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Frank White joins T-Bones, shuts door on Royals
By SAM MELLINGERThe Kansas City Star
The divorce is final now. No reconciliation is coming, and no happy ending. Just more of a bitter war between the Royals and a hometown man whose statue stands in front of the stadium he literally helped build with a construction job one summer.
Frank White played so well over 18 seasons that the Royals retired his number. He has done hundreds of public appearances on their behalf, worked in the front office, and broadcast games on radio and TV. Once, he dreamed of managing them.
But now he is a full-time employee for the T-Bones, coaching in the low-budget outpost of minor-league baseball and swearing off the only big-league team he’s ever truly loved.
White is done with the Royals. He’s said this before, you might remember. This time he is shutting the door on ever coming back.
“There’s nothing they can do for me,” he says.
Joining the T-Bones is White’s way to stay in the game, and he sees some connected business relationships that might help. He will serve as first-base coach, advise the front office and make most of the bus trips to road games, a significant drop in status and pay from making around $300,000 last year broadcasting Royals games.
White has no delusions of rekindling dreams of a big-league managing career from the Northern League, which isn’t connected to any major-league teams and offers only the faintest hope for players to be noticed. He sees this instead as a way to move on emotionally while staying in Kansas City.
There is a permanence to White’s words that didn’t exist before, setting up an uncomfortable summer in which the Royals will play host to baseball’s All-Star Game while one of two players with a retired number wants nothing to do with them.
“I’m just glad I’m not there anymore,” he says. “I’m healthier. My blood pressure is stable. I’m laughing a lot more, I’m having more fun. This is good. This is good for me.”
He puts most of the blame for his ugly relationship with the Royals on club president Dan Glass, who did not return messages for this column.
According to White, Glass told him last year that he had done “irrevocable damage” to the Royals “that can’t be repaired.” White thinks he was fired from broadcasting because Glass was “(ticked) off I didn’t let them step on my neck anymore,” and also says that he did more work for less money than the Royals paid George Brett.
White says he’ll write a book someday, but for now he will coach anonymous players in small stadiums and swear that he has no regrets of how he handled his time with the Royals.
The club declined official comment, but Brett — the Hall of Famer, current vice president and a teammate of White’s for 18 seasons — spoke about this for the first time.
“It’s unfortunate,” Brett says. “Frank is a friend of mine, a teammate, but I don’t know everything that happened. I’m not really privy to all the conversations. So for me to say something more, I don’t really know everything that’s going on.”
Brett is looking forward to talking with White about this next week at what is sure to be an awkward Royals fantasy camp, and likely the last thing he ever does with the team.
“It’s hard to go to work when the people there don’t see you as an asset, or someone who can help make the team better,” White says. “When you’re the guy everybody messes with. When there’s nobody there to say, ‘This is Frank White, this is what he’s done for us, don’t mess with him.’ ”
The fight between man and franchise grows uglier and less salvageable the more you hear. White had a reputation for badmouthing the Royals to other clubs, for instance.
He says nobody ever brought that to his attention, that a conversation Thursday for this column was the first he ever heard of it. Others say differently.
“If you say the Royals have always been a team that doesn’t like to pay, is that being negative or is that being true?” White says. “But my thing is, if you have something to say, say it. If you have something negative about me, why don’t you put it out there?”
In dispute is everything from whether White undercut coaches’ credibility to players, to whether White’s reluctance to ask questions to managers Trey Hillman and Ned Yost as a broadcaster was to avoid the appearance of challenging their authority or because he thought himself above it.
Two months ago, when White was fired from broadcasting, each side sent signals that reconciliation could happen. A friend of White’s, in fact, said he would bet on it.
That’s all different now. Instead of letting emotions settle, time is only allowing each side to dig in more.
White said he would only listen to the club if he had “representation” at the meeting, and there is no indication from the Royals that they’d listen to White without major concessions that he isn’t willing to make.
An already tenuous relationship is tilting over the cliff.
“I’ll tell you the most disappointing thing in this,” he says. “Nobody stood up for me. Even when I was making sense to them, or thought I was making sense, nobody stood up for me. Nobody.”