Brooks Robinson
Baseball · Hometown: Little Rock, AR
- High school
- Little Rock Central High School
- Pro team(s)
- Baltimore Orioles
- Hall of Fame
- ⭐ National Baseball Hall of Fame
Brooks Robinson spent his entire 23-year career with the Baltimore Orioles and is universally regarded as the greatest defensive third baseman in baseball history. He won 16 consecutive Gold Glove Awards from 1960 to 1975 — a record that has never been approached at any position. Robinson was a two-time World Series champion (1966, 1970) and the 1964 American League MVP. His performance in the 1970 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, in which he made a series of almost impossibly athletic plays, is the most celebrated individual defensive performance in Series history — the Reds players themselves marveled at what they were witnessing in real time. He batted .267 lifetime with 2,848 hits and 268 home runs, but it was his defense that made him a legend. Robinson was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983 in his first year of eligibility. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 18, 1937, and attended Little Rock Central High School — the same building that two years after his graduation would become the site of the famous 1957 desegregation crisis.