The boy who never grew up

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

I always could spot Frank at those games because he never stood with those carping old men but, rather, stood off to the side listening to the chatter of the wives and girlfriends of the players. Frank was always with the women, as if he felt they needed someone, a man, with them at those games in rough neighborhoods. The girlfriends changed over the years, became wives, brought to the game their sons, to whose girlfriends Frank Klein one day would be listening.

But Frank never changed. He was always a slim, little man with thick-lensed eyeglasses and slicked-back hair, and the pleased, sheepish look of a young boy talking to older women. He shuffled his feet, looked down at the dirt, stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. As the women chatted, Frank's head would bob up and down like the heads of those toy dogs in the rear windows of so many of the cars parked at those games.

I always remembered Frank from those games, but I never really knew him, which was why I was surprised, years later, when I started writing for magazines and began receiving Frank's cryptic notes along with a clipping from a newspaper about a local pitcher.

"Pat Thought this might interest you. Frank."

What did he want? Finally, I decided to find out one day in 1980. 1 decided to spend a day with Frank, a man I'd known for 20 years but really did not know at all.

Frank Klein was a bachelor, who lived then with his tiny, 80-year-old mother in a small, immaculate house in Fairfield, Conn. He rose before the sun each morning. So as not to disturb his mother, he went downstairs to his basement to smoke a cigarette, listen to music (Peter Nero) and work. He had set up a folding chair, a card table, a small lamp and a portable typewriter there. Each morning, he banged out a press release for his life's avocation - the Connecticut Collegiate Summer Baseball League. He was the league's founder in 1964, its director, its press agent and its sole executive officer. In short, Frank Klein was the CCSBL. It was a sort of summer Cape Cod League for college-age players and older, who, for various reasons - a lack of talent, the need to hold a summer job - could not afford to play in the Cape with college All-Americans.

"My players don't have the potential to be high draft choices like those at the Cape," Frank said. "They play for the love of the game."

On the summer morning that I arrived at Frank's house, at 5:30, he had been awake since 4 a.m. He had gone downstairs to his basement to arrange things for me. On his basement floor he had laid out in neat stacks, his baseball memorabilia. Piles of old CCSBL press releases, some of which I had slashed to bits when I was a young sportswriter. Letters from friends, fans and former players. Envelopes adorned with the bright insignias of major league teams. (like a kid, he loved the insignias of the Orioles, orange and black; and the Cardinals, red, black and gold.) There was a yellowed program from the 1925 World Series between the Washington Senators and the Pirates. It revealed a glimpse of baseball as it was played in a simpler time. On the inside cover there was a brown-tinted photograph of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner. There was nothing soft or corporate-looking about Landis, as there is today about so many of the men who run the game they seem not to know or love. Inside the program were advertisements for Worumbo overcoats worn by every member of the Senators - they looked like a lineup of assassins at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre - and for Clark C. Griffith's oil company, with a testimonial from Walter Johnson ("It's the delivery that counts.). And finally, an ad for Mike Martin's liniment Martin, who resembled W.C. Fields with his bright red, drinker's nose, was the Senators' trainer. His liniment promised to relieve colds, aches, pains, stiff muscles, swollen joints, cold feet, lameness, rheumatism, lumbago, neuralgia and neuritis - all for the modest sum of 50 cents for two ounces.