Warwick’s Dan Wheeler pitches for the Rays in Game Seven of the ALCS against the Red Sox.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

He pitched against the Red Sox in the playoffs, and the Phillies in the World Series, but for the last few days or so, Dan Wheeler has been back in Warwick. Back in the Lakewood house he grew up in.

“This is home,” he says. “Rhode Island always has been home.”

Sometime it’s easy to forget that.

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the fact that Wheeler is one of our few ambassadors to the big leagues.

For he was never a huge name as a high school player, never was one of those kids whose adolescent accomplishments were serenaded by trumpets. He never was one of those kids who seemed sprinkled in stardust, someone whose career seemed destined to end up in big games in big stadiums.

But now he’s pitched in two out of the last four World Series, and who would have ever believed that back there when he was Pilgrim?

Not even Wheeler himself.

“I was always good in high school,” Wheeler says, “but never the best. There was nothing that stood out about me in high school.”

He ended up being second-team All-State in 1995, but it was Rhode Island high school baseball where the season is too short and too cold, and no one ever really throws enough, not really.

He also was one of those typical kids who grew up playing a variety of sports. Soccer. Wrestling. Basketball. He played them all, even though baseball was always the first love. He grew up on Post Road, across the street from the Warwick West Side Little League field, and was always playing Home Run Derby and other makeshift games as a kid.

In many ways, it was a typical Rhode Island story. His father drove a truck. His mother was a secretary at Rhode Island Hospital. His maternal grandfather came here in his teens from Ireland. His paternal grandfather was a boxer in Olneyville. His uncle, Mike Wheeler, is a police sergeant in Providence, head of the gang unit. These are the roots, and they run deep, as Rhode Island as frozen lemonade.

He grew up loving the Red Sox and hating the Yankees. He grew up going to Fenway a couple of times a year, a Rhode Island kid’s version of the Emerald City. And if he always had those childhood dreams of one day playing in the big leagues, back there as a high school kid, essentially throwing in the low 80s, that all seemed as far away as the moon.

Dan Wheeler, the kid from Pilgrim, was going to one day be a major-league pitcher?

Yeah, right.

But he got lucky.

He also played for Shields, one of the top American Legion teams in the state, one that was coached by Jim Dawber, who also had coached him in Little League. So he had good fundamentals. He also was 6-foot-3, about 200 pounds, the kind of size that stands out. And there were always scouts drifting through legion games, so he felt as if he were a part of baseball culture. Still, as a senior at Pilgrim, he knew he had to go somewhere to get noticed, somewhere where he could play year round.

As fate would have it, Gerry Habershaw, his coach at Pilgrim, had a connection at Central Arizona Junior College, and in the fall of ’95, Wheeler went there. It was 3,000 miles from home, and there were no guarantees.

But his life began to change.

For one thing, after just one year he essentially went from throwing in the low 80s to throwing in the low 90s, the baseball version of breaking the glass ceiling, courtesy of throwing year-round and being a year older.

More important, he had become a prospect.

He was drafted in the 34th round by Tampa Bay after his first year, signed after his second for $125,000.

“That meant I had a chance,” he says.

Two years later, in September of 1999, he was in the big leagues. He was just 21, just four years out of Pilgrim High School, and there he was for the Devil Rays playing in Camden Yards. Dan Wheeler, who had grown up playing imaginary games in his head on the Little League field across the street from his house in Warwick, dreaming his dreams, however far-fetched they may have seemed at the time, the kid who always had flown beneath the radar, even in his home state, was in the major leagues.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I couldn’t stop shaking. It meant the world to me.”

He essentially has been in the majors for a decade now, given a short stint in the minors, back when he had thought he had blown his only chance. He’s played for Tampa Bay, the Mets, the Astros, and now the Rays again. He began as a starter, but Steve Phillips, the Mets’ general manager in 2003, told him his best chance to get back to the big leagues was to go to the bullpen.

It was the right advice. He’s been in two World Series. He got the last out of the NLCS in 2005. The next year, he played for Team USA. He is married to the daughter of one of the Tampa Bay broadcasters. They live on the beach in Bel Air, Fla.. and they have two young boys — the kind of life that must have seemed unimaginable back there as a kid playing makeshift baseball games on the Little League field across the street from his house.

In short, he’s had a career that no one could have envisioned back there when he was just a high school kid at Pilgrim, just another Rhode Island kid who seemed to be playing the wrong sport in the wrong state.

All that, and he’s only 31.

“I don’t set too many goals for myself,” he says. “I want to make 70 appearances a year, stay healthy, and pitch until I’m 40.”

Still, he takes nothing for granted. So there are times when he tells himself to stay in the moment, appreciate where he is, how, in many ways, his baseball life has become like living in the middle of some childhood fantasy, the ones that used to run around inside his head as a kid.

The first time he went to Yankee Stadium, where he took countless pictures on a small camera. The first time he stood on the field in Fenway Park. All those snapshots from a kid’s imagination that have become his life, this life that’s taken him so far from that Little League field on Post Road where it all started.

“I still take moments when I think about where I am,” says Wheeler. “I try not to get too far away from those moments.”

For he knows how far he’s come, how incredibly far. Knows how high the odds he’s overcome to get where he is today, this great Rhode Island sports story, one of the best we have.

breynold@projo.com