This baseball life started on Highway 99 as it heads north through the flat central farming valley of central California en route to San Francisco or Oakland.



As a boy as young as 5, Brad Mills and his three brothers rode with their parents as their father made the four-drive from Exeter to Candlestick Park or Oakland-Alameda Coliseum to see the Giants or A’s. En route, Dad would talk baseball, the players, the stars, how they played the game and what made them major leaguers.



“Because of that, I fell in love with the sport, at a very young age,” Mills said recently from his ranch in Granbury, Texas. As Mills spoke, he was just a little less than two weeks from heading to his seventh spring training with the Cleveland Indians, continuing a long baseball journey that now has him as the bench coach and trusted confidant to manager Terry Francona.



It’s a journey that has taken Mills from a two-story home surrounded by orange groves in the...