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After losing TV gig, Frank White says ‘I’m done with the Royals’
By SAM MELLINGERFrank White thought hunting may help clear his mind. Being fired from the only organization he’s ever truly loved will knock a man’s brain to a vulnerable place, so he put his camouflage on and drove out to rural Missouri with some friends and aimed at pheasants.
Didn’t help.
So he returns a call, and begins to open his soul.
“I’m done with the Royals,” he says. “In all aspects. I’m tired. I’ve worked so hard to build my reputation and prove to them that I was loyal.”
White’s broadcasting contract with the Royals was not renewed, a move the team and Fox Sports Kansas City announced on Friday, the final crack in a long crumbling relationship between icon and franchise.
He swears he’s done doing anything on the team’s behalf, and wonders if he’ll tell the Royals to take his retired number off the Hall of Fame facade in left field.
Three Royals sources and one from Fox Sports KC declined to speak publicly, but White will share his side of the story over most of the next hour. His words are steady and even. He swears he isn’t mad, and his voice never raises, even as the message is frustration, anger, and a touch of bitterness.
White knows this is a sad story. He grew up a few miles from what became the Truman Sports Complex, and worked on the construction crew that built Royals Stadium. He is the ultimate success story of the old Royals Academy, playing 18 seasons with eight Gold Gloves, five All-Star games, and helping win the team’s only World Series championship in 1985.
None of that seems to matter now. Two entities that should live happily ever after instead are effectively at each other’s throats in one of the saddest stories in recent Kansas City sports history.
The divorce is infuriatingly unnecessary and terribly timed — just as the Royals are building something real on the field, here comes a public relations disaster to make fans distrust the club off the field.
“I’m not pissed off,” White says. “It’s just time for this crap to end. Maybe it’s just time. People keep saying, you’re ‘Frank White, you’ve got a statue.’ That don’t mean a damn thing to them. Not a damn thing.”
• • •
The rocky relationship goes back decades, but for today’s purposes we pick up when White interviewed for the manager’s job that went to Trey Hillman before the 2008 season.
This was White’s dream, really. He wanted to be a big league manager, and to prove it managed three years at Class AA Wichita. Always popular with fans, it was thought that White had an advantage having coached Royals prospects such as Alex Gordon and Billy Butler.
But White was always skeptical of his chances, and now calls interviewing for the job his biggest regret.
“That was the worst thing I did,” he says. “Everything changed after that … I don’t know if they ever took me serious or not. They never asked me my opinion on guys. Nothing. It’s like they shove me in the corner and tell me to behave.”
White joined the broadcast booth instead, eventually taking on a heavier workload after primary TV analyst Paul Splittorff became sick. All the while, White tiptoed around Hillman, intentionally never asking a question in news conferences and taking notice that nobody asked him to work with the infielders or about his opinions on players.
Those feelings of disrespect grew, turning into a well-known secret until busting into the public last offseason. White’s increased broadcasting schedule meant he could do fewer personal appearances for the Royals, and when the team asked him to take a representative cut from that part of his salary, he voiced his frustration.
He eventually worked things out enough to serve as the primary TV analyst last season, but the raw feelings never went away on either side.
White only felt more disrespected by an organization he cared about his entire life, and the Royals grew more tired of what some viewed as a sense of entitlement and paranoia unbecoming of a man of such accomplishment.
Royals general manager Dayton Moore is being blamed in many circles for White’s ouster from the broadcast booth, which multiple sources adamantly dispute and classify as a collaborative decision.
“The only place I’m unpopular is out at the ballpark,” White says. “Upper management. That’s where the problem is. It’s nothing to do with the employees or the players. It’s those guys on top of the organization. I don’t understand where it comes from.”
• • • White is not blameless here. This is a touchy subject, enough that even an organization currently being trashed won’t speak publicly other than a short, vague and entirely inadequate press release.
But White is complicit in getting to this point. His reputation for privately badmouthing the Royals caught up to him, as well as a feeling from some that he’s a diva who longs to be treated as George Brett’s equal without the Hall of Fame status to justify it.
The Royals have done a lot for White. They gave him a coaching job, and, when White cut an original five-year commitment in Wichita after three years, pushed him for the broadcasting job.
White is the common denominator in a tension-filled relationship with the club that stretches back to his playing days — through different general managers, front office personnel, coaches, even ownership.
So there are two sides to this, each uncomfortable, and each damning to the other. White’s status as a proud man who feels underappreciated by a franchise he’s done so much for is matched by an organization that too often views him as a pest rather than an ambassador, and tends to dismiss his complaints rather than listen.
But you know what? None of it matters, not in the most important way.
There is a sentiment from some within the Royals, like, “Who does this guy think he is?” But the answer: he’s Frank White.
The Royals don’t have anyone else like him, a local boy turned hometown hero, an active member of the community, a smiling face that fans love and, let’s be honest, a black man in a sport that needs more.
Not many other teams have someone like him either, for that matter, which makes it critical that the Royals treat White as a gift instead of an annoyance. They can’t and don’t deserve to win an image battle with a beloved local icon, no matter the situation’s nuance.
There is still hope from most that this ugly scene won’t last forever. Emotions may level, and at some point each side will see that it is better with the other.
That’s the hope, anyway.
When the time comes, it’s on the Royals to make the first apology.