The boy who never grew up

Sporting News, The, March 13, 1995 by Pat Jordan

Whenever I think of baseball these days, and like most of us I am thinking about it a lot, I remember Frank Klein, a man who loved the game more purely than most, and yet, a man I tried to avoid whenever I saw him in 1980 in my hometown of Bridgeport, Conn. I'd be walking through town when I'd see Frank walking toward me or about to pull his battered Volkswagen bug over to the curb and call out my name. I immediately turned into the nearest store and waited - flattened behind the lingerie rack of Merle Norman Cosmetics - until he passed. Usually, however, Frank saw me before I saw him. He leaned across the passenger seat of his bug, which was always littered with cigarette ashes and the sports sections of Connecticut newspapers, and began telling me, in that breathless boy's way of his - Frank was in his 50s then - about the latest local-college pitching phenom. It was always a pitcher.

"Pat, what do you think about Catto?" he said.

"I don't know," I said. "What about him?"

He looked at me incredulously. "He was drafted! In the third round by the Reds! What do you think? Does he have a shot? Come on, Pat. You should know. You were a pitcher."

I tried to control myself. I told Frank I didn't know. I had never seen Keith Catto throw a baseball. I had not thrown a baseball in more than 20 years. I no longer thought of myself as a pitcher, as ever having been a pitcher (a lie). And then, before Frank regrouped, I fled to my office. Frank peered at my hasty retreat through his rearview mirror. He looked bewildered.

I sat in my office and cursed my rudeness. And I cursed Frank Klein for eliciting that rudeness. For reminding me of that which I have worked so diligently, albeit unsuccessfully, at forgetting - my faded baseball career. Just when I thought I had exercised the demon of my failure - when I could finally read the major league box scores filled with the names of players I had known in the minor leagues, without thinking of them when I played with them in the '50s, but as they were then, in 1980, managers like Joe Torre and aging pitchers like Phil Niekro - up popped Frank like some prophetic jack-in-the-box.

But he meant no harm. He was just a pleasant man who loved the game in a way I never did. I loved to play it. But I didn't love the game. I had known Frank on and off for years. I first met him when I was a 22-year-old sportswriter working the 6 p.m.-2 a.m. shift on a Bridgeport newspaper. He would appear at midnight bearing gifts of coffee for me and my grumpy boss, along with one of his interminable press releases. My boss, a bear of a man, would be hunched over some copy paper, his face low to his desk, deliberately trying to avoid eye contact with Frank. He would reach up without taking his eyes from the copy paper and accept Frank's coffee. He refused to look up because the sight of Frank's beseeching eyes might force even him to use all four pages of a press release for which we had the space of paragraphs. At least my boss would grumble thanks for that coffee, and then wave Frank and his press release to my desk. Frank would stand over me, stuttering a few words about a local pitcher, while I slashed away at his copy. Finally, no longer able to bear the pain, Frank fled.

I also used to see Frank at a lot of local semipro games played usually at twilight on a weekday. These were not the American Legion games of young prospects, played in the suburbs before a polite crowd of parents and major league scouts. These were city games, played after work before a crowd of African Americans and Puerto Ricans and old men sipping from bottles in paper bags, and even older men, who stood in the shade of the only tree and criticized the players on the field while reminiscing about their playing days with the White Eagles and the Rosebud AC. I remember when I got released in the early '60s from the Braves, I was too embarrassed to show my face at those games. When I finally mustered the courage to go down to the city park one evening, the old-timers, like Harpies, were there under the tree. I stood behind them, unnoticed for a few minutes, and watched the game. Then I heard my name mentioned by one of the old men.

"Jordan's back," he said.

"He couldn't cut it," said another.

"Figures," said a third. "I never thought he had it."

I ran from that park with tears in my eyes and never returned for a year or more.

The players in those city games were in their late 20s or 30s or 40s, had once been prospects, had maybe even gone away to play in the minors before being released. Some were in their 50s, and some had even made the majors, like Tom Casagrande, a huge man with thick, freckled arms dusted with orange hair. "The Big House." his name meant in Italian, and to me as a kid, he was as big as a house: 6 feet 3, 235 pounds. Tom was a smooth-throwing left-hander (aren't they all) who was the star of that city league. He was also a successful businessman, unlike the other players who were mostly members of the Bricklayers' and Carpenters' unions. They rushed to the park after work only minutes before the game and changed into their uniforms in their cars (there were no lockers) and took the field without warming up (they had no careers to protect), looking so odd with their hands dusted white with lime, or sliced with cuts from their saws.