On a recent sun-drenched afternoon, the faded blue seats of Greer Stadium are one shade lighter than the sky. There’s a game tonight, and the Nashville Sounds are taking batting practice, socking balls into the far green reaches of the outfield. Frank Kremblas’ angular face is turned in their direction—you can even see the swings reflected in his mirrored shades. But it’s impossible to know exactly where he is looking, or what he is thinking.

Kremblas, the Sounds’ 21st manager in 30 years of baseball at Greer Stadium, gives nothing away. He’s not much for small talk, and extracting personal information is like squeezing granite for water. He does not suffer fools gladly, or at all. Without the glasses, his eyes can throw a piercing look that bores through steel, scaring the crap out of any player who dares to arrive late. He does not sit still easily, and he has neither the folksy charm nor the gruff but lovable manner of the stereotypical dugout denizen in Hollywood baseball movies. By the way, Frank Kremblas hates Hollywood baseball movies.

In fact, don’t get Kremblas started on his beefs. For instance, the Reds organization that drafted him in the 23rd round in 1989—especially Jim Bowden, who’s “a prick.” (Bowden, now the controversy-stirring GM of the Washington Nationals, once worked in player development for the Reds.) And politicians. The lights at Greer. Tardiness. Country music. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. O’Hare Airport. And United Airlines. Especially United Airlines.

“I had paid $400 to fly home early from an away series about a month ago,” Kremblas says, clearly still pissed. “I had to change airlines to make the connection in O’Hare, the worst airport in the country.” The Sounds may be fielding flies in his sunglasses, summer days don’t get any brighter, but Kremblas is suddenly somewhere else—back at a check-in counter in Chicago, ticking off hassles ranging from delayed flights to an obstreperous clerk who wouldn’t let him check or carry on his luggage.

“I asked her what she would suggest I do about my suitcase,” Kremblas continues, spitting out words like the sunflower seeds he chews throughout a game, one leg pumping in place like a piston. “She says, ‘I don’t know. Throw it away?’ I looked at her and said, ‘Where’s the trash can?’ She didn’t look like she believed me, but she pointed one out. I ripped the tags off the suitcase, left it beside the trashcan, and got on the plane. I had to go shopping for some new clothes when I got back because that was pretty much what I had. I hate United.”

The harangue confirms what Sounds fans and visiting players have suspected for the past two years: don’t challenge Frank Kremblas unless you’re ready for the consequences. He looks like a human bullet: shaved head, not an ounce of body fat on his streamlined build. A relative whippersnapper among league managers, he is not somebody you’d call “Pops.” Where his peers often sit nailed to their slice of wood in the dugout, Kremblas fidgets through every game. He’s up and down, up and down, up at the rail or down on the bench. When the Sounds are at bat, he assumes his place on the third-base line, his panoramic vision taking in the batter, the base-runners, the pitcher, the catcher, the officiating crew—and between batters, the women in the stands. He either stands ramrod straight or bent at the waist, hands on his knees, poised like a cat ready to spring.

“Other players are always asking us, ‘What’s up with your skipper? Is he weird?’ ” says Sounds infielder Brad Nelson. “He is so intense, there’s no way he could get any more intense.”

That intensity, though, has given a shot of excitement to a franchise in need of some juice. Since 2005—when Frank Kremblas assumed the helm of an all-new affiliation with the Milwaukee Brewers and an entirely new roster—the Sounds have turned into something more than a good team. They’ve given fans a show on the field. Sure, marketing has helped—the Bible-based bobbleheads, the Thirsty Thursdays. But under Kremblas’ Zenlike instruction to play with passion, not emotion, the players have brought scrappy new energy to their games, coming from behind time after time when all looked lost.

Last Thursday and Friday night against Omaha, for example, the games ended with walk-off home runs by Joe Dillon and Callix Crabbe, respectively—the first time for that feat in Nashville in 10 seasons. Then, on Sunday, Lance Nix hit a two-run homer in the sixth to take a lead the team would not lose for their fifth win in a row. Those dingers and subsequent wins put Nashville back in first place in the PCL North Division, and in possession of the best record in the entire league. That kind of drama puts butts in bleachers—and as the team rallies support for its still-debated new stadium, it couldn’t come at a better time.

“Players take on the face, the personality of their manager,” says Stan Kyles, the Sounds’ third-year pitching coach, who worked previously with Kremblas at AA Huntsville in 2002 and 2003. “Frank has a lot of energy, so his team has a lot of energy. Frank has never, not even as a new guy, been afraid to take chances, but they are informed, educated chances. He instills that in his team. He encourages them to try something, as long as there is some thought behind it, a reason for what they did. And if it doesn’t work, he’s willing to take the heat for it.”

“You can always see Frank’s wheels turning, nonstop,” says Sounds first baseman/outfielder Andy Abad, who’s regarded as the locker room’s premier practical joker. “He’s always thinking of something. This game is mental”—here Abad laughs—“and he’s about as mental as they come.”

Frank Kremblas doesn’t have an iPod, a car (the Sounds lend him one to drive during the season) or a home. “Basically, I’m homeless,” he says, only half-kidding. “I live in one of those residential hotels.” Asked what part of town, he answers, “The airport.”

It’s a way of life perfectly suited for a single guy on the go, though not high on the domestic bliss. Good luck to the interviewer who presses him for more.

Were you ever married?

“No.”

Why not?

“I’ve never asked anybody.” Do you want to be? Grimace. Stony silence. Never mind. He has a girlfriend, though not the same one the ushers who work Greer’s comp ticket sections knew from last year.

Quick as he is to list his dislikes, Kremblas has his preferences. He likes loud music with energy, crossword puzzles, sushi, FreeCell. He likes his steaks bloody and his martinis extra dirty. Mostly, he loves baseball, and he loves coaching.

“Why wouldn’t you want to do this?” is the rhetorical question Kremblas poses as he surveys his domain. “I love this. I love helping guys, moving them along, teaching them things about the game. I love going against other managers, other teams, trying to fool them. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I always wanted to play professional ball, and if you are lucky enough to do that, you want to play at the highest level. I still want to play at the highest level.”

Frank Kremblas was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. Asked to describe his youth, he shrugs: “On a road with houses.” His father was a patent attorney, his mother a secretary for the firm. His only sibling is a younger brother, whom he ended up managing for one year in Huntsville.

Like most kids of that time and place, he began playing sports for fun. Unlike most kids, he had a tough act to follow. Father Frank Sr., who passed away last year, quarterbacked the Ohio State Buckeyes to a share of the 1957 national championship. “There was no pressure from him to play sports, though,” Kremblas says. “But there were expectations from my parents to do your best whatever you did, behave properly and appropriately, and accept personal responsibility.”

As a boy, he followed the Cincinnati Reds and began playing Little League baseball when he was about 7. Always, he says, he had a lot of energy. “I’m sure I was a pain in the ass as a kid,” he says. He excelled academically in high school, earning a 3.8 GPA without much effort. “School was easy for me,” he says. “I never had to study.” He also played three sports, and was fondest of football, “because you got to hit, and I loved to hit.” He played quarterback and safety, but while he spent a lot of time on the field, he didn’t receive any offers to play college football.

He did, however, accept an offer from Eastern Kentucky to play baseball. He was All-Ohio Valley Conference in 1987 and 1988. He played second, but his goal was to get behind the plate and catch. “I bugged the coach about it all the time,” Kremblas remembers. “I felt like it was easier to get drafted as a catcher than an infielder. I knew I was a better catcher than the one we had, but the coach had never seen me catch. When he did, he saw I was right and I got to be catcher my senior year.”

Sure enough, in the June 1989 draft, he was selected in the 23rd round by the team he’d cheered since childhood, the Cincinnati Reds. Playing for the Reds was a dream. The reality was eye-opening.

“You feel more insecure than you ever have in your life coming in to play minor league ball if you were not a high pick,” Kremblas says. “At least that’s how it was in the Reds organization, and that’s all I knew. They treated the high picks better than all the other players, and that’s not right. We were not treated like human beings, we were treated like pieces of meat. But I didn’t know any better, and I just wanted to play ball.”

His professional playing career began in the rookie league in 1989 and ended eight years later at Triple-A lndianapolis. In 1993, he spent the entire season in Indy, but began the next two in AA before moving back up to AAA. It was in 1994 that he first began to suspect he might not be in the Reds’ plans for the future. “There were lots of injuries on the Reds that year, and it seemed like I might get a chance to go up,” Kremblas says. “But I didn’t.”

 

In 1996, the writing was on the wall in spring training. He asked for his release. He was playing ball for the Independent League in Columbia, Tenn., when his manager got a call from the Reds. They wanted an infielder to play on their Triple-A team, and Kremblas was the obvious choice. He went for it, but his dream team burned him yet again.

“They are supposed to pay you a $3,000 bonus to sign on,” Kremblas recalls, “but the bastards made me waive it in order to play. I did, so that’s my fault.” The next year, when the only offer he received to play ball was from the Reds, he turned it down. Instead, he signed on as hitting coach in the Montreal Expos system for their rookie level in Ottawa.

“The transition was hard at first,” he remembers. “I felt like I was quitting, but then I realized I just wasn’t good enough to be a player anymore, so that was easier. I hadn’t given coaching a lot of thought while I was playing, but I liked it right away. And the Expos’ organization showed me how bad the Reds’ was then, and that there was another way. ”

It was after he finished playing that he had the epiphany that has guided his coaching philosophy. “As a player, you are so results-oriented—results were so important to me then,” Kremblas explains. “It’s amazing how much easier it is to learn without results clouding your head. When you play, you are looking through a filter of stats and numbers. You can’t see clearly. Look at it as cause and effect. Stats are the effect. What is the cause? The results—the stats—will not change unless you can change the cause. I wish I had known that when I was playing.

“I want to take them out of their comfort zone of what they know they can do, and [make them] do some things they can’t,” Kremblas says of his players. “Maybe they’ll find out they can. To do that, you have to clear your head of result-oriented thinking. Then the results will come.”

When you ask ballplayers about Kremblas’ method, you get a certain amount of head-scratching. “I’ve had 11 different managers in my career, and Frank’s the most out-there manager I’ve ever had,” says Andy Abad, now in the 15th season of a professional baseball career that began in 1993 with the Red Sox’s Gulf Coast League.

Abad has wound through levels from rookie league to big league and nearly a dozen teams, including a season for the Osaka Kintetsu in Japan. This ain’t his first rodeo: that much is clear one afternoon as he sits on a table in the training room, his left forearm hooked up to a machine, a laptop balanced on his thighs. Yet even the seasoned first baseman says he’s never encountered anyone quite like Kremblas.

“He’s weird, but in a good way,” says the prankish Abad, who spent the day before with a mattress-sized ice pack strapped to his back as he razzed his teammates at batting practice. “When I came to spring training, other players said to me, ‘You’ll see some stuff that you don’t see every day come out of a manager.’ And they were right. He knows the game better than just about anybody. You just never know what to expect from him.”

Sounds pitching coach Stan Kyles says that’s the key to Kremblas’ philosophy. “You play every single day, and it can get stagnant and predictable,” Kyles says. “But when Frank’s running a ball club, you have to be on your toes. At any given moment, he might ask them to do something they don’t expect.”

Just ask infielder Chris Barnwell, who spent two full seasons under Kremblas in Huntsville before being reunited with him in Nashville early in the 2005 season. He hasn’t forgotten being caught off-guard by his teammate during a game in 2004 in Huntsville. “I was at bat when Brad Nelson tried to steal home,” says Barnwell, “and I didn’t even see it coming.”

Nelson, who weighs in at 250, isn’t exactly a gazelle on the base paths. But he’d been given the go-ahead out of the blue by his third-base coach, Frank Kremblas. And if he lacked anything in speed, he was fueled by heart and one of the Kremblas Rules of Play: give it all you’ve got.

“Base running is a big thing with him,” says Nelson, a good-natured, easygoing 24-year-old raised on a working farm in north central Iowa. “I got tagged out by the catcher, but at least I tried it. You fail a lot more than you succeed in baseball. If you try something and it doesn’t happen, Frank just says, ‘Maybe next time.’ ”

“Frank wants players to think quickly,” says Kyles. “He allows them to try things without the pressure of being afraid of screwing up. If you try something and it doesn’t work, as long as you had a thought process behind it, then that’s OK. But have a reason for doing what you did. You have to find out what you can do and what you can’t do, but you can’t find out until you try. Frank gives his players the freedom to do that.”

 

While Kremblas’ way of thinking pulls players out of their comfort zone and can cause fans to throw up their hands in frustration—or get more vocally aggravated on beer-stoked Thirsty Thursdays—the man gets results, earns the devotion of his players and the respect of his peers.

Kremblas began making a name for himself in his three years at the helm of the Milwaukee Brewers’ AA team, the Huntsville Stars. In his first year, the Stars just missed the playoffs on the final day of the regular season. The next year, Kremblas led the Stars to the Southern League’s Western Division Championship. He was chosen as the league’s 2003 Manager of the Year. In 2004, his peers named him Best Managerial Prospect in a Baseball America poll.

When the Brewers entered into an agreement with AmeriSports Companies (the Sounds’ owners) to make Nashville the home of their Triple-A team beginning with the 2005 season, they promoted Kremblas from Huntsville to manage. Kyles, who had been at Huntsville with Kremblas before spending the 2004 season with the arms at the Brewers’ AAA affiliate in Louisville, forwarded his address to Music City as well.

If the Brewers wanted to see results in Nashville, they got ’em. In Kremblas’ first year managing at the Triple-A level, he led the Sounds to the Pacific Coast League championship—the club’s first AAA title, and their first professional championship in the 23 years since the Double-A Sounds captured the Southern Coast League trophy in 1982. Last year, the Sounds captured the Northern Division title in the American Conference, losing the Conference championship to Round Rock in a five-game series.

For someone who discourages obsessing over stats, Kremblas’ numbers are nothing to sneeze at. Before the start of his 10th season, his overall managerial record read 499-477. On June 13 in Memphis, he ascended to third place on the Sounds’ all-time managers’ ranking with his 187th victory. The tie-breaking run was scored by Brad Nelson, on pure hustle from second base.

But trophies, stats and the wins column only tell part of the story. The Milwaukee lineup tells another. When Brewers second baseman Rickie Weeks comes back from the disabled list to rejoin first baseman Prince Fielder, shortstop J.J. Hardy and third baseman Ryan Braun, the first-place Brewers will boast one of the youngest infields in the major leagues, none of them 25 years old.

At the same time, the three No. 1 draft picks (Fielder 2002, Weeks 2003 and Braun 2005) and one No. 2 (Hardy, 2001) have another thing in common: all played under Frank Kremblas in Huntsville, Nashville or both. In spite of their youth, each player segued almost seamlessly from AAA into being an everyday player for the Brewers. The team has been picked by several baseball publications as World Series contenders this year. They’ve been in first place in the NL central division since the third week of the season.

Before much-heralded 21-year-old right-hander Yovani Gallardo, who made his major-league debut on the mound Monday night, the newest arrival was Braun, who made his Triple-A debut in Nashville on April 5—and was called up to Milwaukee on May 25, just 49 games into the season. Less then a week later, on June 1, Braun homered, doubled and singled in an 8-5 win over the Marlins. Other former Kremblas players on the field that night were right fielder Corey Hart and pinch hitter Tony Gwynn Jr.

“The thing about being an affiliate for a small-market team like Milwaukee, as opposed to a major-market team like the Yankees who purchase stars, is the fans actually get to see the parent team’s players of the future play,” notes Kyles. “All of these players—Fields, Weeks, Hardy, Hart, Gwynn, Braun, and now Gallardo—spent a good amount of time in Nashville, and now are playing every day for the Brewers.”

By that measure, Frank Kremblas is doing exactly what Milwaukee wants him to do: get players ready for the big league. For Kremblas, that responsibility goes well beyond the can’t-miss phenom No. 1 draft picks. It burns perhaps fiercest for players working their way up the farm system. Players like Chris Barnwell, the Brewers 25th-round pick in the June 2001 draft; Brad Nelson, who was picked in the fourth round the same year and has bounced between Huntsville and Nashville the past two seasons; and Vinny Rotino, a Wisconsin native who was signed by Milwaukee as a non-drafted free agent in 2003, and was the last player cut by the Brewers at the conclusion of spring training this year.

That goes also for solid, reliable players like catcher Mike Rivera, now in his 11th professional season, his third with Nashville. And for journeymen like Abad, and for former big leaguers like pitcher R.A. Dickey, who played high-school ball at MBA, college ball for UT and was a first-round pick of the Texas Rangers in the 1996 June draft, spending parts of five seasons with the Rangers. In January, Dickey was signed by the Brewers as a minor-league free agent. In seven starts, he was 1-4 with a 6.17 ERA. Since moving to the bullpen as reliever, he is 3-0 with a 4.95 ERA. On Sunday night, Dickey took the spot in the rotation freed by Gallardo’s promotion, and responded with a two-run win.

Fans at Greer Stadium could definitely use a program—especially since the only part of the guitar-shaped scoreboard that is still (semi)working is the arm that shows the inning-by-inning score, strikes, balls and outs. Positions and batting lineup change on a daily basis, and though the fans may get confused, players understand why. The parent organization wants their top draft picks to play the position for which they were drafted and where they expect to play in the big leagues. Hence Weeks always played second, Fielder played first, Hardy played short and Braun played third.

So far this year, though, Nelson has played first base and right and left field; Barnwell has covered short, second and third; and Rottino has been the Sounds catcher, first and third baseman, and left and right fielder.

“I always played shortstop, and I would prefer to play shortstop everyday,” says Barnwell. “But it is in my best interest to learn the other positions. What Frank tries to teach us is that just because the situation in Milwaukee may not be good for your position, you’re playing for every team. There are 30 major-league teams, not one. You never know.”

“Winning is not necessarily the goal in minor league baseball, where you are developing players,” Stan Kyles says. “But Frank and I think you can do both, develop players and win. If you develop players the right way, then you’ll win. We have been fortunate to have some very good ballplayers here. When some of them leave, get called up, other players step in to take their place, and we continue to win. That tells us we’re doing something right, and it’s working.”

“It’s my job to get as many guys to the big leagues as I can,” Kremblas says. “If I can’t find out what they can and can’t do, I can’t help them. Baseball is such a hard game to play—there are so many things you can’t do. Players are aware of what they can’t do, but not everything they can do unless they try.”

There is not a single player on the Sounds’ roster who doesn’t dream of making it to the big leagues, of getting the call telling him he’s going to the show. Count Frank Kremblas in that club as well. His players and his colleagues believe it is just a matter of time.

“I have no doubt Frank will get a chance to coach in the big leagues,” says Chris Barnwell. “Anyone who has a chance to play for Frank becomes a better player. He is just so smart. He is always showing you details. We’re always talking about stuff; he is right there with his team and he is a great teacher.”

Kyles agrees. “In the time I have worked with him, Frank has grown as a manager, he has matured in his thinking. He is one of the game’s innovators, plus he has accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience that will bode well for him when he gets the chance to run a major league team. I don’t see how he can be denied.”

To paraphrase Tom Petty, it’s the way-yay-ting that’s the hardest part. Kremblas, who is just 40 years old, has ascended quickly up the coaching ladder. Several of his peers at the same level qualify for AARP discounts and have been managing since long before most of their players were even born.

“The really good players stand out like beacons, you know right away,” says Kyles. “They’re obvious. It’s the other ones that are harder to find, that you have to look for, stay on them, push them to be the player they can be. Frank excels at that. Where is he of better service to the organization? Is it here, developing young players, getting them ready for the big leagues? Or up in Milwaukee, with the young players he has helped develop?”

Only Milwaukee can answer that question. What Kremblas does know is that in the past couple of years, there have been five openings for coaching positions on the Brewers, and he was not invited to interview for any of them. “If they don’t think I can coach at a major league level,” he says, “then I am not as good yet as they want me to be.”

“The thing about Frank is that he is a player’s manager,” says Abad, just six years younger than his skipper. “He is not that far removed from playing the game himself. Some of the other managers haven’t played in 30 or 40 years. Players have changed a lot and he understands them, he can communicate with them.”

Kremblas has no aspirations to best former manager Trent Jewett’s record of 320 Sounds wins, or Rick Renick’s 309. He’s fond of Nashville and thinks it’s a nice place to live, for the time being. But if he gets that call, he’s ready to run.

“I can fit everything I own here in one suitcase,” he says. With just the hint of a smile.