Editor’s note: Second in a season-long series on the 25th year of Major League Baseball in Denver.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Rockies’ most improbable fan is a homeless ex-con who lives in an abandoned batting cage. Angelo Peterson was 4 years old when he first picked up a bat. “I’ve been awake ever since,” he said. Now he gives hitting advice to center fielder Charlie Blackmon — and Blackmon listens. He goes for coffee with pitcher Tyler Chatwood to talk about fastball grips.

Angelo, with half his teeth, a leathered face and a stiff mustache, chats with a rustic logic about the fine points of baseball. The Rockies listen.

“Baseball really teaches you about trying to be perfect and how to deal with not being perfect,” Angelo said. “I believe God intended perfection. The good, right and true all together. It exists everywhere.

“But in baseball, it changes all the time. So I’m searching.”

This is the Rockies’ 25th season, but the personalities in their orbit are still arriving. The fans and acolytes who form the fabric of their extended family collect in the wake of games, outside the chalk of the foul lines. They are a menagerie of oddballs and zealots.

Angelo is a baseball lifer, a fan with his face pressed to the fences on the back fields. He is as devoted to his favorite team as they are to him. For 10 years, he has seen more practices at Rockies spring training than even the club’s scouts — first in Tucson, then in Scottsdale. He is “Angelo” to nearly every person at Salt River Fields.

“There is a little something that everybody can learn from Angelo,” Blackmon said.

“He is a unique guy”

Tall tales fill the pages of baseball’s history. Did Babe Ruth really call his home run shot at Wrigley Field? Did Jimmy Blake really tear the cover off the ball for the Mudville Nine that day?

Angelo, 53, said he once pitched a baseball 121 mph. That would be a record. He recently adopted an Aroldis Chapman-style leg kick in his windup that Angelo estimates can increase his velocity to somewhere near 135 mph. At Rockies camp, he’s the guy in black jeans and sneakers practicing his delivery next to the bleacher seats.

“I listen to all his stories,” Rockies owner Dick Monfort said. “Many of them are somewhat hard to believe. He is a unique guy.”

But buried behind Angelo’s bombast is a reasoned grasp of the game. Chatwood was acquired from the Angels in 2011. He has heard all of Angelo’s pitching grip tutorials and windup philosophies.

“He stands above the bullpens. So right away in my first camp, I hear some guy up there yelling at me what to do,” Chatwood said. “I tried to ignore him, but he kept going and going. So then I’d fire questions back at him and he has answers.

“You just take Angelo and have fun with him. We enjoy him being around.”

Chatwood and Angelo regularly rally for coffee at Starbucks near the Salt River complex in the early mornings before a spring day begins. The topic is always pitching.

“He’s telling me what grip he’s using and what stuff he likes to throw,” Chatwood said. “He’s intelligent. So I’ll listen to him. In his mind, it makes sense. And when you start thinking about it from his perspective, it does make a lot of sense, what he’s trying to tell you.”

Wandering to reality

In baseball, home is always in the same spot, a 360-foot trip around the infield. But Angelo can never go home again. That’s why he is sleeping in a deserted batting cage behind an auto parts shop in Scottsdale, about a mile from Rockies headquarters.

Angelo is “from the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere” outside Ryder, N.D. By the time he turned 4 years old, “in the Hank Aaron era,” he said, he was in school in Chicago and playing baseball. His mother worked three jobs and his best friend was shot in the chest, he said.

Trouble, he thought, was all around, so Angelo dropped out of school. He was 9. “And my mom, of course, beat me up for not going to school. But eventually we sat down and had a talk,” he said. “She let me go at that point. I decided I would seek the truth.”

That truth, at first, was difficult to capture and Angelo, as a young man, entered his “period of insanity.” Jail was an open invitation, for mostly petty charges until a burglary rap in 1986 landed him a 26-year sentence in Illinois, he said. He served 12 1/2 years. He can still recite George Bernard Shaw readings and Bible and Koran passages that gave him some peace inside locked doors.

“Jesus wandering around the desert for 40 days? You really have to go insane to overcome your ignorance and truly end up in reality,” Angelo said. “I’d been trying to figure out the world for so long.”

In 1999, he left prison and drove straight to Seattle to visit his mother, he said. He hadn’t seen her in 15 years. And he got a job working construction. But he ran into some street kids and, soon after, he said, he was in and out of jail for petty charges the next two years.

“I don’t like to call my mom because it makes me feel so guilty about my life,” he said. “It makes me want to go home. But I’m busy trying to do stuff. Hopefully, I’m getting closer to having a real life for myself. I’m trying.”

No fixed motive blew Angelo in a circuitous route from Seattle to Tucson, where he arrived in 2007. There was the 1960 GMC bus converted into a motor home he helped drive down the coast with a woman he knew, and the marijuana grow farm he helped set up for an English professor in Humboldt County, Calif. And baseball. Always baseball.

Angelo found a spot to sleep in a park near Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, then the home of the Rockies.

“And I really liked the people,” he said. “It seemed to me the Rockies had a much more old-fashioned type mind-set in their being. And I’m still a country kid from North Dakota. So I liked them.”

A signpost toward baseball

Living on the streets sowed a loneliness in Angelo that was difficult to let go. There was a hierarchy to the homeless population, with Angelo on the outside of outsiders. “And there’s always some jerk who wants to beat up people,” he said. “I just play baseball, you know?”

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“I was laying there, and I see this light. And it keeps growing. And it turns into this fireball meteorite coming straight at me,” he said. “I could hear it, even. I was like, ‘OK, this is it.’ And then it flipped and turned and went floating off into the desert.”

It was a signpost, Angelo calls them, and it pointed him to Hi Corbett Field. When a club convenes for spring training, baseball bubbles up like a thawing creek. Pitchers file out for long toss and hitters swing off tees; coaches with clipboards and scouts with radar guns mingle around the margins. And fans watch it all play out a few feet away on the other side of the backstop fence.

Angelo tried to tweak Blackmon’s swing early on.

“Me and Angelo go way back,” said Blackmon. “He used to really, really bug me.”

One of Blackmon’s bosses his rookie season was minor-league coordinator Anthony Sanders, who always treated Angelo with respect.

“And I couldn’t figure out how he could have so much patience with this guy all the time,” Blackmon said. “But Angelo is always positive. So I tried to implement that in my life. And it worked. He helped me figure out how I need to manage my emotions better.”

The Rockies decamped to fancier digs in 2011, leaving Tucson for a glittery new ballpark in Scottsdale. Angelo followed, finding a spot to sleep on a concrete sidewalk at the batting cages down the road. His adoption into the club’s family was seamless.

During a Cactus League game a few years ago, a new security service that patrols Salt River Fields spotted Angelo as a target. He often carries a briefcase of overstuffed belongings, and his longer hair can make him stick out among the tanned spring-breakers.

“No! None of that,” said Mary O’Dell, a longtime usher at Salt River and Coors Field, scolding the new patrolmen. “He is my friend. He’s with us. He might be homeless, but right now, this is his home.”

Part of the family

A ticket is always waiting for Angelo at the Salt River gates for Cactus League games, left by Chatwood or O’Dell or Tony Luciano, two of the team of ushers who know him well. Angelo usually travels to Denver sometime in the summer by bus for games at Coors Field.

But Angelo never wants more than baseball. “He’s never asked me for anything,” Blackmon said.

Two years ago, Blackmon stepped on the 16th Street Mall bus on his way to a night game at Coors Field. He was an all-star by then, with a recognizable bushy beard. But it wasn’t Blackmon who was noticed.

“I looked across the bus and sure enough, Angelo is right there,” Blackmon said. “And we immediately recognized each other and it was like, ‘Hey man! How are you doing?’ It was the unlikeliest of reunions.”

Like the tree grove behind the fence at Coors Field, Angelo has grown to be a part of the Rockies over time, part of a family bonded by a shared appreciation for the game. In 24 years, the Rockies played in one World Series and have never won their division. Their value, among the extended cast of characters in an ongoing play, is personal.

“Somebody asked me, ‘Why do you hang out with the Rockies? They’re losers,’ ” Angelo said. “Well, I don’t think so. And I have to believe in the goodness of the people up here.

“There are more important things than baseball, unfortunately. But the only thing I’ve ever loved doing in my life was playing baseball,” he said. “I love getting lost in that little moment where everything around you is gone and you’re nonexistent and at the end of it, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was awesome.’ ”