Max Patkin was one of those rare people - a truly natural funny man. If you've seen the film Bull Durham, you should be familiar with him. He's that goofy-looking character wearing a baseball uniform which is clearly too big and which has a question mark on the back, with his baseball cap on sideways, and who dances like a chicken while Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' is playing during the scene where the teams are warming up before a game. He also gets to dance with Annie (Susan Sarandon) when 'Crash' (Kevin Costner) and 'Nuke' (Tim Robbins) pick a fight with each other.

Rather than playing a fictional character though, Max Patkin was playing himself in Bull Durham, and as a baseball clown he played that role for 50 years. In fact, Max himself estimated that he made over 4,000 appearances as a baseball clown without missing a game, until he slipped on the dugout steps at Fenway Park¹ in August 1993, spraining an ankle.

Max's Beginnings

Max Patkin was born on 10 January, 1920 in Philadelphia, and like so many young American boys of the time dreamt of being a baseball player, placing his baseball cap and catching mitt under his pillow each night before going to sleep. He began to show talent as a baseball pitcher while attending West Philadelphia High School. After leaving school he joined a local Minor League team², later joining the US Navy and fighting in World War Two. Max played for Navy baseball teams and would often employ a little slapstick humour if a game was becoming tedious. It was at one of these games that he was spotted by Bill Veeck, who was at that time owner of The Cleveland Indians baseball team, and who hired Max to boost attendances at Cleveland games. The Indians had at that time been going through a slump for a couple of years.

With a lanky (6'3"/2m, 185lbs/84kg) frame, rubber face, huge nose, and apparent double-jointedness, Max was tailor-made for clowning. Bill Veeck said of Max that he was put together by someone who couldn't read the instructions very well, while Joe Garagiola described him as a flamingo on hot coals. One journalist wrote that:

Someone had started at the top, and finished in the middle. For one thing, they forgot to put the bones in. He looked as if they found him on a broomstick in a cornfield.

After a few seasons, the Indians started winning again, and although he drew in the crowds, Bill Veeck decided that Max's services were no longer required, so Max started his long run of clowning in the Minor Leagues. He has since revealed that he would rather have returned to pitching at that point in his life, but was encouraged by many, including the great Joe DiMaggio to continue clowning.

On the Road

So began a lonely and peripatetic life for Max, constantly moving from one ballpark to another, staying in fleapit hotels, travelling around by train³, but making people laugh every night of the season. He played to as many as 80,000 fans in Cleveland and as few as four in a Montana ballpark on the night that Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the Moon. He also appeared on more than one occasion with basketball legends The Harlem Globetrotters.

I stayed in rooms so small, you had to step outside to change your mind.

Max's favourite comic technique was to caricature players and officials (and farmyard fowl), sometimes mimicking the batter during his warm-up, sometimes pretending to be one of the base coaches⁴, even following a batter around the bases, as he did once when Joe DiMaggio hit a home run off one of Max's pitches in a Navy game.

Although he managed to save something like $50,000 by 1951, he steadily lost it all to drinking and gambling. He worked his way through two marriages, one of which was to a cigarette girl he met in a nightclub who was 17 years his junior and 'A tall blonde with big bazooms'.

Bill Veeck employed Max on two more occasions as Veeck himself moved from owning one baseball club to another. Max's second passion after baseball was dancing, and by all accounts there were few more gifted at it than he. When he wasn't clowning in a baseball stadium he was putting on dancing exhibitions. He taught Susan Sarandon to jitterbug for the aforementioned scene in Bull Durham.

In 1982 Max took on the title Clown Prince of Baseball following the death of the previous holder, Al Schacht.

During the 1980s Max became disillusioned as ever-growing sums of money changed his beloved baseball from the people's game into a multi-million (billion, even) dollar business. He watched as ball cub after ball club closed, citing air-conditioning as one of the reasons, as well as television coverage. He often said that before air-conditioning became common, the only way to keep cool on hot summer evenings was to get outside, so people went to see a game of baseball.

After the incident at Fenway in 1993, Max decided it was time to hang up his uniform, and made that his last season. He settled down with his daughter in Pennsylvania, and died of a burst aneurism on 30 October, 1999, at the age of 79 after a week in hospital, having already suffered a ruptured aorta.

While he has yet to be inducted into The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, Max Patkin already has his place in The Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, and in the memories of millions of baseball fans across north America.