THE YEAR OF THE OLD SPORT : Patkin Is Still Out There Clownin’ Around : At 67, He Keeps ‘Em Laughing With a Face That Only a Mother--or a Fan--Could Love

Before there was the San Diego Chicken or the Philly Phanatic, or any of the other birdlike buffoons, there was Max Patkin.

Now what can you say about Max, whose curious vaudeville has enlivened, and made a mockery of, many a baseball game?

“That I was homely?” suggests Max. Can’t simply say that. “That I had a nose the size of Rhode Island?” You can say that, yet it doesn’t say it all. “That I was just a goofy looking guy?” he asks, hopefully.

Look, Max, nobody’s saying you get the girl in the last reel. You’re 150 pounds of nervous tics, your face, with the exception of a stand-up nose, has the droopy characteristics of a Jell-O slide and your limbs have a disjointed life of their own. Also, nobody’s seen a neck quite like yours outside the Los Angeles zoo.

You’re a piece of work, Max. Agreed. Like Bill Veeck said, it’s as if someone put you together without benefit of an instruction manual.

Still, you have to say this about Max. Before there was the Chicken, he was about all baseball had to laugh at, clowning inventively in the coach’s box. You had to say he got laughs, and without benefit of any costume. “They’re all ducks,” he says of the new breed. “Costumes. At least with me, they’re laughing at my face.”

You have to say one more thing about Max. They’re still laughing. He’s still working. Even at 67, he is booked for another 70 shows in the bushes, traveling the minor league circuit to showcase his baseball burlesque. “It’s a living,” he explains. “Also, a pleasure to make people laugh.”

There are few by now who have yet to see Max’s antic clowning, in some small town or even at a major league park. He estimates he’s done close to 4,000 shows in his 42 years--never missing a date. He’s mimiced a hapless first-baseman in Sumter, S.C., upstaged an umpire in South America and otherwise flustered a manager in Cuba.

Reggie Jackson approaches him to say, yeah, I caught your act in Lewiston. Mickey Mantle remembers seeing Max somewhere in Oklahoma. Willie Stargell reminds him of a show in Missoula, Mont., before Stargell was Pops, but well after Max was the Clown Prince of Baseball.

Of course, it is a well known story that Max meant to be admired for his onfield performances, not his sideline caricatures. He was a pitcher in the early 1940s, more determined to become Clem Labine than Clem Kadiddlehopper. “But it seemed all I had to do was lean down to get the sign, my neck craned like a giraffe’s, and the batter would have to step out of the box, doubled over with laughter,” he laments.

It was a curious phenomenon, but one he meant to overcome. Then, finally, one day in Pearl Harbor, he realized his comic potential and realized he’d better go with the screwball and leave the curve at home.

It happened in an inter-service game. Max was pitching to a guy named Joe Dimaggio. Pitching hard. Except Dimaggio nailed a pitch that is probably still bobbing somewhere in the Pacific. To this day, Max doesn’t know why he did what he did. Call it destiny. But as Dimaggio began to trot around the bases, Max followed him, cap sideways, matching the great one stride for ridiculous stride.

A clown was born. “His whole team came out of the dugout,” he recalls, “but to shake my hand. I’ll never forget Dimaggio sitting alone in the dugout while 20 guys walked me back to the mound.”

Max honed his craft at Wilkes-Barre, where he still imagined himself a pitcher, although rather a funny one. Lou Boudreau got a load of his act and tabbed him to his boss, Bill Veeck. Veeck, who, from time to time, had treated baseball as lightly as he could, recognized a co-conspirator. Patkin was instructed to forget his pitching career and pretend baseball had just named Barnum & Bailey as co-commissioners.

Those were the days. Of course, with Veeck things could go from the sublime to the ridiculous with the swing of the bat. It was so bad once that Max had to play second fiddle. “He had that midget,” Max sniffs at being upstaged. “Didn’t weigh as much as my nose.”

The establishment was not always amused. See, part of the problem with being funny is that, on any given day, some people are not going to laugh. Like your old-line managers. “In the beginning, when I left the Indians and I was coaching in the minors,” he recalls, “some managers thought what I did was sacrilegious. Some old-time managers were just murder on my. Gene Mauch was the worst. He blew his top every time, tried to refuse to let me perform. He got me four times. Well I’ll be a s.o.b. if he didn’t lose all four games.”

Without Veeck, the major leagues had restored some measure of solemnity to the game. Max didn’t often work that circuit, preferring the minors, where his act meant box office. But one day, George Steinbrenner, who had been a Patkin fan while growing up in Cleveland, gave Max the call. Come play for the Yankees.

Well, knocking down the house Ruth built had a certain appeal and Max broke some dates to work a Yankees’ game.

“But who’s greeting me at the front door? Ralph Houk. He starts screaming. ‘I’ve had enough of your act in the minors. I’m in the big leagues now. We’re fighting for a pennant.’ And so on. I mean, it was May 15.”

So Max went out on the field and proceeded to make Harmon Killebrew appear like a comic cow. “What could I do?”

In the years since, it hasn’t been all laughs, at least not for Max. His wife woke up one morning and said she couldn’t stand any more of his face.

“The travel didn’t help any,” he admits.

And working conditions are not always the best.

“Once,” he once said, “I had to get out of a burning plane and take a Piper Cub with a one-eyed pilot who had asthma to make a game in Arkansas.”

But the worst is rolling into some town with a dying franchise, the owners no longer having the wherewithal to promote his appearance. “I’ve got to have people,” he says. “But what chance have I got when there’s 20 people in the stands.”

That doesn’t happen often, though. After four decades of his punchy pantomime, he is still regarded as an attendance booster. He claims to have sold out the stadium at Albuquerque last year. Knocked them dead. Figures to do so again.

“I’m the last of a breed,” he says. “They’ve got the Chicken now. I’m not jealous, but I am envious of the money he makes. Me, I’m no duck. I’m 100% baseball. They’re laughing at me, my face, my body, when they laugh. The suit I wear, I grew.”

At last reckoning, Max was on his way to the winter baseball meetings, to do a little PR work, hand out his pictures and clippings. To make sure, in other words, that baseball remains a funny game.