toughest thing to handle in baseball.

Any time you're in the coaching business or managing in the minor leagues, when you see a player who has made it to the major leagues, you get a thrill out of that.

Your first responsibility is to the organization, to teach and prepare players to get to the big leagues and have them ready when they get there, but everyone in the minors wants to be in the majors.

When I was a minor league player, my goal was to be a major leaguer. It's no different as a minor league manager.

He's (Jack McKeon) been around baseball for twenty-plus years. He knows what it takes to be a manager. I hope he gets the chance.

Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?

The coverage [of crimes] is different. It's less angry when white [athletes] are involved, less accusatory, less judgemental. I see that in the pieces that are written and reported. At times it bothers me to the point that I just stop reading...just stop.

From the very beginning I used sound business practices in everything I did. White businessman uses them to make money he's a genius. Black businessman uses them he's a crook. That's the way it is.

I didn't know if I could make it to the big leagues without going through Triple-A.

Racial inequality has gotten worse in the last years because any time you have a moribund economy, the people who historically have had more problems getting jobs have suffered. And that, I think, is triggering a lot of the animosity.

See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to.

I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don't have an advantage or this and that. I've said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

The national conversation around white entitlement, around institutionalized racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think, came about in large part because of the widening and broadening of our understanding of inequality. That conversation was begun by Occupy.

An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."