If you grew up in the right place and time, chances are Brooks Robinson was an idol of yours, perhaps the idol. Known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner for his proficiency at third base, Robinson was a mainstay of the great Baltimore Orioles’ teams of the 1960s and 1970s.

Robinson died Tuesday. He was 86.

The obits will – rightly – trumpet his many achievements on the baseball diamond, which can in a sense be boiled down to these two: No player in the lengthy history of the game spent more years with a single team than did Robinson, who spent 23 years in the O’s orange-and-black. And at the end of that, Robinson was a first-ballot Hall of Famer, garnering more than 90% of eligible votes.

Yet if Robinson’s home was the hot corner at Memorial Stadium, his home away from home, one of them, anyway, was the racetrack. Wherever the horses were running, you were apt to find him, often, for years, in the company of the late owner and breeder Frank Wright. Laurel, Pimlico, even Timonium: where they ran, he was.

Many, many Marylanders have memories of meeting and interacting with Brooks; none, as far as I can tell, had a bad experience. I had the great good fortune to speak with Robinson a number of times at the track, and there was never a man more gracious to his fans than he. 

One moment demonstrated what he meant to his adopted hometown.

Back on a September Sunday in 2019, I was hosting the on-air handicapping for Timonium, joined by my friend Gary Quill – someone who did grow up in that right place and at that right time. Word came to us that Brooks Robinson was eating lunch in the Grandstand Grill. A few minutes later, he agreed to join us on-air for a brief interview. Gary and I decided he – a lifetime O’s fan – would conduct the interview, and I would melt into the crowd and watch.

Robinson was characteristically self-effacing. “You’re quite the handicapper,” Gary said to Brooks after the second race.

“I wish I was,” Brooks replied. “I bring along [former Major League shortstop and 1960 American League Rookie of the Year] Ronny Hansen sometimes. We’re good buddies, and he’s a good handicapper. I did win that one… but anyway, I’m a long way from getting even.”

As the interview went on, I looked around and realized that seemingly every person  at the track that day – young and old, men and women – had gathered in a semi-circle surrounding the small set on which the interview was taking place, eager just to be in Robinson’s presence. 

“I just come – it’s fun to sit down, enjoy myself,” Brooks said to Gary, and the assembled masses. “It’s a great day when I go to the races. I love it.”

As the interview concluded, the crowd spontaneously broke into applause, grown men and women turned into star-struck kids. Brooks Robinson – the Brooks Robinson – was in the house.

“You know, if you play long enough, as they say, someone’s going to get you and you’re going to get them,” Robinson noted drily during the interview.

Maybe so, and maybe he never did get even. The son of Little Rock, Arkansas, the archetype of the slick-fielding third baseman, he belongs, like all of us, to many worlds at once and now, according to his adopted Catholic faith, also to the angels. But to millions of Marylanders, and not just those who grew up in the right place and at the right time, he’ll forever belong to Baltimore, just as Baltimore will always belong to him.

CHECK OUT THE LATEST OFF TO THE RACES RADIO!