WARWICK — Down the hall from the main office of Bishop Hendricken High School yesterday, a flat-screen television broadcast a sports Web site’s headline all day about Cumberland native Rocco Baldelli joining his “hometown” Boston Red Sox.

Hendricken had added its own headline above: “Congratulations & Welcome Home.”

Even Hendricken students who have never met Baldelli know he graduated from the all-boys Roman Catholic prep school in 2000 and look to him as a model of success. They noticed the MLB.com story on what they refer to as the “video board.”

“There’s no better feeling, no better representation that you can get from our school,” said Gian Paolella, a 17-year-old senior from East Greenwich.

The school is a baseball powerhouse, home of the current Division I state champions and proud that its team won the state championship four years in a row –– something no other Rhode Island school has done, according to the team’s pitching coach, Bill Campbell. That winning streak stretched from 1997 through 2000.

Those were the Baldelli years.

Yesterday, students were quick to share their connections to Baldelli. Some had met him once or twice –– and were in awe of him. Some knew a brother or the mother of the famous ballplayer or had a cousin who knew him. Some knew no one connected to Baldelli but still seemed to think of him as part of the family –– the Hendricken family that includes many father-son combinations who have graduated from the school and teachers who went to school together and now work at their alma mater.

Across the hall from the main office, in the school cafeteria, boys in dress shirts, ties and sport jackets pushed their lunches aside to talk Baldelli. They straightened their ties, refrained from eating, squared their shoulders and spoke with poise about one of their own.

“Rocco’s one of my favorite baseball players,” said Alex Cordeiro, 17, a senior from North Smithfield on the hockey team who said he, like nearly all the boys in the school, played baseball himself at one point –– in middle school. Cordeiro and the boys he ate lunch with yesterday describe themselves as big Red Sox fans –– and big Baldelli fans.

“Rocco’s a big topic at our school,” said Cordeiro, who unlike some of the boys around him, is one degree of separation away from the famous Baldelli. He knows Rocco Baldelli’s younger brother, Dante, and Cordeiro’s mother grew up in Cumberland and is friends with the Baldelli boys’ mother.

“And I played baseball in Rocco Baldelli’s backyard with his little brother, Dante,” Cordeiro said.

Hendricken students seem to love Baldelli for the baseball success and status he has brought the school, but for far more than that.

He has overcome adversity, battling and now successfully controlling a mitochondrial disorder that could have ended his playing career.

Paolella said Baldelli fans who aren’t part of the Hendricken family may not even realize that he’s overcoming a debilitating disease. Knowing he has done so makes Paolella proud of Baldelli, he said. Others facing such a disease could have given up, but “Rocco didn’t,” he said.

“I think he’s a great role model for people, not just because of what he possesses with his skills, but what he’s overcome is more important, I think,” he said.

“I think he represents Bishop Hendricken in the right way,” said Billy Baron, 18, of East Greenwich, whose dad, Jim Baron, coaches the University of Rhode Island basketball team.

Although the boys heard school leaders congratulate Baldelli for joining the Red Sox on the morning announcements yesterday, it’s a pretty safe bet that most from this close-knit school already knew one of their own was coming home. Cousins, friends and classmates were texting each other Thursday afternoon, boys said, as Baldelli was becoming a member of the storied Red Sox franchise.

At the front of the school yesterday afternoon, as a thousand boys changed classes, they walked in a calm and orderly fashion past the video board. No loud shouts in this school corridor. Dignity. Respect. A bit of elegance in the swinging ties and the sport jackets.

Rocco Baldelli could have been right there with them, said Campbell, his former pitching coach, a retired union steamfitter who was in Hendricken’s first graduating class, 1962, and now works in the school’s maintenance department.

“You’d never know he was a Major League Baseball player,” said Campbell, who has Baldelli’s cell number saved in the phone he wears on his belt. “He’s just a regular guy, you know, doing something he likes to do.”

kbramson@projo.com