Zac Jordan, 14 (left), and Matt Robbe, 14, take part in practice for their AABC Southwest Ohio Baseball League at Kuliga Park. The Enquirer/JEFF SWINGER

A Pete Rose Drive street sign sits next to Western Hills High School where the former Cincinnati Reds star went to school.

Drive by Boldface Park's ball fields at the corner of River Road and Fairbanks Avenue in Sedamsville when school is out and kids are out on the diamonds. Look for the shortest kid on the field, pumping his way around second and belly-flopping into third base.

You're looking at Pete Rose, 50-some years ago.

Rose was the "river rat" who grew up a few blocks away on Braddock Avenue, played catcher on his Knothole team at Boldface Park, starred on the Western Hills High School squad, signed a contract with his hometown Reds and went on to become the greatest baseball legend ever to come out of Cincinnati's west side.

But he was by no means the only one.

The corner of Cincinnati that lies west of the Mill Creek has been for a century now the place where baseball took root and grew not only future major leaguers, but thousands of devotees who play the game until their creaking, aged bones won't take any more.

It is a part of town where the game is passed down from generation to generation; a part of town where the baseball competition has always been fierce, whether it is a West High-Elder match-up, an American Legion tournament, or a tee-ball contest at the lowest rung of Knothole.

"On the west side, baseball has been part of growing up," said Glenn Sample, a Western Hills High School grad who coached the University of Cincinnati's baseball team for two decades. He now makes the calls from a booth overlooking Great American Ball Park as the Reds' official scorer.

"It's part of life."

No one knows that better than Sample. He has been around baseball for more than 60 years, from his days as an 8-year-old Knotholer on the West Side, his teenage years as a Western Hills star and player for the legendary Bentley Post American Legion team, to his years at UC and the past 24 seasons with the Reds organization.

Sample might have attained the dream of thousands of Western Hills boys over the generations himself when he returned to Cincinnati after two years in the Army during the Korean War. He had offers from three major league organizations - the Reds, Indians and Phillies. He chose instead what was in the early 1950s a much more stable job - coaching at UC.

"When I was a kid growing up, everyone wanted to make the majors some day," said Sample, who grew up in Price Hill and lives now in Mack.

"That was the dream."

Playing in the Bigs

Dozens of west side youths made that dream a reality.

At Western Hills High School, long before there was a Pete Rose, there were players who made the grade:

• Don Zimmer, the Brooklyn Dodger who became one of the original Mets and is now the New York Yankees' bench coach.

• Jim Frey, who never played in the majors but who managed the Kansas City Royals to the World Series.

• Russ Nixon, the former Reds' manager.

• Herm Wehmeier, the former Reds pitcher.

Elder produced Jim Brosnan, the Reds' relief pitcher of the early 1960s, and Buzz Boyle, a Reds scout for decades.

Oak Hills High School had Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Bill Wegman. LaSalle got into the act in the 1980s with Tim Naehring, who had an eight-year career with the Boston Red Sox and is now the Reds' director of player development.

Naehring said some of his best memories of growing up in White Oak were Sundays, when his family would go to church and then head to his grandmother's house. The kids would spend the afternoon playing wiffle ball in the backyard.

"I was always playing ball of some kind,'' said Naehring. "I'd play with a tennis ball, a Wiffle ball, anything that was handy. When we weren't playing Knothole, we were playing pick-up games. Morning to night."

Naehring said he thinks one reason that Cincinnati's west side has produced so many major leaguers is that baseball has always been very competitive there.

"The competitiveness of one school against another, of American Legion ball, kind of made up for the fact that we couldn't play year round, like they do in a place like California or Texas," Naehring said.

Coaching generations of kids

Naehring and Sample say that west side baseball has thrived because there have been baseball coaches - in Knothole, at high schools, and with the American Legion and baseball clubs like the Storm Club - who have worked for decades. They have coached one generation after another.

Sample remembers that when he was young, the late William H. Zimmer - then the president of Cincinnati Gas & Electric - was better known on the west side as a Knothole coach for decades.

"You'd see him out there on the ball fields every day and you would never guess that he was a big man in town," Sample said.