Klima’s story Deal of the Century was selected to appear in the 2007 Edition of the Best American Sports Writing. Pulitzer Prize winning author David Maraniss, who also endorsed Willie’s Boys, selected Deal of the Century for publication.

Klima’s work has also appeared in the New York Times and Yahoo! Sports. He is formerly a baseball columnist and general sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, Torrance Daily Breeze, Ventura County Star and others. He has also written for MLB.com, The Los Angeles Times, and team magazines of the Dodgers, Angels and Royals. Klima’s 10-part story “Baseball’s Blackout” was chosen as the L.A. Press Club’s best sports story of 2006 and his general sports columns were recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2006.

A vocational baseball scout who learned the trade from some of the game’s legendary talent evaluators, Klima also writes and produces the website, BaseballBeginnings.com, devoted to scouting professional prospects and identifying future major leaguers. The site launched in 2009 and quickly established itself as one the rising voices of player projection available online with its combination of video, scouting reports and narrative analysis.

Klima spent two years as baseball play-by-announcer, calling Division I college baseball games for Pepperdine University in 2002-2003. He worked one summer in the New England Collegiate Baseball League and one summer as the voice of the short-season Yakima Bears, an Arizona Diamondbacks affiliate in the Northwest League. He also worked middle innings for California League games. Klima has been interviewed on major sports radio stations in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and appeared on television in Birmingham.

As a historian, Klima’s knowledge of the last years of the Negro Leagues and the signing of former Negro League players into white baseball is unmatched. He is one of the game’s leading historians on professional scouts and scouting. He also possesses a wide range of baseball knowledge spanning the decades and is deeply connected to the game on many levels in the past, present and future. His story about Willie Mays’s roots in the Birmingham Industrial League will be published by Alabama Heritage magazine (Tuscaloosa) in Summer, 2010. He is currently at work on his next book project.

Klima graduated from California State University, Northridge, in 2001, with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology. While at CSUN, he wrote his first book, Pitched Battle, which was published by McFarland in 2002. He later wrote Scouting the Heart, which served as his sample manuscript in the book industry. Some of its material later appeared in Willie’s Boys. Klima currently lives in Los Angeles with Jen, and their two boys, Monkey and The Man.