The one constant through all the years has been baseball.

I love the game of baseball. I'm a romantic about it. No apologies. It's late October and the World Series started last night. I look forward to October. Thirty Octobers ago, the Cleveland Indians played in the World Series for the first time in 41 years. I covered that team as a sports reporter for WKYC, Channel 3 News in Cleveland. My column today is an invitation for to you to join me in conversation with five men from that team: Sandy Alomar, Carlos Baerga, Charlie Nagy, Jim Thome and their manager, Mike Hargrove. This is not a dissection of the World Series. The following is not even a dissection of the '95 season. That team, season, and series have been analyzed extensively. The World Series season of 1995 serves simply as my muse.Come along. Little boys and baseball Sandy Alomar Jr. grew up in Salinas, Puerto Rico. Salinas is on the southern coast of the island. "We first started playing ball behind my neighbor's house. There was a river back there," Sandy said to me as we sat in the Guardians dugout before a ballgame this summer. "Our neighbor had a bulldozer and he'd clean out the area and there'd be rocks and piles of sand. He'd clear a field and create a home run fence of small hills of rocks and sand." Sandy's neighbor made bases for the river-bed field and that is where he learned how to play baseball. "I had a glove. It was a catcher's mitt," he said as he turned his wrist and his empty right hand as if the mitt was, for the moment, back on it. "I had to share it with the other kids and the only thing I didn't like about sharing was that the other kids used to clean home plate with it. I'd say, 'Don't do that! You're going to ruin it.' "Sandy would play in tennis shoes, worn-out jeans and T-shirts. They'd paint team names on their shirts. "My Dad would bring products home from the big leagues (Sandy Alomar Sr. played 14 seasons in Major League baseball)," Sandy said to me, "but we wanted to be like the other kids." Carlos Baerga grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Juan is the capital and largest city in Puerto Rico. "We played stickball in the streets," Carlos said of his first memories. "We used to play right in the middle of the street," he said. Carlos' father, Jose, worked in the accounting department of the newspaper in San Juan. Every day when he came home from work, he'd take young Carlos out and pitch to him. "My father would pitch me bottle caps and I would have to hit them with a broomstick," Carlos said. "The bottle caps moved a lot, and my father wanted me to develop good eye coordination." Jose Baerga was from a family of 11 brothers and two sisters. The Baergas fielded their own fastpitch softball team and Carlos played on it as a little kid. The team was famous in Puerto Rico, appearing often in the local newspaper. A coastal beach along the Atlantic Ocean was 10 minutes from where Carlos grew up and his father would take him there to run and do pushups in the sand. Once, at 12 years old, Carlos wasn't paying enough attention to his schoolwork and his father took him out of baseball "to teach me a lesson that education always comes first," Carlos said. "I'll never forget it." Carlos signed a professional baseball contract at 16 years old but still went to school and earned his college degree in six years. Charlie Nagy grew up on the East Coast. He was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a port town at the mouth of the Pequonnock River on Long Island Sound. "There was a park down the street," Charlie said to me over the phone from his home on the West Coast. "It had two baseball fields and a pond. We used to skate on the pond in the winter." I wondered if he was a good skater. "No, it wasn't pretty." He said with a chuckle. "Skating wasn't in my future." Baseball wasn't necessarily either, at least not the major leagues. "I just loved playing sports and we went with the seasons," Charlie said as the middle child of three boys. "We drove my mom crazy." In the early spring, the boys would walk down to the park, sometimes with a shovel on shoulder, to clear a patch of lingering snow and they'd play. "We'd have three or four guys and we'd hit balls. One guy would pitch and right field was off limits because we didn't have enough guys.The most vivid story I remember though," Charlie continued, "is I used to leave my glove outside all the time and my Dad would get pissed. Gloves weren't cheap. He would just hide it on me to teach me a lesson about taking care of my stuff. He'd make me think I lost my glove." Jim Thome grew up in Peoria, Illinois. He's a Midwestern kid. Peoria sits along the Illinois River. "Just the other day," he said to me over the phone, "I came across the bat that I used when I was a kid to hit rocks in the driveway. That brought back so many memories. It has all the marks on it." We both laughed. "I'd always be out front of our house, hitting rocks and I'd play games with myself and think about big moments. I'd emulate hitting a home run and then I'd be the announcer and say, 'Oh, we're going to the World Series!' ". Jim played in the West Peoria Little League. "We had a wonderful man, Gary Trotter. He did amazing things for kids." Jim said. Thome is over a two-hour drive from Peoria today but he never forgets. "Whenever I have the time now, I'll go and drive by where I used to live and I'll drive by that park and I'll remember the practices we had on the parking lot when the field was too wet and we'd take ground balls using rubber balls and just the fun." Jim grew up the youngest of five children. He has two brothers and two sisters. He is a twin, born three minutes after his sister, Jenny. "We're really close," Jim said of his twin. The simplicity of baseball is a thread that weaves still today in his family. "My son, Landon, is using the glove that I used when I was trying to break in at third base." That was 1991. "It's pretty cool stuff, to see your son put it on and say, 'Yeah, Dad, that feels pretty good.' " I can't see Jim through the phone, but I'm pretty sure his eyes were wide and a smile filled his face when he said, "Maybe Landon will pass it on to one of his kids one day." Mike Hargrove wraps the cover of a baseball back on a twisted ball of yarn with black electrical tape. His hands are small and he is young. He's 8 years old. "We were living in Houston, Texas, at the time," Grover said to me on the phone this week as he and his wife, Sharon, were driving from Amarillo, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona. Mike and Sharon will celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary this December. She was as much Cleveland as he was in 1995. "I'm putting you on speaker phone, Ron," Mike said to me, "So stop talking bad about Sharon 'cause she can hear you." I asked Mike about his first memories of playing ball. "There was a vacant lot near where we lived. We played over there every chance we could. It was full of crab grass. You know, bumpy clumps of grass, but we played everything in that lot, baseball, whiffle ball, anything with a ball. The cover was always coming off, or the plastic was always cracked. We used a lot of black electrical tape." Mike's dad, Dudley, played on the town baseball team "when I was little bitty," Mike said. He ended up using his dad's glove. A couple of problems with that — Mike was a lefty with little boy hands and his dad was a righty with the grown man hands of an oil pumper. The glove had six fingers. "I remember that glove," Mike said. "It was like I put my hand in a bushel basket." "Honestly and truly though, Ron, growing up my favorite sport was football." Mike didn't play high school baseball. They didn't have a team at his high school in Perryton, Texas. "Too cold," Mike said. "The wind was always blowing 30 mph." Mike was an All-State safety and really good at basketball, too. He went to Northwestern Oklahoma State University on a basketball scholarship. "My Dad said, 'Son, do me a favor, walk on for the baseball team, and if you're not good enough then that's OK, but I want you to try.' So, I did, and I'm really glad I did." "That's the really cool part of it all," Jim Thome said to me. "We all grew up in different areas but the common theme was the true love we all had for being out on a field anywhere and being able to play. The setupI was in Tucson, Arizona, in the spring of 1992, covering the Cleveland Indians spring training camp for WUAB-TV's 10 O'Clock News. Two members of the Indians front office and I were on our way to play golf at a course north of Tucson called El Conquistador. I'll never forget the moment. We were riding in a convertible and we had the top down. It was a beautiful blue sky day and the Tucson mountain range framed our view. Lee Greenwood's song, "I'm proud to be an American'' was on the radio. One of the Indians' brass encouraged me to stay for two more days. "There's going to be a big announcement that will change the future of the franchise," he said. "I can't tell you what it is, but I do think you should stay just a little while longer to be here for the announcement." Two days later, Indians General Manager John Hart announced that he and assistant GM, Dan O'Dowd had signed a core of young players to long-term contracts. Among those players were Sandy Alomar, Carlos Baerga and Charlie Nagy. Albert Belle and Kenny Lofton would sign long-term deals the following year. It was a risk for both the organization and the players. It paid off. The foundational base of what would become the 1995 World Series team was in place. The deliveryKenny Lofton was the leadoff hitter, Omar Vizquel hit second, Baerga was third, Albert Belle hit cleanup, Eddie Murray was fifth. The man who would hit 612 home runs in his career, Hall of Famer Jim Thome, hit sixth. Manny Ramirez hit seventh in the lineup. Paul Sorrento hit eighth and a platoon of Sandy Alomar and Tony Pena hit ninth. "Nobody liked coming in to play us," Nagy told me. "I'd talk to the pitchers on the other team and if they weren't pitching in that series, they were so happy that they missed our team." "I think it's (batting order) in the conversation as probably one of the best lineups in the history of the game," Nagy said. As I was talking to Thome, I said, "Jim, do you realize that only seven players, in all of Major League Baseball this season, hit above .300? Before I could finish my thought, Jim said, "I think everyone in our lineup hit .300 or better in 1995." He's close. Seven of the 10 who typically filled out the lineup card, hit .300 or better. The Indians hit only .179 in the World Series and lost in six games to the Atlanta Braves. Alomar started four games and caught five behind the plate for the Indians in that series. "I honestly felt we didn't have the same strike zone they had," he said to me. "They were hitting spots, give them credit, that were 6 inches off the plate and they were getting strikes and I'm not using that as an excuse, I'm just saying you can watch the games and you can see it. But their staff was ridiculous. Nothing against the Braves. They were good." Hall of Fame baseball play-by-play man Tom Hamilton quipped as he emceed a celebration of the '95 squad this summer, "I'd like to thank Joe Brinkman for not showing up today." Brinkman was the controversial home plate umpire in game six. Baerga joined me on a Saturday morning WEOL radio show and said this, "I believe there will be seven players from that lineup in the Hall of Fame one day." Thome and Murray are already in and Baerga thinks Lofton, Vizquel, Belle and Ramirez will one day get their due. "To be in that lineup," Thome said, "was such an honor. I was lucky to be a part of it." The World Series was the most significant event in baseball, to that point, for Alomar, Baerga, Nagy, Thome and Hargrove. Nagy was on the 1988 Olympic team but the World Series was the pinnacle. "I remember talking to Tony LaRussa and Tom Kelly, separately about what to expect as a manager in the World Series," Hargrove said. LaRussa had won three World Series (one with Oakland and two with St. Louis) and Kelly two titles (both with Minnesota). "They both said to do my job but don't forget to stop and enjoy the journey." "I don't remember enjoying the journey," he said. "You are so locked in. It was everything." The '95 team had so many personalities. How was he able to manage it all? "I really believe, Ron, that every player has a hook. Something you can use to kind of reel 'em in and I tried to identify that in each player." Example? "Albert Belle wanted to set every offensive record in franchise history," he said. "Albert wanted it more than anything else. Our clubhouse guy would use really nice china to serve the team meals after games, really nice plates. When Albert would have a bad game he would come in and take his bat to the plates and there was china flying everywhere. He did it a couple of times and I got really upset. I called him in for a meeting and I told him, 'If you keep doing this stuff, I'm not going to play you. You're going to sit next to me on the bench and watch the games from the dugout.' Then, I went to the clubhouse guy and said, "Why don't you just use paper plates?' " Issues fixed. "People ask me, after I retired, what was my favorite moment as a Cleveland Indian," Alomar said, "and I tell them, raising the championship banner that erased 41 years of losing. That was the most important thing. Every plan, every long-term contract we signed was for a purpose, and we could see the fruition of it by raising that banner." "I'll never forget being introduced in the World Series and what that felt like," Thome said. "I was 25 years old. You talk about a dream come true. That's about as good as it gets." Mike Hargrove turns 76 on Sunday. He and Sharon, who first met in junior high school, stopped to take a picture outside a hotel in Dalhart, Texas, on their drive to Tucson. "It's a little dirt town," Mike said. "It was the first stop Sharon and I made on our honeymoon." "And it's still there?" I asked, referring to the hotel. "Barely there," Sharon said, "but, so are we, Ron." My viewI grew up in Grafton. My dad, Ron Sr., coached youth baseball and high school baseball at Midview. There are batting cages at Midview named in his honor. My little brother, Creg, played baseball through college. Baseball meant a lot and means a lot to my family. We all played on the sandlot fields behind the Irish Catholic Church. My dad was president of Grafton Hot Stove League and a long-time manager. The fields are no longer there.I grew up in the 1970s and Frank Duffy was my favorite player. He was the shortstop for the Indians. I wanted to play shortstop because of Duffy. I ended up a high school second baseman who was decent with the glove but couldn't hit a lick. In October of 1995, I had been married to Stacy for just over a year, and she was six months pregnant with our first child. She was covering the World Series for WHK radio. I used to walk from Channel 3, on East Sixth Street, to Jacobs Field to cover the games. Because of baseball traffic, the walk was quicker than getting a ride from one of our cameramen. It also allowed me to soak in the atmosphere of the city. It was electric. Each night, long after the games were over and after I had finished gathering my interviews in the clubhouse, I'd walk back through the dugout and onto the field. I'd walk alongside it for a bit and then up through the stands to leave the ballpark. Everything was quiet. Peaceful. I'll never forget those moments, and I'll never forget that October. As my conversation with Jim Thome was ending, he said, "In Chicago, the leaves are starting to turn now, Ron. I love the fall. It reminds me of Cleveland in October." Contact Ron Jantz at rjantz@chroniclet.com.