In the October Edition of American Outdoor News, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ryan Klesko, a former MLB star who has traded his bat for a bow in the great outdoors. Ryan is a passionate hunter who spends much of his time pursuing big game and sharing his love for the outdoors with his family and friends. He brings a unique perspective, blending the intensity of professional sports with the patience and skill required for hunting.
Our conversation also touched on his impressive conservation efforts. Ryan is deeply committed to preserving natural habitats and wildlife for future generations, working with various organizations to restore ecosystems and ensure sustainable hunting practices. His dedication to conservation stems from his belief that hunters play a key role in protecting the environment.
Ryan also discussed how he introduces some of his famous friends to the outdoor lifestyle. Whether it is hunting for the first time or learning about conservation, Ryan finds joy in helping others experience the thrill of the hunt and the beauty of nature. His stories of sharing these adventures with fellow athletes and celebrities offer an exciting glimpse into his world off the field.
Chris Avena: You are the consummate outdoorsman. You grew up outdoors, you surf, you hunt. What don't you do?
Ryan Klesko: Yes, I do not have time for a whole lot of hobbies. I have never been a good golfer because I have never had time to do it besides the fishing and the surfing and the spear fishing. I grew up around the water. I grew up in California, which was crazy because they called me the California Redneck for a while.
People ask me, “How did a guy from California grow up in the outdoors?” And I guess my whole family did it. I grew up going to the dove fields and quail hunting. Right outside of Bakersfield, CA my dad and a lot of my friends around there, we did a lot of bird hunting early on in those days. Pheasant hunting, quail hunting, dove hunting, doing a lot of bird hunting. I really did not get into the big game until later.
I was drafted by the Atlanta Braves when I was 18 and then started travelling a little bit so started having some access to some deer hunting and stuff as I got a little bit older.
Chris Avena: Did that conflict with baseball at all? How did hunting and baseball meld together?
Ryan Klesko: Well, it was crazy. The season was so long, and we always found a way, there were always guys on the team that liked to hunt and fish and do outdoor activities. So as soon as the game schedule came out, I remember in the minor leagues a few of us used to travel with all our fishing gear because there would be ponds and stuff every time that we were on the road.
So, there was a group of us that always loved to be in the outdoors in the minor leagues and the major leagues. When I played for San Diego, we used to have off days in Colorado, so we would go fly fishing. We had an elk tag one year; it was an over-the-counter tag. So, me and Chipper Jones and Charlie O'Brien went out. We both had mule deer and elk tags in Colorado.
So, when they released the MLB schedule of the season, we would always get it out and figure out when we had off days. There has been plenty of times where I have been up and gone albacore fishing or yellowtail fishing in California on these road trips, dove hunting in Arizona while we were playing the Diamondbacks.
Get up in the morning, do a dove hunt. Come back, take a nap at the hotel and then be at the ballpark by 3:00. So, you are going have a lot of time off, but it was kind of just a way to get out in the outdoors to always kind of relax my mind because it is such a crazy hectic world. It can be stressful when you are out there every day trying to perform. But that was a way for me to get away, help me relax, and I guess it just became the normal.
Chris Avena: So, it helped you zone in for the game, just out there with friends ripping some lips or shooting some doves.
Did you have any clauses in your contract? Because I know there are some teams that do not like you to do dangerous activities and things of that nature. Hunting with a bow, hunting with a rifle. Were there any restrictions in your contract?
Ryan Klesko: No, there was not anything in there. They did find out that I surfed a lot. I had to put in my contract in San Diego that I was allowed to surf during the season. There was a couple of guys on the team that went surfing as well and we had to put it on our contract. You can add things to your contract. There are other things that you can add. You can insure yourself as well.
You can get hurt doing anything so you can insure yourself on your own too. I used to do some work with the police, and we used to do an undercover search, and I used to volunteer in these ops when I was younger. A friend of mine worked for the SWAT team so I used to do that. So, if I insured my body just in case, I got hurt doing that, I would have enough to live on for the rest of my life. So, I guess I am an outdoor guy. I love being outdoors.
We had some crazy times, even during turkey season. I remember we went hunting during turkey season. When the season kicked off when I was with the Atlanta Braves, we used to have the spring training all around in Florida. So that was prime time for when turkey seasons opened.
There were times when I would bring a turkey into the clubhouse and after a morning or an afternoon hunt, I would bring a turkey into the clubhouse and cook it up for the guys. Wild turkey. I would cook it up for the guys for lunch or dinner.
Chris Avena: So, you are a chef too?
Ryan Klesko: Oh yeah, love cooking.
Chris Avena: You are going to have to keep an eye out for my cookbook that is coming out.
Ryan Klesko: Oh, heck yeah! One of my dad's best friends was a wild game chef, and I learned a lot from him over the years about that stuff, too. But Marquis Christian and I, one of my teammates, used to go out and do a lot of Crappie fishing, too. So, when I am fishing, I caught Crappie, and the southern people caught crappie.
They call it White Perch. What do they call it up there in NY?
Chris Avena: We call them crappie as well.
Ryan Klesko: I think north, like Minnesota and stuff, I think they call them white perch. There are so many different names for the same fish. They call it sacalait in Louisiana, I think they call them sacalait in Louisiana. So, there is a lot of names for one fish. It is kind of like the mahi-mahi. Dorado, mahi-mahi. It is funny, the first time that someone said “We're gonna go out fishing for white perch,” I was like, “What's that?” Figured out it was the same thing.
Chris Avena: You have introduced a lot of people into the outdoors that never hunted before. When you bring somebody hunting for the first time, do they have to kiss your World Series ring like the godfather of the outdoors?
Ryan Klesko: Oh, no, man, someone did it for me and I do it for them. But I think in all the crazy stories about introducing people to the outdoors, I think it was Barry Bonds who was the one that sticks out the most,
Before I retired, Barry and I were teammates in San Francisco, and I got him into archery hunting and took him on some trips. We shot skeet here at my farm. I am actually at my farm right now in South Georgia and took him out shooting skeet. He had never shot a gun before.
He had never shot a compound bow and got very into hunting that year and after he broke the all-time home run record, he took a huge mule deer. I think it was a 192” mule deer and he looked at me. We were up in Colorado, and he looked at me and said, “Is that a big one?” I said, “The biggest thing I ever shot!” So, I said, “For your first one, you're pretty dang lucky.” It was cool teaching Barry because you get a guy that has never been in the outdoors.
We use terminology in the hunting and outdoor world, and I remember us walking across the top of a mountain when we were up in Colorado. And I kept telling him “Quit skylining yourself. Quit skylining yourself because you do not want to get to the top of the ridge and skyline yourself where the animals can see.” And he goes, “I do not know why you keep yelling that? You are under the impression that I know what that means. What does skylining even mean?” So, when you bring new guys into the outdoors, you cannot assume that they know the terminologies in the outdoor world. But yeah, it is crazy.
Have you ever been to the SHOT Show?
Chris Avena: Every year.
Ryan Klesko: So, I took Barry to the SHOT Show one year and walked around and within two days he had more guns and bows and more stuff in his locker. It was crazy. And over the years, Stone Cold Steve Austin, a good friend of mine, former wrestler, I spent a lot of time down there at the SHOT Show with him and a lot of outdoor people, a lot of country singers, a lot of athletes love the outdoors, and so there is a true bond there.
To this day, I still get calls from people while they are on the road. They are still playing in professional sports and asking me if I can find them a place to fish or hunt. And I try to always oblige if I can. It is funny, a lot of the pitchers, they all like to go golfing and they have their little black books with all their golf courses and all the contacts’ names and where they go.
Mine was all my hunting and fishing spots, and I developed a lot of good friendships over the years all around the world. So, it was a true blessing, for sure.
Chris Avena: You have hunted with Kevin Costner. When he was in camp, was he more “Dances with Wolves or Yellowstone?”
Ryan Klesko: Oh man, that is a good one! He was just laid back. He is a conservationist. He loves the outdoors, loves a quail hunt. He got up and spoke and flew all the way out there and a friend of mine, Chris Breed, brought him in from Los Angeles and it was just a great day spending some time with him.
I did not want to talk about all the stuff. He is probably trying to get outdoors and try to not talk about movies and all this stuff. So, we just stayed in the outdoors and talked about hunting and fishing and one of his potential movies. Because he has done so many great baseball movies.
I asked him if he had one left in him. And he said he wrote it, and he is waiting to produce it and to knock it out.
So, I am kind of hoping that I get a call on that one, to help him on that. Because we talked about his last baseball movie, for several hours. So hopefully he will hire me to come on and do some stuff to make sure it is realistic when it comes to the baseball movie.
Chris Avena: Including the locker room scenes? I hear the locker room is more like daycare center!
Ryan Klesko: Oh yeah, I found this out years later. We had a group of guys, Scott Linebrink, Jake Peavy, a bunch of guys that love the outdoors.
And we had our mounds. We all had our fishing mounts and some of us had our deer head mounts and stuff. I remember coming back to our locker room one time and my deer head had a chip in it. And I was like, “Man, what happened to my deer mount? It must have fell off the wall.” Well, come to find out, in San Diego, every time we left town, they would take all our stuff down and hide it cause when they would bring people in, they did not want to see a bunch of animal heads and fishing hanging on the walls.
So, they took it down. It is in California, so you know where I am going with this. They would take it all down. Then when we came back in town, they would put it back up. But I guess they did not put my deer head back up all the way. That dropped it off out of my locker and cracked it and they tried to do the best they could to fix it, but I noticed it. But I found out that years and years down the road that they would take all our stuff down.
Chris Avena: You had a man cave in the locker room? With taxidermy.
Ryan Klesko: Yeah, we had a few of us. One guy had a 10-pound bass, and one guy had a mount. We all had one little thing. It is not like you have this big locker room. You just kind of put it in your locker. A lot of the guys had fish mounts and stuff like that. We all had, we call it, our own little redneck road down in San Diego there for a while.
Chris Avena: Getting into your conservation. What role do you believe that hunters play in the broader conservation management and how can they contribute more effectively?
Ryan Klesko: Well, I think it is just knowledge of the system. I think once you realize that the most contributors, and the highest amount by any means, is the hunters, right? So, what does that mean? That means that all the purchases of hunting licenses and boat registration and the amounts of money that goes back into conservation to help us study the fish, the deer herd, the elk herd.
The hunters are the largest contributors. So, it keeps everything in check, in force. I am on the board of the National Wild Turkey Federation. And if it were not for that group alone, we would not have turkeys. And we have turkeys in almost every state in the country. And if it were not for the NWTF going in and getting turkeys and relocating them to all these other states, we would not have that.
So, a lot of the money and the purchases, a lot of that stuff comes from hunters. And it is not all about people that are uneducated or have not studied enough.
It is not all about just killing animals, it is about harvesting and eating the animals and conservation about giving back and making sure that the animal herds are healthy and getting studied the right way. And so, there is a lot more to it. There is a lot that I learned over the years with a lot of these organizations. Some states bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in hunting licenses and fishing licenses and boat registrations for boats and stuff. So that money goes back into the system to help everything keep equal and keep it healthy.
Chris Avena: You have managed habitat, even on your own property. It is habitat restoration and conservation. How have you seen the changes in your own property, in your wildlife management?
Ryan Klesko: It is just a matter of, again, learning the process, learning the bedding areas, and learning what quail thrive on. And I have had several properties that have put in conservation and quality programs. Even there's programs where we are spraying evasive species of weeds and Sweet Gums. And beetles if you are up in the Rocky Mountains. And so, there is a lot to be done, a lot to be studied, and from all these different great organizations out there. I just try to listen to them. I have learned a lot from several other people over the years about just keeping that what it is and try to do the best you can. And there are some great programs out there that will help subsidize people that own farms and ranches throughout the United States to do that. You just must find them.
Chris Avena: I have seen that changing the landscape or reintroducing plant life for certain species, there is a whole trickledown effect, and it affects the whole ecosystem, from the insect all the way up to the big game. The elk, the deer, the wild hogs or whatever it might be. The smallest change to the ecosystem will affect everything.
Ryan Klesko: Yeah, exactly. And something that we have tried to find out that there has been a lot of change in last several years. I think it was started with quail at first, because Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina had a lot of wild quail populations and it has diminished heavily over the last 25 years, 30 years. And we are starting to see that with turkeys now too. There is a bunch of different scenarios out there and that is why the organizations are trying to do the best they can and research. It could be a combination of things, and you could put 10 experts in a room, and they have they might have 5 or 10 different theories to throw at you, but I think it is a combination of things. The farm that I am on now used to have a ton of wild turkeys. We never overhunted them. We trapped, we did everything we could, and the Turkey population in the state of Georgia is down greatly and in a lot of other states. There is lots of different things that we are trying to do to study that. I think in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the red ants, the ant beds. There have been some studies to where if you put like a baby chicken down on the ground, that is fresh born, if there is a red ant pile within 10 feet of it the baby chicken is killed within like 1/2 of a day. There is all kinds of theories and scenarios out there. The main thing is to study it. Do as best you can and figure out what the problem is and go from there. Lack of trapping, years and years ago, they used to trap a lot. So obviously that is a big thing with the quail eggs and the turkey eggs for lack of trapping.
Also, there is a new thing out, I am sure you heard of this, about the possibility of the chicken manure coming in that people spread on their farms as fertilizer, that has got some type of disease in it that kills the turkeys. So, we really do not know just yet. There are several different theories out there and I am sure a little bit plays in all of them. The main thing is to go out there and continue to support the effort and try to make sure that stays strong.
Chris Avena: We all must do our part. Every license we buy, every round of ammo, every gun, every bow, money is raised through the Pittman-Robertson Act and the billions of dollars raised through that self-imposed tax goes directly into conservation.
Ryan Klesko: That is right. Yeah. There is a lot of good groups out there and I try to support all of them. And there’s stream restoration too, with all the population growing and the water sources, there is a lot to do. I know that the mule deer population is starting to decrease out west. Northwest. And there is a lot to be doing there. Obviously with the predator population there, the mountain lions, there is a lot of states that used to allow you to go after the mountain lions. Now some of the states are protecting them. They are adding wolves. They have added wolves to certain states. The wolves are just devastating to the elk and mule deer population too.
But again, all this research would not happen if it were not for the outdoorsman purchasing the licenses. Alot of them donate back to certain charities as well. It is going to be an ongoing effort.
Chris Avena: Well, I could not agree with you more. We have got to stay active. I am on the board of the Northeast Chapter Dallas Safari Club. So, we try and do our part as well.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.
Ryan Klesko: Yes, Sir, anytime.
Chris Avena: At the end of the day, with everything that you have been involved with, how would you like to be remembered?
Ryan Klesko: I guess just as somebody that cared about the environment. Not just a guy that goes out and just hunts to take, to kill or just to hunt. I think it is a great way to introduce your family. I think it is a good way to get away. It kept me out of trouble over the years, it is a good way to spend time with your family. It is a great way to eat organic meat. It is a great way to provide for your family. I guess, when it comes down to it, it is a kind of give and take part process. And I do not want to be one of those guys that was always about the take part. I think the give part is more important than the take part.
Chris Avena: I agree. All right. I appreciate you for taking the time and we look forward to speaking to you again soon.
Ryan Klesko: Yeah, I am heading off to New Mexico this week, so I got some friends coming up. We are going to be doing some archery hunting for elk with some good friends of mine. A couple of guys have never been before. So, I am looking to get their first elk for them. I am excited. I was out there packing all my stuff and washing it. And all the nonsense that we go through.
Chris Avena: The rituals we go through.
Ryan Klesko: Oh yeah. You know there is nothing better than a good elk steak on the fire.
Chris Avena: I agree. I have a couple of recipes coming your way.
Ryan Klesko: Alright, well send them to me and we should have plenty soon, my friend.