For nine innings this summer, The Denver Post will share stories that capture our state’s love of baseball. We spend the fifth inning with Rockies relief pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, who is passing on his love of the game.

The major-league pitcher joined seventh-graders and grandparents alike to celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of little Sammy Weiss.

“He was taking part in the hora and all the chazerai at your typical Bar Mitzvah,” said Weiss, now 19, using a word that means “the usual stuff” in Yiddish. “He jumped right in and didn’t look back.”

During spring trainings in Florida, Michael Weiss was the Minnesota Twins’ doctor; one Twin became part of the doctor’s family.

LaTroy Hawkins, today a Colorado Rockies relief pitcher, would dine at the Weiss household, sometimes attending Sammy’s youth baseball games — an ump once even ejected the passionate big-leaguer from the stands. When Hawkins left the Twins to sign with the Chicago Cubs for the 2004 season, a heartbroken Sammy refused to talk to him for a month. When Dr. Weiss himself underwent a major surgery, Hawkins stayed with the family at the hospital for 10 hours.

And when 13-year-old Sammy had his Bar Mitzvah in 2008, Hawkins, his wife and daughter all flew to Florida, even though it was Hawkins’ birthday weekend.

“In a Jewish kid’s life, a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is basically the thing you work up to,” Sammy said. “I think he felt somewhat of an ownership, almost a pseudo-parental-fraternal role for me. … But it’s not even as much about having a professional baseball player as a friend, but more the quality of person that he is. You just absorb every single characteristic of himself into you, and as a kid, you can mold yourself in his image.”

The story about LaTroy and Sammy is cool on its own. But then consider that Hawkins has influenced so many others just like Sammy. The 42-year-old Rockies reliever has passed down his passion for playing baseball and living life the right way.

He’s retiring this fall, but his legacy is his web. Not the one inside his Rawlings, but the one that reaches out to 10 major-league clubhouses, from the Bay Area to the Bronx; to Sammy; to a fan club that became family; to rookies he took to buy their first major-league suits; to the future rookies those one-time rookies then took for their first suits; to his actual family — his wife, Anita, his 22-year-old stepson, Dakari, and his 13-year-old daughter, Troi.