Those standards and no-nonsense ways, said Jim Sveum, Dale's older brother by three years, come directly from what they learned from their parents, Sandrea Kay and George, an ex-Marine and president of his local Teamsters Union.

"You take care of business, which is what Dale does," said Jim, a labor relations representative in Northern California. "Our father taught us work ethic from the beginning, and Dale was very focused, very intense, even as a kid.

"He was always playing baseball, football and basketball with older kids and sometimes he got criticized for that, but he never let that deter him. He took care of business."

Dale Sveum is the undisputed best athlete Pinole Valley High School in the San Francisco Bay area ever produced, and that includes Heisman Trophy winner Gino Torretta and former White Sox player and commentator Chris Singleton.

An All-American in football and baseball, Sveum also was a standout in basketball and the best golfer at the school by far, though he didn't have time to play for the golf team. The track and swim coaches also wanted him.

As a sophomore, Sveum threw an early 80-yard touchdown pass on the first play of the game in Oakland Coliseum to carry his team to an upset victory in the sectional championship. "The kid was fantastically composed and calm under pressure," recalled Jim Erickson, an assistant football and baseball coach at Pinole Valley at the time who still keeps in touch with Sveum.

Football was his first love. And Erickson remembers that in a short speech last year at the high school, when it inducted Sveum into its Hall of Fame, Sveum told the crowd that even with a World Series ring, he would love to play "just one more football game."

But Pinole baseball coach and Chicago native Mike Lafferty remembers his gifts at shortstop.

"Scouts would ask me, 'How come he doesn't get excited and jump around like the other kids?'" Lafferty recalled. "But he was always on an even keel. I used to have scouts come watch him. With other kids, I couldn't do it, they couldn't play, but the pressure never bothered Dale."

In California's North-South all-star baseball game in his senior year, Sveum, a natural righty, stepped to the left side of the plate in the top of the ninth inning and hit a 420-foot, game-winning grand slam.

He had just taught himself to be a switch-hitter that year.

When it came time to decide what to do after high school, Sveum was offered a football scholarship to Arizona State, where he could have also played baseball, and Pinole had visions of Sveum as an NFL quarterback. But a $100,000 signing bonus as a first-round draft choice and the 25th pick overall of the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1982 amateur draft convinced him otherwise, and four years later, he was in the bigs, playing 91 games as a utility infielder.