Bill Robinson, RIP: The Fire Down Below

He became a New York Yankee outfielder in the 1966 swap that made an Atlanta Brave out of virtuoso fielding third baseman Clete Boyer, who died in June. He bounced from there to the Chicago White Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies (a three-season tour), the Pittsburgh Pirates (seven seasons and a World Series ring in 1979, when he hit 24 home runs and slugged .504 on the regular season), then a split season between the Pirates and the Phillies before finishing off with the Phillies after a year and a half.

Then Bill Robinson became a coach, and a respected one, particularly as the batting instructor and manning the coaching lines at first for the New York Mets as they rose to mid-1980s enfants terrible, perennial contenders, and 1986 World Series winners. In due course, he became the batting instructor for another World Series winner (the 2003 Florida Marlins), and he was visiting Las Vegas during a second season in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he died in his hotel room at age 64 Sunday.

A respectable baseball career, even if he never quite lived up to an early expectation as a Yankee. ("I was supposed to be a black Mickey Mantle. I made the mistake of hitting a home run in my second game.") A respected man. ("[H]e was a devoted family man, a consummate professional and one of the classiest men in our sport," said Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon upon learning of Robinson's death; Dodger owner Ned Colletti issued a warm statement of his own: "Bill was a wonderful family man and a great baseball player, coach, manager, and friend to everyone he met. Even though he never played for the Dodgers, it was an honor that he chose to be a part of the organization. Everyone he came into contact with was better for having known him.")

And it will probably fall second place to the memory that burns brightest involving Robinson. The guarantor of that memory is now the pitching coach of the Atlanta Braves, but was then a youthful co-closer out of the Mets' bullpen. In 1986, especially, Roger McDowell and Bill Robinson intersected hotly enough, during a May game in Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium.

In the bottom of the second inning in a scoreless contest, Bill Robinson ... was sitting by himself at the end of the Mets' bench, slowly making his way through a bag of sunflower seeds. With the blessing of his teammates (but without [manager] Davey Johnson's knowledge, McDowell climbed under the bench and on elbows and knees crawled the 20 feet to Robinson's dangling cleats. In one fist, McDowell held a single Marlboro cigarette and a roll of gaffer's tape. In the other, he had a fully loaded book of matches. Exercising the dexterity of Spider-Man, McDowell, lying at Robinson's feet, removed the staple from the matchbook, wrapped the book around the cigarette, and taped the two together. Then softly and gently he stuck the device on Robinson's left cleat. As soon as the inning ended, McDowell lit the cigarette and crawled back to the other end of the dugout.

"There are a lot of complications," McDowell says. "You have to time the cigarette, and you also have to make sure there's enough air between the match and the cigarette so it doesn't die out. It's pretty intense."

Usually, when a hotfoot ignites, it takes anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds, and the result is a burning sensation and a small, manageable flame. This was no ordinary hotfoot. Robinson left the bench, took his post next to first base, watched the pitcher warm up, traded a few words with a fan, and clapped and yelled encouragement to Darryl Strawberry. As Gary Carter, the next hitter, stepped into the box, Reds manager Pete Rose noticed the smoke oozing from Robinson's foot. Unable to contain his laughter, he called his entire bench to join him at the end of the dugout. On the Mets' side, McDowell told Bill Welch, the director of WWOR's televised broadcast, to keep a camera on first base. The count was one ball, one strike on Carter. Suddenly, whoooooosh! An inferno exploded and flames shot up Robinson's leg as if he were the guest of honour at a Hawaiian pig roast. Robinson began jumping up and down, screaming in pain. For McDowell, it was perfection.

"It was like NASA just launched something," he says. "The greatest hotfoot ever. And Bill, to his credit, never got mad. He just said, 'You won't get me anymore. I'm done with that.' To me that was like when you're a kid and someone says, 'Don't call me that!' What are you supposed to do?"

The answer was obvious. McDowell, along with partner and technical adviser Howard Johnson, lit Robinson's shoe no fewer than 15 more times that season, including seven or eight in August and September alone. At season's end Jay Horwitz, the Mets PR whiz, incorporated a section on hotfoots into the team highlight video, including McDowell and HoJo demonstrating their step-by-step approach.

Before a game against the [St. Louis] Cardinals August 17, Robinson was sleeping on a couch in the Shea Stadium clubhouse when he felt yet another burning sensation. This time Johnson and McDowell were especially ambitious—both of Robinson's shoes were ablaze. "I grabbed the shoes to get 'em off me," says Robinson, "and the plastic from the laces burned the shit out of my hand." Robinson took his ashen right shoe and flung it at McDowell's head, missing by a couple of inches.

— Jeff Pearlman, in "Hot Stuff," from The Bad Guys Won. (New York: HarperCollins, 2004.)

Robinson could take it in a prank, but he wasn't exactly a man to stand still when it was dirty pool on the field, either. Mets fans still remember the June 6, 1986 brawl he triggered in Pittsburgh's old and unlamented Three Rivers Stadium, when he hollered to Carter in the batter's box to get the home plate umpire, Billy Williams, to check the balls thrown by Pittsburgh right-hander Rick Rhoden, a man known not to be shy about putting whatever he had (or could think of) on whatever he threw. (Robinson was in position to know: he and Rhoden had been teammates for four seasons.)

Williams checked a ball and tossed it out of play. Rhoden, according to Pearlman, "shoved a small object into the back pocket of his uniform pants." That brought Williams to the mound for a quick frisk; the ump returned to his post and the game went on.

Between innings, however, Robinson made sure to cross his path to Rhoden's as the clubs switched sides. "Rick," Robinson is said to have told his old mate, "you're too good a pitcher to cheat." Rhoden was not amused. "Bill, f**k you!" he hollered. "You guys are a bunch of f**kin' whiners!" Which was pretty brazen for a pitcher whose team was on the way to losing 98 games on the season, even if he and they were en route to beating the Mets, 7-1, on the afternoon.

Rhoden's outburst earned him a shove in the chest from Robinson and the scrum was on. It took four teammates to hold Strawberry back after he decked Pirate outfielder Lee Mazzilli. (Irony: Mazzilli, once a Met idol, would return to the Mets soon enough and play a big enough role as a pinch hitter and late replacement.) Sid Bream, then the Pirates' first baseman and an eventual, unlikely National League Championship Series hero with Atlanta (he scored the winning run on Francisco Cabrera's bases-loaded single, despite his crippled knees — "I'd had five operations on my right knee and I was wearing a big brace and I ran like molasses" — beating a throw from Barry Bonds playing a little too deep in left field, to nail the 1992 pennant) at the Pirates' expense, jumped Robinson himself ... and came away with a broken pinkie for his trouble.

Then Sammy Khalifa, the Pirates's shortstop, made two dreadful mistakes. He went after Robinson blindside, and Kevin Mitchell — the ghetto-smart Met rookie — saw him. Mitchell turned out to have a special affection for Robinson, who'd taken a particular interest in him and provoked the kind of loyalty that made Mitchell especially protective of the coach he, especially, called Uncle Bill.

Mitchell considered it his duty to look out for the first base coach. Thus, Mitchell blindsided Khalifa with a clothesline to the head, dropping the Pirate to the ground with an awesome thud. Mitchell proceeded to wrap his arm around Khalifa's throat and drag him facedown across the stadium's Astroturf surface. "White meat," says Mitchell, smiling. For the next 10 seconds, Mitchell held Khalifa in a headlock. As his face went from white to a purplish blue, Khalifa gasped for air, his arms waving wildly. "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Finally, at the urging of several Mets, Mitchell let go. Khalifa crumpled.

"I would have killed him," says Mitchell. "It's the lion's den, and I was pissed because he was going at Uncle Bill from behind. If you're gonna do something like that, be a man and come from the front.

— Pearlman, in "The Kid and the Black Hats," The Bad Guys Won.

The Pirates won the game; the Mets won everything else in sight, practically (they finished 108-54 and 10 ahead of the second-place Phillies; the Pirates finished dead last and 23.5 out), including a thriller of a League Championship Series (against the Houston Astros) and, of course, that surreal World Series (against the Boston Red Sox).

Two months after the rumble in the Pittsburgh jungle? "Rick Rhoden and I played golf," Robinson remembered to Pearlman. "No hard feelings. We were able to laugh about it."

Not half as loudly, it says here, as were a packed Cincinnati ballpark, both dugouts therein, and at least two television audiences in New York (and elsewhere, since WWOR had gone superstation at the time) and Cincinnati, at the fire down below.