Biography by John P. Rossi and is located in the American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, 1999.

Chuck Klein (7 Oct. 1904-28 Mar. 1958), baseball player, was born Charles Herbert Klein near Southport, Indiana, the son of Frank Klein and Margaret Vacker, farmers. Klein was a star athlete at Southport High School, from which he graduated in 1923. He worked briefly on a construction road gang and in a steel mill, where he developed his 6', 185-pound frame by hurling 200-pound ingots.

 
After playing semiprofessional baseball, Klein signed a minor league contract with Evansville of the Three I League in 1927. The next year, while he was hitting .331 at Fort Wayne of the Central League, his contract was purchased for $7,500 by the Philadelphia Phillies, which outbid the New York Yankees. In 64 games with the Phillies in 1928 Klein showed signs of greatness by hitting .360.
 
Over the next five seasons Klein's offensive statistics were among the most outstanding in baseball history. He led the National League in eighteen offensive categories. During that span he averaged .359, along with 36 home runs per year, 139 runs batted in, 132 runs scored, 224 hits, and a slugging percentage of .636. Among National League records he established during those years were most runs scored (158) and most extra base hits (107). His 445 total bases in 1930 remained the most by any National League left-handed hitter almost seven decades later. Klein won one batting title (.368 in 1933) and the Triple Crown (first in batting average, runs batted in, and home runs), captured four home run titles (1929, 1931-1933), and was twice named the National League's Most Valuable Player by the Sporting News (1931, 1932).
 
Klein was also a superb defensive player who mastered the tricky dimensions of Baker Bowl, the Phillies' home field. With the ballpark's high tin fence only 280 feet from home plate in right field, he learned to play rebounds and caroms off the wall so effectively that he established a single-season record (1930) for assists, 44, that has not been challenged.
 
The financially straitened Phillies traded Klein to the Chicago Cubs in November 1933 for three journeymen players and $65,000, a huge sum at the time. In Chicago, Klein never duplicated his high quality of play with the Phillies, although he still hit .301 and .293 in his two full seasons as a Cub. In the 1935 World Series, which the Cubs lost in six games to the Detroit Tigers, he hit .333 with one home run.
 
With the Cubs, Klein began to experience a series of minor injuries, probably muscle pulls then called charley horses. It is believed by many that Klein's drinking began to affect his performance from the mid-1930s. He returned to the Phillies in 1936 and experienced his last strong season, scoring and driving in more than 100 runs for the sixth and final time. That July in Pittsburgh, Klein joined an exclusive group of sluggers--including Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Mike Schmidt--to hit four home runs in a single game. That same year he married Marie Torpey; they had no children and divorced in 1956.
 
Klein's career dragged to a close after a short tour with Pittsburgh in 1939 before he returned to the Phillies; he retired following the wartime season of 1944. He also coached for the Phillies from 1942 through 1945.
 
Klein played seventeen years in the major leagues, producing some impressive career statistics, among them 2,076 hits, a lifetime batting average of .320, plus 300 home runs, 1,168 runs scored, and 1,201 runs batted in. His lifetime slugging average of .543 remained fifteenth among all hitters a half-century after his final game. At his death Klein held many National League hitting records, the most impressive probably being the single-season marks of most extra base hits (107) and most runs scored (158), both in 1930.
 
Following his playing days, Klein ran a bar in the working-class neighborhood of Kensington in Philadelphia. Heavy drinking had impaired his health, and beginning in 1948 he suffered from cancer and a disease of the central nervous system that left him a semi-invalid. He moved to Indianapolis in 1947 to live with close relatives. He died there of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Klein was elected to baseball's Hall of Fame in 1980, finally gaining the recognition he had longed for throughout his retirement years.
 
Bibliography
 
Information on Klein's career is in Frank Bilovsky and Rich Wescott, The Phillies Encyclopedia (1993), and Lowell Reidenbaugh, Cooperstown: Where Baseball's Legends Live Forever (1983). Lengthy obituaries are in the Philadelphia Bulletin and Philadelphia Inquirer, both 29 Mar. 1958.