Fifty years later, Frank Robinson’s managerial debut still matters to those who were there

CLEVELAND — David Scott was a young bureau chief for The Elyria Chronicle-Telegram in Ohio, making $105 a week.

On those wages, Scott didn’t have much extra to splurge on an event that the Greater Cleveland area and all the sports world was talking about: the debut of Frank Robinson with the then-Cleveland Indians as the first Black manager in the history of Major League Baseball.

“But when I heard many staffers wanted to go to the game, I was in,” Scott recalled now 50 years later.

On April 8, 1975, he led a group of off-the-clock journalists to see Robinson and his historic debut … if they could get to Municipal Stadium for Opening Day.

In the chill of a spring afternoon, they joined the crowd of 56,204 who streamed into the concrete bowl on the lakefront, but Scott and his friends missed the pregame pomp. They also missed Robinson’s first at-bat as player-manager.

“Herding a bunch of reporters was difficult, as I would relearn many times over the coming years,” Scott said through the 20/20 lens of hindsight. He and his journalistic comrades carpooled from a parking lot in Elyria and raced to get to Municipal Stadium for the first pitch.

They forgot one small matter: parking.

Parking on Opening Days has always been difficult in Downtown Cleveland. It proved almost impossible to find a spot for Scott and the five friends who power-walked with him from a faraway lot to the stadium.

They didn’t see the early fireworks.

In the bottom of the first inning, Robinson, who penciled his name in as designated hitter, stepped to the plate against New York Yankees right-hander Doc Medich. He served a low, 2-2 fastball to Robinson, who drove it over the left-field wall for a solo home run.

Outside the old stadium, Scott and his crew bumped into a police officer. He confirmed that the din signified a home run.

“The sound of people rising to their feet in jubilation is impressive at any venue,” Scott said, although he technically wasn’t there for the moment. “But it has a strange mixture of joy and angst when you hear it from outside the stadium.

“It was a bit muffled by distance but somehow more powerful because of the mystery it represented.”

Scott had no time, however, to hear details from the police officer as he and his coworkers rushed to get through the turnstiles, having missed firsthand what would become one of baseball’s most iconic moments.

Nowadays, a half-century later, Scott has a choice to make whenever conversations turn to Robinson’s managerial debut in the 5-3 victory. He can claim without lying to having a ticket and, as he put it, leave untold a fuller, more textured truth.

So, is it the whole truth or not?

“Depends on my mood,” said Scott, a retired journalist. “It depends on if I want to tell people I missed the lead.”

Over the years, the number of fans at Frank Robinson’s debut as Indians manager has swelled from 56,204 to 560,204 (or some other unworldly number) in a stadium that only held 78,000 for baseball.

Tall tales do that with sports history, said Phil Dixon, one of the foremost authorities in America on baseball.

Dixon, who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, was a Black boy when Robinson took the field to manage the Indians, but he was riveted to this day in baseball history. It had been 28 years since another Robinson (Jackie) broke into the big leagues as a player, and Frank Robinson had spent years readying himself for the task of managing a team.

“Everybody knew guys like Frank Robinson could play,” Dixon said. “They’d been playing successfully for a long time, But could they lead? They managed in the Negro Leagues, but they just couldn’t get that manager’s job in the majors.”

Dixon used Buck O’Neil as an example. O’Neil, who had managed successfully in the Negro Leagues, took jobs as a scout and a pioneering coach with the Chicago Cubs in the early 1960s.

“Buck thought he could have been a general manager — certainly the manager of the Cubs,” Dixon said. “He never got the chance.”

Dixon has written extensively about O’Neil and others who managed teams in the Negro Leagues. But the doors to do the same in MLB never opened for them. He bemoans how the O’Neils and the Vic Harrises of Black baseball never got a sniff of managing in the bigs.

“You know, they celebrate Buck now,” Dixon said. “Back then, a Black manager wasn’t very palatable for where their white clientele was.”

Black men who aspired to manage a Major League ballclub “lacked the necessities,” so the whispers went. In interviews with O’Neil, one of the co-founders of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Dixon heard O’Neil say ballclubs wanted managers with coaching experience — in Triple-A ball or in college.

Black men in baseball didn’t have that experience. In MLB, no one was hiring Black coaches. Nor could they land jobs as college coaches.

But Frank Robinson understood this hurdle that team officials put in front of him — which is why, during the offseason, he traveled to Puerto Rico in the early 1970s to manage the Santurce Crabbers.

His success there caught the attention of the right people.

Still, they were slow to move on putting a Black man in charge of a mostly white roster, Dixon said. Like Jackie Robinson, hiring Frank Robinson would be the next grand experiment in the sport. Could this Robinson prove his color didn’t matter when it came managing ballplayers?

Dixon and the baseball world were about to find out. No one knew then if his hiring would lead to a flood of other men of color getting similar opportunities.

In 50 years since Robinson’s debut, 15 Black men have managed Major League ballclubs. On Opening Day in 2025, the league had two: Ron Washington of the Los Angeles Angels and Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Has it been a flood, or a trickle?

What was to follow Frank Robinson didn’t mean much to 13-year-old Delvis Valentine in the spring of 1975. Valentine just knew he wanted to go to Municipal Stadium and see a man who looked like him make history.

“From the time I was about 9 or 10, I knew if I learned American history, I needed to know Black history,” said Valentine, an Air Force veteran and retired radio personality in Cleveland. “I knew this was important.”

His father stressed that fact. He told young Delvis this Opening Day game was important, and he had no misgivings about letting his son skip school to attend it. Delvis and his best friend Danny jumped on the No. 14 bus, which ran through Kinsman Avenue and took them downtown.

As he recalled, an Opening Day ticket was $3 or $4 for a bleacher seat, a discounted price for schoolchildren. Not that the cost mattered to Valentine; he’d have paid more. History did seem worth the price.

“It was like ‘Wow!’ ” he said.

He had no idea when he took his seat how memorable the day would be, but Delvis found out before the first inning had ended. Robinson’s homer etched its way into baseball history — at least to those who rooted for the Indians.

“I told Danny: ‘This doesn’t even seem real,’” he recalled. “Yeah, man, it was surreal.”

After Robinson’s home run, Valentine thought: The Indians have to win. He homers as a player/manager … they have to win.

“I don’t think there were any other player/managers then — period,” he said. “I mean, you’re the manager and put yourself in the lineup. And then you deliver. Wow!”

As he looked back to April 8, 1975, he was surprised Robinson debut was not a sellout. When the Yankees came to town, Indians fans often couldn’t get a ticket. The Yankees-Indians series routinely sold out.

Still, none of those series proved as memorable as Robinson’s debut, Valentine said. He’s seen Browns playoff games, he’s been in the locker room when the Cavaliers won an NBA title, and he was at World Series games the Indians/Guardians played.

Yet of all those sports events he’s attended, indoors or outdoors, he ranked going to Robinson’s debut as No. 1.

“Nothing else is close,” he said.