‘A Tremendous Amount of Fun’: Meet Kelley Franco, Baseball’s ‘Three Inning Fan’

Kelley Franco, eleventh and youngest sibling among the New Canaan Francos, a clan of eight boys and three girls, recalls sitting out on the family’s screened-in porch on Tommy’s Lane one day in 1982. 

She was 12 years old and one of her big brothers, Mike, had either just gotten into law school or decided to become a lawyer, she recalled.

“And I also had decided that I wanted to be a lawyer—which I realize is a little young to decide your career path, but whatever—and someone made a joke at dinner out on the porch, and they said, ‘Maybe someday they’ll have a law firm together and it’ll be the ‘Franco Law Firm.’ And everyone was like, ‘Right, haha.’ Fast-forward to 2006, and I just kind of called up Mike one day and said, ‘Remember when we talked about this?’ ”

By then, she’d attended St. Aloysius School through eighth grade, graduated from New Canaan High School (class of ‘88), earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Georgetown (minor in French), studied abroad for one year in Paris, earned a law degree from the University of Connecticut School of Law, passed the New York and Connecticut bars and married a Mets fan (Tom Throop, gifted furniture designer maker of Grove Street).

Franco would form Franco Law Associates with Mike after launching her own career as a litigator, doing a three-month internship in a Paris law firm and then stints at large and small firms in the United States.

Amid all that, about 20 years ago, Franco—a steadfast Yankees fan who’d managed the NCHS freshman baseball team as a teen, keeping score for the squad—felt another itch to scratch, this one connected to our national pastime.

Specifically, Franco carried a passion for casual baseball fans.

“I decided that there should be a way for people who know absolutely nothing about baseball to learn how to watch, enjoy and appreciate a ball game in about an hour,” she said. “And so I actually designed a class, and I called it ‘Baseball 101,’ that taught fans the rules of the game, the structure of Major League Baseball, and what I said were 10 pieces of baseball history that every fan had to know.”

She added: “If you don’t know anything about baseball—let’s say you don’t know what a ‘foul ball’ is—there’s really no good place to turn. You have entire books written about the World Series in whatever year. But there’s really no succinct place to turn where in an hour you can learn anything about baseball.”

‘Baseball 101’ would become a stepping-stone for Franco in what has rapidly developed into a multifaceted baseball media venture that offers fun, adventure and connection—and possibly a second career. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. caught wind of Franco’s “Baseball 101” class and asked her to lecture there. She was written up in the paper, an article spotted by a CNN Financial Network producer, and asked to come in and talk about baseball on the daytime show (she went on to do a half-dozen appearances). 

Today, while also practicing law, Kelley Franco Throop (she goes by ‘Kelley Franco’ professionally) is founder and owner of Three Inning Fan, a baseball media company with thousands of social followers on X and Instagram, and dozens of YouTube videos, including bite-size “three inning minute” segments and full podcast (20 to 25 minutes each) installments (also available on Apple and Spotify). In them, Franco leans into her considerable skills, knowledge and unique perspective, bringing legal analysis to timely baseball topics, marking anniversaries and fun facts of baseball history and in-season game analyses.

The name “Three Inning Fan” goes back to Franco’s desire “to bring casual fans into the game because I wanted people to understand that you didn’t have to watch all nine innings of a game,” she said.

“You could watch three innings of a game and call yourself a fan,” she said. “Who cares if you don’t watch all nine innings? Who cares if you don’t stay up late? Who cares if you don’t know every player’s name or what their ‘OPS+’ is? Just enjoy yourself. Now, obviously, I watched more than three innings myself, but that’s where the name came from, because I really think baseball can be inclusive, and should be.”

And through all of it, she’s true to her brand name, talkin’ baseball with unmistakable if understated expertise to connect with casual fans.

“I think that to enjoy baseball, you don’t need to know every players’ name,” Franco told NewCanaanite.com. “You don’t need to know all the stats. I personally think the stats are a bore. I think they’re useful and I don’t deny that they’re a tool in the toolbox of baseball. But I think they’re boring. I much more enjoy the stories of baseball.”

‘What the heck’ 

Kelley Franco has never played baseball.

Her first memory of the game was Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent’s storied home run against the Boston Red Sox in 1978.

“It was a day game, and I remember that he hit it, and I went running into the kitchen and said, ‘Mom, Bucky Dent just hit a three run homer,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, that’s great honey,’ ” Franco recalled with a laugh. “But the truth is that my mother really nurtured my love for baseball. She encouraged me to read the sports section because I enjoyed it. And I grew up with eight brothers and they were also very encouraging of it.”

One brother, Claude, played baseball himself while the eldest of the Franco kids, Rick, “bought me complete sets of baseball cards starting in 1980,” she recalled.

“So from 1980 to 1982, I have some complete sets that he bought me, which is really special,” Franco said. “Like with a lot of families, sports is a reason to gather. I mean it’s not only watching the game and being in the game and being passionate about the game, but it’s a reason to get together.”

Franco’s own baseball venture faded for some years after the Hall of Fame lecture and CNN appearances of the mid- to late-2000s.

Then, amid the pandemic, the itch returned.

“It was just about two years ago that I made my first video,” she said. “I thought, I really want to give this baseball another try because I still enjoy the game and I’m at a different point in my life and my legal career. I mean I’m in my 50s at this point. And you know how it is: You start to think, ‘Well, what the heck, let’s try some new things.’ And so I put together some baseball lectures, and I started to give them locally. And then I started to make these short videos that I posted on what was then Twitter.”

The videos immediately drew praise from the baseball cognoscenti of what we now know as X, where Franco counts nearly 4,000 followers, including Mike Piazza, David Cone, John Kruk, Roger McDowell, Howie Rose and Frank “the Tank” Fleming, among other former MLBers and baseball media luminaries.

“I think that all of these years of being in a courtroom have made me comfortable speaking publicly and on the record, because when you speak in a courtroom everything you say is written down by the stenographer,” Franco said. “And I’ve become accustomed to that over the years.”

‘She has an energy level that soars’

It shows, and people have taken notice.

Last October, Franco, a Rowayton resident, was asked to moderate a panel discussion at Norwalk Library titled “Baseball: Stories & History of America’s Favorite Pastime,” featuring retired MLB public relations director Bob Wirz and former New York Mets pitcher (and current TV broadcaster) Ron Darling. 

A fundraiser for The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum—whose original laborers had started their-own Civil War era baseball team after finishing the famous building, the organization’s archivists have found—the event quickly sold out.

Kathy Olsen, a Lockwood-Mathews trustee and chair of the nonprofit’s Lecture Committee, said that while searching for a dynamic panel moderator, a mutual friend urged her to reach out to Franco.

She did.

“She’s funny, she’s authentic, she’s very engaging and she’s a great storyteller,” Olsen said.

“And her enthusiasm for the game just comes across in any conversation you have with her,” Olsen continued. “I’ve actually never dealt with her as an attorney. I’ve only dealt with her as a baseball enthusiast. So I only know that side of her and her passion for it. So that’s really why I asked her to come on board. And after we had a meeting, she sent me—probably a week or two later—questions and things that she thought would be interesting to ask the panel. I thought her questions—with little input from me, frankly—covered the sort of array of topics that people would be interested in while giving both Ron and Bob the same amount of time… She balanced that very well.”

The panel discussion was a big hit, as was the fundraiser for Lockwood-Mathews (currently closed for mechanical upgrades and set to reopen in Spring ‘25), Olsen said.

“Honestly, I thought she was perfect,” Olsen said. “She did a very good job of keeping control of the lecture while keeping the energy up. She has an energy level that soars way beyond an average person’s on a day-to-day basis. And that’s what I needed. But it’s also her knowledge that is just outstanding. She can talk about so many things. At one point, Ron was talking about a specific game and she let out a very big chuckle. Personally, I didn’t know what game he was talking about, but Kelley definitely knew what play he was talking about. I just thought that people could relate to her and a lot of people went up to Kelley after the event, just like they did to Ron and Bob. They wanted to learn more about her.”

And, according to Olsen’s review of the hour-long panel discussion, Franco stayed true to her “Three Inning Fan” brand.

“I love that Kelley can talk these stats, these scores, the plays with the enthusiast, but she also can make the game relatable to just a layperson, like maybe a wife that came with the husband and was sort of like, ‘I don’t really want to come,’ ” she said. “And then they’re like, ‘This was a great talk.’ A lot of people said that to me and you saw there were children in the room and that’s really what Lockwood-Mathews Mansion is about, is having these lectures be for everyone. And I thought that particular lecture, with Kelley’s help, really made it relatable to everyone in the room.”

‘It’s just so fun’

Franco said it was “a privilege” to be on a panel with Wirz and Darling. The former Mets pitcher and 1986 champion “is not only an incredibly accomplished Mets legend, but I love the Mets booth,” Franco said.

“Both the TV and radio booth,” she continued. “One of the reasons why I don’t mind being married to a Mets fan is because I love watching the Mets games, because the booth is so good. I learn something new every time we watch a game.” 

The opportunity to lead that discussion was a highlight for Franco in her baseball venture, and it’s not the only one. 

She was invited to London by the British Baseball Federation to watch the Mets-Phillies series in June, and lectured there with accomplished baseball writer Joe Posnanski, author of “The Baseball 100.” 

By then, Franco had been publishing the “Three Inning Minute” videos weekly for nearly two years, and after serving as a guest in various baseball podcasts, she decided to start her own “Three Inning Fan” podcast. She has designed and delivered additional baseball lectures, one about baseball’s great rivalries and one about 10 ways that the game has changed.

“Because baseball really has undergone a metamorphosis in the past two years,” Franco noted. “It’s incredible. For a game that was relatively untouched for 120 years, it all of a sudden changed a lot.”

Though people who know Franco often comment to her about the podcasts, there’s been just one instance so far where someone she didn’t know referred to it.

“It was the guy who works in the cheese department in Whole Foods,” she said with a laugh. “He just looked up and said, ‘Do you talk about baseball on Twitter?’ ”

Asked what “Three Inning Fan” is doing for her, Franco said, “I am having a tremendous amount of fun is what it’s doing for me.”

She continued, “When I go to my studio, especially to do my podcast, it’s just so fun. I get to talk about baseball, but I also get to let my followers in on a little bit of who I am. Like when I’m not watching baseball, I’m basically cooking or eating or growing something that I want to cook and then eat. And so in my baseball podcast, I always close with a segment on what’s good to eat while watching the ball game. I get to talk about a new recipe I made or some produce that we grew in the garden and then I cooked. I’m just having fun with so many different aspects of it. I get to talk about being in a marriage where I’m a Yankees fan married to a Mets fan. And I get to share baseball with people.”

Asked about the future of “Three Inning Fan,” Franco said she’d like to grow it.

“I don’t quite know what direction that’s going to go in, but I’ve done some pretty cool stuff so far,” she said, adding, “And now I’m curious to see where it can go.”