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Toronto Blue Jays second baseman Roberto Alomar (TOP) flies after forcing out Chicago White Sox first baseman Dan Pasqua during second inning action in game one of the American League Championship Series in Chicago, Oct. 5. Batter Ron Karkovice reached first base safely on the play.

It was the family business.

Roberto Alomar, the best position player in Canada's major-league history - and Wednesday, barring something completely outrageous, a newly elected member of the Baseball Hall of Fame - really knew nothing else growing up.

His father, Sandy, played 15 seasons in the big leagues with six different teams, and Robbie and his brother Sandy Jr. split their formative years between home life in Puerto Rico, and summers spent hanging around a variety of American ballparks, which would be many a kid's fantasy.

Sandy Jr. was into other things (no small irony that he has become a baseball lifer), and was more likely to push back against parental authority, but for Robbie there was only the game, and his father's word was gospel. He trailed Sandy Sr. around like a mascot, watched, listened, absorbed, shagged flies and played games of pepper.

That's part of what made him special.

Alomar's core influence was a journeyman who had to fight to keep his place in the big leagues where he never earned more than $50,000 in a season, who had experienced first hand the extra hurdles faced by Latino players of his generation, who was suspicious, who felt he had been ripped off, and who believed that the game was something that had to be studied, that there was a right way and wrong way to play. So Robbie learned how to switch hit, he learned where he ought throw the ball in a given situation, he learned when to take base-running chances, when to back down, and he learned that not everyone was to be trusted.

"You have to know how to play this game," he said some years ago. "You have to be smart. It's not like you have to read books or anything like that, but you have to know what to do to be a better ballplayer. You have to understand the situations. Every day you can learn something new - if you want to."

The other half of the equation was of course his remarkable physical gifts, the ability to anticipate and glide in the field, the great hitter's eye, the surprising power.

The San Diego Padres, who originally signed him, certainly understood that potential, and brought him to the majors as a 20-year-old, but in the end couldn't make it work, or at least weren't willing to be patient (they tried to convert Alomar to shortstop, they fired his father as a coach, and he became a whipping boy for manager Greg Riddoch). Arriving in Toronto as part of the biggest trade in franchise history, joining a team on the verge in a city he came to love, playing for a manager with a soft touch who was happy to let him be, Alomar blossomed, and the rest is history.

Anyone who saw him play during his salad days remembers the crazy difficult plays made routine, remembers the elegance, the balletic turn of a double play, remembers the home run against Dennis Eckersley in the 1992 American League Championship Series that finally cast the monkey off the Jays' back (that same season, he made just five errors in 670 chances - a .993 fielding percentage).

He never won the batting title many had predicted for him, and he was never named most valuable player. But Alomar was for a stretch, not just in Toronto, but continuing through his time in Baltimore and Cleveland, among the best players in baseball - and certainly the best second baseman.

It is too easy to forget some of that, and be distracted by the spitting incident with John Hirschbeck (for which Hirschbeck long ago forgave him), by the way Alomar's career wound down so abruptly largely because of injury, and by the disconcerting story of his personal life the last few years.

Off the field, it is fair to say that he was always a bit of cipher, not particularly close to his teammates, spending his time in Toronto holed up in what was then the SkyDome Hotel.

Precious few people had any real idea what made him tick, but it's telling that he will be back here Wednesday, hoping to receive the call from Cooperstown at the noon hour, and that's there no question, despite his successes as an Oriole and an Indian, which cap he'll be wearing on his plaque.

Alomar's acrimonious departure from the Blue Jays was in hindsight one of the first signs that the glory days were over, that the magic of 1992 and 1993 was finished - and lo these many years, it has yet to return.

Not to put too much faith in harbingers, but Wednesday's events occur at a time of at least long-term optimism for the team. While saluting the best to ever wear the uniform, thinking back to a time when baseball was as obsessively followed as hockey and Alomar was treated like a rock star, it's perhaps worth lifting out of nostalgia just long enough to hope that it might be like that some day again.

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