Max Patkin had been “The Clown Prince of Baseball” for 40 years before “Bull Durham” came along and preserved his act for all time.

Writer-director Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, remembers basically building his Kevin Costner/Susan Sarandon/Tim Robbins romance around the presence of Patkin, the animated, gawky mime who “saved” minor league baseball.

“Max WAS minor league baseball,” Shelton recalls for the new documentary, “Max Patkin: The Clown Prince of Baseball.”

Tall, ungainly, with “a big nose and one tooth,” a “goose-neck” and Jim Carrey-rubbery limbs that seemed to defy the presence of bones, Patkin harbored big league dreams in his youth. But he found his true calling as a mid-game “clown” — mimicking and teasing players, over-acting the role of semaphore-signaling third base coach, faking arguments and spraying a “geyser” of water into the heavens with just just mouth and lungs.

With his eyes bugging-out below a long-defunct Montreal Expos cap worn sideways, a filthy uniform that could double as a skirt, with a “?” for his uniform number and a loping walk and sprint reminiscent of Harpo Marx, Patkin was a featured attraction at many a struggling minor league ballpark for most of his career.

If you ever saw him, you’d understand why. His childish, child-centered clowning was adored by generations before Shelton captured and preserved it in the greatest minor league baseball movie of them all.

Documentary filmmaker Greg DeHart is a former minor league pitcher who remembered Patkin “getting under my skin” while he was playing, trying to pitch his way to the major leagues. After that didn’t work out, DeHart spent 20 years compiling interviews for a Patkin documentary.

Former players like Bob Feller and Harold Reynolds, the late player and Cubs and Yankees manager Don Zimmer, Shelton, sportswriters and others remember the clown with the sad back story — an unhappy marriage that ended in violence — and a mania for performing.

Patkin appeared in some 4000 games, minor and major leagues, over the course of his long career. That got him on a lot of local and national TV, into “Bull Durham” and landed his jersey in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

We see footage of Patkin coaching the players about his act pre-game, directing the gags and the best ways for them to react to them.

“It’ll be cute,” he urges them. Come on, play along.

We hear about “the grind” of minor league life, even for the barnstorming clown who’d travel from city to city, goosing attendance everywhere he appeared. No, nobody in that life stays in nice hotels.

“The last room I had was so small even the mice were hunchbacks.

DeHart covers Patkin’s baseball career and recalls the “big break” that came when he was pitching against Joe DiMaggio in an exhibition game for the troops in Hawaii late in World War II. Minor leaguer turned Navy man Max gives up a homer, and trots behind DiMaggio, mimicking his gait around the bases.

An act was born.

The peak moments are remembered and the grim facts of life about maintaining a marriage and raising a kid while constantly being “on the road” are related.

One thing I hadn’t realized is that Patkin wasn’t the first “clown prince” of America’s oldest and most sentimentalized professional sport. Al Schacht kind of invented the schtick and the nickname.

But Patkin was the guy who made a career of it, bringing the hijinx to the game-in-progress and not just between innings. He lasted from 1946 to the Rise of the Mascots, who borrowed a lot of his “bits” just as he reached retirement age.

No, he didn’t help DeHart get into the big leagues, with his “distracting” foolishness. But he did remind one and all how much fun the game could be, especially if you had someone with great clowning skills carrying on during all of the dead spots in a nine-inning contest.

The film that tells the story of his life skips over the unknown and never seems much more than a surface gloss. But it’s a fitting tribute to an unforgettable fringe figure who played an important role in the preservation of America’s Passtime.

Cast: Max Patkin, Ron Shelton, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Harold Reynolds, Don Zimmer, Mike Veeck, Joy Patkin and Bob Feller.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Credits:Scripted and directed by Greg DeHart. A Sunn Stream release.

Running time: 1:10