The San Diego School of Baseball was backed by hitting stars such as Tony Gwynn and Alan Trammell, but it was the pitching minds that gave the early 1980s baseball camp its charm — and its legacy.

Brent Strom and Tom House had been teammates at the University of Southern California and then, later, journeyman pitchers in the major leagues. Aside from lineage, they also shared deep-seated hunches that there was more to learn about baseball than previous generations had taught.

So when the day’s instruction was over, they sat in the dugouts of Grossmont College or ventured to a local watering hole, tossing ideas back and forth: the things they loved about the game, the things they thought were wrong, the things they wanted to change.

Once, during a baby shower for another coach’s wife, the men were scolded when they were found in the corner of a room, playing back film of pitchers. They were all obsessives, and the San Diego School of Baseball was their offseason oasis — a place where they could gather and discuss, without judgment and scorn, some of the very concepts that decades later would alter the balance of baseball.

“A summit,” House called it, “of smart baseball minds.”

Before PITCHf/x and Statcast could measure progress, before internet message boards and…

The Hall of Fame is made for players like Adrián Beltré. As a pure hitter, reliable slugger and slick third baseman, Beltré had few peers: No other infielder in the history of baseball has 3,000 hits, 400 homers and five Gold Glove awards. Beltré, now 44, was a lock for the Hall of Fame.

As a first-time Cooperstown candidate, Beltré did not need to follow the breathless tracking of public ballots this winter. Yet he still could not feel secure, he said, until his wife and son assured him on Tuesday that election day looked promising. He could savor it.

“That made me relax a little bit more, and I kind of forced myself to try to enjoy this moment,” Beltré said from his home in Southern California, moments after achieving his sport’s greatest honor. “It was going to be a nice moment, and probably the last moment in baseball that I was going to accomplish, being at the pinnacle of the game.”

Beltré had company at the summit on Tuesday, with Todd Helton and Joe Mauer joining him in the new class of Hall of Famers. Former manager Jim Leyland, elected by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee last month, will also be inducted at the ceremony July 21.

Candidates must receive 75 percent of the ballots from 10-year members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of…

HOUSTON — During a homestand from hell, Dana Brown received a reminder of his own words. He coined a phrase during his four-year stint as Atlanta’s vice president of scouting and repeated it during the Braves’ most trying times, usually to calm the president of baseball operations and general manager Alex Anthopolous’ constant concerns.

Brown now finds himself confronting some of those same worries. His team can’t win at home, refuses to beat teams it should and spent most of the past seven days ceding control of the American League West to its intrastate rivals. The team has lost five of its past six games, including three against the American League’s worst team.

During one of those defeats, Brown’s wife, Casandra, sent her husband a text message telling him exactly what he always told Anthopolous: “You have to have the stomach for this.”

“It’s tough. It’s a battle. It’s a grind. It’s 162 games,” Brown said Sunday during the team’s pregame radio show. “We’re still in the wild card right now. We want to win the division. We still have a clear path to win the division, we just have to win games.”

Brown then witnessed another one-run loss against one of baseball’s bottom feeders, a stomach-churning setback to cloud the clear path he promised…

HOUSTON — His team had struck out something like 18 or 19 times and, after the final one, Brandon Hyde couldn’t find his hitting coach. Other members of the 2006 Greensboro Grasshoppers gathered their belongings and boarded a bus bound for the team hotel in Augusta, Georgia.

Hyde’s wife, Lisa, accompanied him on the trip, so the newlyweds drove back on their own. On their way, on a traffic-filled highway, a figure appeared in full uniform.

“We’re driving along a busy area of Augusta — it’s not the greatest neighborhood in the world — there’s Joe in his uniform walking to the team hotel because he was so mad that he just wanted to go home,” Hyde said.

The Hydes pulled over and picked up Joe Espada, an excitable first-year coach enraged by a poor performance, a problem he sometimes shared with his boss. The 33-year-old skipper and his 32-year-old hitting coach considered every loss personal, every player’s slump something they needed to fix. That the Grasshoppers grinded their way to a 68-69 record only enhanced those instincts.

“We were both a little younger, a little more emotional at that time,” Hyde said this week. “We took losses really hard and we took individual player or team success or failures extremely hard. We kind of commiserated…

SEATTLE —  It was 6:13 p.m., 31 minutes before J.P. France’s boyhood dream would become reality. His wife, Jessica, was juggling her nerves and her baby, 3-month-old Liam. France’s best friend, Ryan Silva, had just left with the baby to receive a certificate commemorating France’s first major-league game. “Should say daddy’s first start,” Silva said while showing Jessica the piece of paper.

“That was his (J.P.’s) first dream in life,” Jessica said, pointing to Liam. “And parallel to that dream was becoming a major-league baseball player.”

Jessica and J.P. typify the term odd couple: a reality television star and a drawl-speaking Southerner who’d rather bow hunt or play baseball than anything else in the world. Jessica appeared in MTV mega-hits “The Real World” and “The Challenge.” She starred under her maiden name, McCain, and earned a cult following.

Fame faded and Jessica’s mother wondered whether she would ever marry or have kids. To calm her down, Jessica downloaded Bumble and swiped right on a minor-league pitcher playing for the Astros’ High-A affiliate in Fayetteville, N.C.

“I completely turned my whole life around for him,” Jessica said. “I was working in Aspen as a chef, had a company car and a mountainside condo and was…