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stephen brunt

Roberto Alomar reaches for his phone, punches a button, and passes it over without comment. Playing is a message that he has carefully saved – and it is not the call from the Baseball Hall of Fame last January, telling him about his appointment in Cooperstown.

Rather, it is a recording of an old friend.

"Robbie, it's John Hirschbeck. I can't tell you how happy I am for you. It's so well deserved. ... You should have got it the first time. Now you've got it. That part's over. You're in the Hall of Fame, dude. That's unbelievable. Congratulations to you. ... When you talk to your father and your brother and your mom, please tell those guys I said hello and tell them how happy I am for you. Call me when you get a chance."

The message finishes.

"This is what it's all about," Alomar says. "This is what people don't see. Whatever they want to say, what can you say about this? As long as him and me keep the relationship, that's what matters. People are writing stories, always negative stories. There is always a positive between him and me."

The best second baseman of his generation, the best position player in the history of the Toronto Blue Jays, the first player in franchise history selected to wear the team's cap into the Hall of Fame (and in all probability, the last for a very long time), the first to have his number retired, an athlete who at one time enjoyed the celebrity wattage of a teen idol, and still the incident hangs in the air, for the last year, and for the last 15 years.

Here's how it is that the best day of a man's life and the worst can be inextricably linked, and here, perhaps, is the opportunity, finally, for an exorcism.

On Sunday, Alomar will have his moment in Cooperstown. The speech will be short and sweet, he says. It will start out in Spanish, to honour his proud Puerto Rican heritage. There will be an acknowledgment of Luis Rosa, who scouted and signed him. It will include mention of other places where he thrived as a player, Baltimore and especially Cleveland, where he enjoyed the best statistical year of his career, reached the World Series, and had the special thrill of playing on the same team as his brother, Sandy Alomar Jr.

Family will be a recurring theme. He is a momma's boy in many ways, and his mother Maria will be there looking on, but Alomar also idolized his father, Sandy Sr., who played 15 years in the big leagues, and who imprinted in his son a series of principles about what it meant to be a pro, about how important it was to play the game right.

"Roberto," his mother once said, "was born in baseball."

But the core of it will be about Toronto, about the city where he found a personal comfort zone, about the baseball team where he fulfilled his potential, about the general manager who traded for him and is a fellow inductee this year, Pat Gillick, about the team president who nurtured him, and now has brought him back into the fold, Paul Beeston, and about the manager who Alomar credits for much of his success, Cito Gaston.

"My heart is half Puerto Rican, half Canadian. That is how I feel," he says. "The city embraced me since the day that I got here. The same way I gave my heart to them they gave their heart to me."

The truth is, though, that for awhile that ardour dimmed considerably. For awhile, because of how he left and especially because of what happened when he came back, a city fell out of love with Alomar, which was part of it falling out of love with baseball.

Now, it seems the reconciliation is on.

Alomar grew up in Salinas, Puerto Rico, where his parents still live in the same modest house, and where he has bought his own place just up the block. The school year was spent there, while in summers he happily kicked around big-league ballparks in the United States while his father played out the final seasons of his career.

Sandy Jr. pushed back a bit against the family business and pursued other interests – though in the end he became a lifer himself, playing in the majors for 20 seasons. He is now coaching with the Indians and is a prime managerial candidate who was interviewed for the Toronto job last year.

But Robbie never once imagined doing anything else. He stuck by Sandy Sr.'s side and memorized his gospel. His father taught him how to field and how to hit from both sides of the plate. How to read game situations, to study, to anticipate, to think one step ahead, as a hitter, as a fielder, as a base-runner. And he taught him some other stuff as well, about the plight of Latino players, about racism, about how you had to fight for and protect your money, about how you had to demand respect. Alomar took all of that in, to the point where any discussion about what made him great has to begin with his genius baseball IQ.

He was originally signed by the San Diego Padres, but fell out of favour there when hard-ass Greg Riddoch took over as manager. For a short time, they tried to convert him to shortstop, which Alomar hated.

That mutual disenchantment played to Toronto's advantage. Gillick had come to understand that the team he had so meticulously constructed wasn't quite good enough. It required less a talent infusion than a cultural shift, and so came the biggest trade in franchise history in December, 1990: out went Tony Fernandez, the best shortstop ever to play for the Jays, and Fred McGriff, who would wrap up his career just short of 500 home runs; arriving were Joe Carter, a proved commodity and the future World Series hero, and Alomar, the smallest name of the bunch.

History records what happened next, how Alomar evolved into the best player on an extraordinary team, how his home run off Dennis Eckersley in the 1992 American League Championship Series was the watershed moment in franchise history, how back-to-back championships followed. That, and other highlights, you have seen over and over again this week in the countdown to Cooperstown, but in many ways, the real joy of watching Alomar, at least for those who deeply love the game, came in smaller, less spectacular, day-to-day increments, when he did things so absolutely right.

Alomar left the Jays under a cloud in 1995, with the franchise mired in ownership uncertainty, with Alomar looking to become the highest-paid player in the game, with then-general manager Gord Ash suggesting that he wasn't a positive influence in the clubhouse, with hurt feelings on both sides, and with Toronto fans – who were still adjusting to the fact that theirs was no longer the best team in baseball – feeling betrayed.

Then the incident played out right in front of them less than a year later. Alomar, who had followed Gillick to Baltimore, had a heated exchange at the plate with Hirschbeck over a disputed call, and spit at him. Afterward, Alomar said that he and other players believed the umpire's personality had changed for the worse since he had lost a son to a catastrophic illness.

On hearing that, Hirschbeck had to be restrained from attacking Alomar in the visiting clubhouse.

"I take the blame," Alomar says. "I'm a human. For people who really know who I am, they know it was something that happened in the heat of the moment, If I could take it back, I would take it back. But it happened."

The transition from local hero to villain was complete.

On some level, it didn't seem to matter that Alomar reached out to Hirschbeck and apologized, that the two men publicly shook hands at home plate in Baltimore, that they became friends, and that their relationship extended to both of their families. "From something bad, something good happened," Alomar says. "We put everything behind us. I got to meet his family. John Hirschbeck is a wonderful person with a wonderful family. I'm so glad that we have become friends."

When Alomar became eligible for the Hall of Fame last year for the first time, he seemed a logical candidate to become just the 39th player in baseball history to be elected his first time on the ballot. But some of the baseball writers who get to act as the guardians of Cooperstown were in moral-arbiter mode, a role they have embraced wholeheartedly in the wake of baseball's steroid era, and so the low rumbles began – about Alomar's at-times messy personal life, about suggestions he didn't play hard enough during his brief, late career stint under the big spotlight with the New York Mets, and of course about the spitting.

In the end, he fell eight votes short of the necessary 75 per cent. Hirschbeck was one of the first to phone and offer consolation.

"We'll get there next year," he said.

"I was a little upset," Alomar says. "Maybe it wasn't the time for me to go there, maybe it wasn't the time for me to go as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But I took it like a man."

The penalty, it turns out, was one year in purgatory. This time around, Alomar was named on 90 per cent of the ballots, and Hirschbeck got on the phone.

"I'm proud of everything that I've accomplished since I was a little boy," Alomar says. "That was my dream – to be a ballplayer. I didn't dream to win so many Gold Gloves, or Silver Bats or play in All-Star Games or World Series. I was just dreaming to play the game.

"When I came here for the first time I didn't know what to expect. I was a young guy, just starting. And now to be going into the Hall of Fame with a Blue Jays' hat makes me so proud, because the fans were so good to me.

"I owe it to them."

And now, perhaps, they're ready to forgive, and to owe him something back.

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