Major League Dad
Major League Dad
By Jack Smiles
I looked at his entry in my Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia so many times it flips opens to page 1006 at a touch. His entry says he was 5’11” and 180 lbs. Says his name was Frank Krischeck and his nickname was “Bulldog.” Says he batted left and threw left; was born in 1937 in Kanock, PA; played seven seasons in the majors with two different teams from 1962 to 1968. What Macmillan doesn’t say is Frank Krischeck is my dad.
* * *
In 1956, Dad was drafted by Cleveland out of Kanock High, where he’d been an all-state running back as well as a pitcher with an assortment of pitches, including one of his own invention: the knuckle drop. With stops at Selma, Alabama, and Minot, North Dakota, it took him until ‘60 to work his way up to AAA Salt Lake, where the air must have been too salty or too dry, because the knuckle didn’t drop and Dad got hammered all over the yard. When he got passed over in the Indians September call-up, they released him. It looked like the end. Expansion saved him. The expansion LA Angels chose him in the special player draft in October of ‘61.
The Angels kept my dad down at AAA to start the ‘62 season, if you can call Hawaii a downer. That September it finally happened: my dad, Frank Krischeck, became a major league ballplayer while getting a sip of coffee in the September call-up. He got in one game. He pitched to seven batters and didn’t get any of them out. Four of them scored and left Dad with an ERA of infinity for ‘61. It’s right there in Macmillan, that squiggly symbol in the ERA column.
By 1962, Dad was 27 and back to Hawaii. Figuring pitching ball in paradise was better than working, Dad wouldn’t give it up.
As he stepped off the plane in Hawaii in March ’63, he met a waitress at the Hula Grill Waikiki. Her name was Lana and she put a lei around his neck. By mid-July, after a couple of Angels went down with arm problems, my father went back to California. This time he stuck, and he never came back.
In 1964 for the Angels, Dad mopped up a 14–2 loss to the Yankees in Yankee Stadium and gave up Mantle’s 410th home run. I got the chills when I learned that.
The Angels released him in July. Over the winter he signed with the Phillies, but he couldn’t get anybody out and the Phillies released him in May. He was two months shy of his 31st birthday. There were no takers. He was done. That’s when he moved in with his mother at the old homestead on Hill Street in Kanock, PA.
He walked into her kitchen, grabbed a beer, and sat down at the kitchen table. She looked at him and said, “Now what?”
His old high school teammate, Bill Bohn, owned a Bud distributorship. He gave Dad a job selling a product that sold itself in an area with more liquor licenses per capita than Vegas. Bohn figured all Dad had to do was walk into an establishment and the proprietors would throw money at him, agog at their one and only bona fide homegrown major leaguer.
I learned most of this stuff about my Dad long after the fact from my Uncle Russ, my Dad’s brother.
* * *
My mom was only 19 and didn’t even know she was pregnant until after Dad left Hawaii for LA in July of ‘63. I was born the following February. She named me Shane and gave me her last name. She never tried to contact my father, figuring he wouldn’t make much of a dad. When I was 12, Mom told me the truth about Dad.
“He was a no account ballplayer who took advantage of a teenager. It was a one-night stand and he never called again.”
A ballplayer? I told my Little League teammates about it. They either rolled their eyes or laughed. I saved up $19.95 delivering papers and bought a first edition Macmillan and wore it out looking at my dad’s entry and studying every team he played on. A sportswriter at the Honolulu Advertiser who knew him told me stories about the partying. He laughed like crazy. The writer arranged access to the Advertiser’s morgue and I photocopied box scores and game stories of his appearances with the Islanders, but I couldn’t find a picture. There were team pictures, but on the microfilm I couldn’t make out his face. I looked for baseball cards, but nobody in Hawaii, at least that I could find, saved nine-year-old baseball cards of obscure pitchers.
Through a pen pal program at my school I exchanged letters with a kid my age in California by the name of Rex. He found two Frank Krischeck baseball cards and sent them to me. When I looked at his rookie card I thought I was looking in a mirror. I showed them to my teammates and they said, “Holy crap.”
After I graduated from high school, I decided to look for Frank Krischeck.
* * *
Rex’s parents were nice: they put me in the efficiency above their garage. From there, I wrote letters to Major League Baseball, the Angels, and the Phillies, asking for the last known address of Frank Krischeck. Not one wrote back. Telephone Information in Pennsylvania had a Krischeck. They said they had heard of Frank, the former ballplayer, but didn’t know if he was still in town.
Rex’s parents were flea marketers and on Sunday mornings they took Rex and me along. Rex and I browsed books and baseball cards. One day I stumbled on a thin paperback and couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked at the cover of “Addresses of Former Major League Baseball Players.” I’d never known such a book existed, but there it was in my hands for 10 cents. And there on page 32 was Frank Krischeck, 111 Hill Street, Kanock, PA. The book was seven-years-old.
Rex wanted me to call and warn my dad before I just walked in on him and introduced myself as the son he never knew he had, but we couldn’t get a number. It was just as well. I didn’t want to call, didn’t want to give him a chance to deny or reject me from 3,000 miles away.
That night I stuffed a change of underwear, a couple pairs of jeans, and two T-shirts in my backpack around my Macmillan. The next morning I walked to the Greyhound station and bought a ticket for Harrisburg, PA—which, the ticket agent said, was as close as he could get me to Kanock. It was a three-day ride to Pennsylvania and along the way I studied an atlas and a Pennsylvania guidebook I had bought at a flea market.
Kanock was up in the mountains. Half the county was a National Forest and the other half was game lands. There were tons of streams and lakes. Sounded like a place that might have more deer than people.
* * *
I got there mid-afternoon. 111 Hill Street, Kanock, PA. It looked like an old farmhouse. With rookie butterflies, I knocked on the door. A woman with grey hair answered. She asked me what did I want and then said, “Ohmigod,” as she peered at my face. “You’re the spittin’ image of…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but I got the meaning. Turned out Dad was gone overnight on a sales trip to Erie, so she called my uncle Russ who came right over. A letter written by my mom explained everything.
Russ sat me down and filled in the blanks in Dad’s story. We talked for hours. When I went on and on about how excited and proud I was to have a Major League Dad, Uncle Russ gave me a warning. He said Dad was embarrassed about his baseball career and his lifestyle back then. Said Dad carried on as if it never happened and he likely wouldn’t talk about it. He even made my grandma, Helen, delist the phone number.
“He was the best and proudest athlete ever to come out of Kanock,” Russ said. “So, what do they talk about? He gave up Mantle’s 410th home run—a 500-foot job. Once hit three batters in a row to force in a run and lose a game. Never reached the postseason. Finished with a losing record for a bunch of lousy teams. And there’s that infinity thing. He’s embarrassed, too, about the partying and the fooling around.”
Russ explained that Dad was a little bitter about the money, too. His highest Major League salary was $17,500, total for the nine seasons was $60,000. He’d only been out of the game six years when his old Phillies teammate Dick Allen signed a quarter million dollar contract with the White Sox.
After Russ left, my new grandma sent me to the shower and told me I could wait up for Dad on the couch. But after I fell asleep in front of a Phillies game, she sent me to bed in a spare bedroom, which used to be Uncle Russ’s. After three days and nights on buses, I slept.
When I opened my eyes, a man was sitting at the foot of the bed. He was old and gray-haired. My father, the Frank Krischeck I knew from baseball cards, was barely older than I was. Time had stopped for me when it came to my father—stopped in 1961, with him 25 years old, on the mound in the major leagues. Stopped with him smiling back at me from a baseball card.
* * *
Shakey’s was one of the many bars in and around Kanock where sports fans hung out. No matter what time it was, it may as well have been midnight. The small portal windows were curtained. There were six guys sitting at the bar under a haze of blue smoke. Before Shakey could say a thing, my Dad blurted out, “If you still want me to sign that old uniform for the back bar, it’s okay.”
Shakey raised an eyebrow and went in the back to get the uniform. One of the guys at the bar blew a smoke ring and asked, “Does that mean you’re finally going to tell us if that infinity thing stood for the number of Annies you met?”
They all hooted and laughed.
“Yeah,” said another one of the guys, “and what about the homer you gave up to Mantle, I heard it’s still going?” More laughter.
“Let me tell you about that,” Dad said. He leaned in close to the bar and the guys gathered around. “I never told anybody this before,” he said barely above a whisper. “I grooved him one because he promised he’d take me to the Copacabana that night.”
They all screamed with laughter, jumping from their stools or burying their heads in their folded arms on the bar.
“Hey Shakey,” one of them yelled, “pour old Bulldog here a shot and a beer.”
This story won the 2023 Sidd Finch Fiction Prize.
Jack Smiles is a former community newspaper feature writer collecting short fiction rejections as a hobby in retirement.
Mark Mosley is a public school 7th grade math teacher. He draws baseball cards when he is not driving his son to baseball or his daughter to gymnastics. His cards can be seen on Twitter @mosley_mark, on Instagram @idrawbaseballcards, and can be purchased at https://idrawbaseballcards.bigcartel.com/
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