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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accuses the owner of the National Enquirer of extortion and blackmail. Mary Louise Kelly talks with Wall Street Journal reporter Lukas Alpert.
February 7, 2019
Baseball Hall Of Famer And Pioneer Frank Robinson Dies At 83
Hall of Famer Frank Robinson was the only player to win the MVP award in both major leagues. He was also baseball’s first black manager.
AP
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AP
Baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who made history as a player, manager and league executive, has died at 83 at his home in California.
Robinson, one of the game’s most feared sluggers and a fierce competitor, starred in both of baseball’s major leagues. He later became baseball’s first African-American manager.
“Frank Robinson’s resume in our game is without parallel, a trailblazer in every sense, whose impact spanned generations,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “He was one of the greatest players in the history of our game, but that was just the beginning of a multifaceted baseball career.”
Robinson broke into the majors in 1956 as a hot hitter and graceful fielder with the National League’s Cincinnati Reds. He was the NL Most Valuable Player in 1961, the same year the Reds won the league pennant. But by 1965, despite hitting 33 home runs and driving in 113 runs, the team’s management considered him old and expendable. Robinson responded to that judgment with a vengeance: In 1966, the year after he was traded to the American League’s Baltimore Orioles, he led the team to a World Series victory while winning the Triple Crown and the Most Valuable Player awards.
“Frank took us from being a good team in 1965 to being a great team in 1966,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer told the Baltimore Sun. “I’m glad Cincinnati thought he was ‘an old 30’ when they traded him.”
In the six years Robinson spent as an Oriole, the team went to the World Series four times and won twice, in 1966 and 1970.
ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian writes that “Robinson is one of the most underrated superstar players ever to play the game.”
“With that 1966 season, Robinson became the first — and remains the only — player to win the MVP in both leagues. He also finished third in the MVP voting twice, fourth twice and in the top 10 a total of 10 times. He made 13 All-Star teams. He won National League Rookie of the Year in 1956, hitting .290 with 38 home runs at age 20 for the Reds. And while he never led his league in a Triple Crown category other than in 1966 when he managed it in all three, he led his league in slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+ four times, including three years in a row (1960-62). And he led his league in runs scored three times, in being hit by pitches seven times and in intentional walks four times.”
Robinson is currently 10th on the all-time home run list with 586.
There are statues of Robinson at the ballparks in Baltimore and Cincinnati.
Robinson became a player-manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1975, hitting a home run on opening day that year at the age of 39.
He went on to manage the San Francisco Giants (1981-1984), and then returned to Baltimore as skipper (1988-1991) before ending his field career managing the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals franchise (2002-2006).
Robinson also worked for the game off the field as a consultant, and then executive, with the commissioner’s office.
Born in Beaumont, Texas, Robinson was raised in West Oakland, Calif., where he attended McClymonds High School along with future NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell.
In 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.
But it was as a slugger that Robinson may be best remembered. On June 26, 1970, he hit grand slam home runs in consecutive innings.
Consider this quote from his Hall of Fame page at Cooperstown:
“When asked by a fan how he would pitch to Frank Robinson, All-Star pitcher Jim Bouton replied, ‘Reluctantly.’ “
Avoiding The Ouch: Scientists Are Working On Ways To Swap The Needle For A Pill
A team of researchers in Boston has developed an insulin-delivery system that injects the medicine directly into the stomach wall, which is painless.
Felice Frankel/MIT
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Felice Frankel/MIT
Many vaccines and some medicines, such as insulin, have to be delivered by injection. That’s a pain, both for patients and for health care providers. But two groups of researchers are trying to put some of these medications in pill form to avoid the needle.
One team of scientists, from MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, developed a system to deliver insulin that actually still uses a needle — but is so small you can swallow it and the injection doesn’t hurt.
They built a pea-size device containing a spring that ejects a tiny dart of solid insulin into the wall of the stomach, says gastroenterologist Carlo Giovanni Traverso, an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“We chose the stomach as the site of delivery because we recognized that the stomach is a thick and robust part of the GI tract,” Traverso says.
Once the device gets into the stomach, the humidity there allows the spring to launch the insulin dart.
So far so good, but Traverso says there was a problem the team had to overcome: “How do we get these devices to self-orient such that the end that is doing the injecting part is in direct contact with a tissue?”
To get it to roll into the right position all on its own, they turned to nature.
“Leopard tortoises happened to have evolved a way of doing this,” Traverso says. The shape of the tortoise shell helps the turtle flip over if it happens to wind up on its back.
And there was another source of inspiration: Weebles, those egg-shape toys that wobble but don’t fall down.
The self-righting capsule orients itself inside the stomach and ejects a tiny dart of solid insulin that’s about a quarter of an inch long.
Ania Hupalowska, Alex Abramson, Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Science
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Ania Hupalowska, Alex Abramson, Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Science
As the researchers report in the journal Science, they’ve tested the device on pigs, and it can deliver a therapeutic dose of insulin provided the pig has an empty stomach.
Traverso and his colleagues have been working with the global health care company Novo Nordisk to ready the device for human testing. He has received consulting fees from the company and is a co-inventor on patent applications describing oral biologic delivery. Traverso hopes their device will be ready for human tests in a few years.
On the other side of the U.S., nanoengineer Ronnie Fang of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues have a different delivery system. Theirs is a kind of ingestible microrocket, about the size of a grain of sand, that is designed to zip past the stomach and into the small intestine.
“It actually propels [itself] using bubbles in a reaction of magnesium with biological fluids,” Fang says.
The rocket has a coating that protects its payload from the acidic and enzyme-filled environment of the stomach. Once the rocket enters the small intestine, the change in acidity causes the coating to dissolve and lets the rocket stick to the intestinal wall to release its payload, in this case a vaccine protein.
Much like Traverso’s design was inspired by the shape of a tortoise shell, the bubble-propelled microrocket travels like a bacterium.
“If you had bacteria invade your gut, they’re not just going to be sitting around statically, they’re going to be swimming around, and they’re going to make it to the intestinal wall,” Fang says.
As Fang and his colleagues report in Nano Letters, their delivery system works in mice, but human testing is probably many years off.
