Born to Play tells us about Dustin Pedroia, who always had to prove himself through his toughness and his resolve, his attitude and his heart.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

We like to believe that great stories can still exist in sports, that kids can overcome the odds.

It’s at the core of most sports movies, this belief that if you work hard and keep believing, then amazing things can happen. Play the music and roll the credits and everyone goes home happy, hooray for Hollywood.

The only problem?

The race usually goes to the quickest, and the battle to the strongest, no matter what the movies tell us.

The reality too often is that most sports dreams go someplace to die.

Except for Dustin Pedroia’s.

Suffice to say that Pedroia does not look like a professional athlete. He’s not big. He’s not cut. He doesn’t impress you with wondrous athleticism. There is still a boyish quality to him. He wouldn’t stand out physically in a local softball league, never mind in a major-league locker room.

So maybe it’s only fitting that he starts his new book, Born To Play — written with Edward. J. Delaney, a professor of communications and creative writing at Roger Williams University — with a scene from the 2007 World Series.

But it’s not a scene that has anything to do with one of the actual games. Nor does it even take place on the field. It happens at the gate at Coors Field in Denver, when the guard at the game looks at this guy who looks too short, too young, too something to actually be a player and demands an ID. Even when Pedroia gives it to him he doesn’t believe it. He looks at it like he’s a bouncer and Pedroia is trying to use a fake ID to get into a club.

It’s a very telling scene, a metaphor for Pedroia’s baseball life.

The little kid who always had to prove himself, every step of the way, through his toughness and his resolve, his attitude and his heart.

The little guy who now sits at the very top of the world he once created for himself.

This is Pedroia’s story, and it begins in northern California, in a small town where he was the second child of hardworking blue-collar parents who owned a tire store. There’s nothing that seems very remarkable in his childhood except for one thing: He always could hit a baseball.

He could hit it as a young kid.

He could hit as a 13-year-old when he played in a junior-college fall-league game, brought along by his older brother to fill out a team.

He could hit as a sophomore in high school even though he probably weighed only 120 pounds.

And what comes across is his amazing confidence, this belief in himself that never seemed to waver, regardless of his lack of size, regardless of what anyone else thought about him. That, and a family support system that was always there. Consider this from the ride home after he had played in an unofficial junior-college game when he was just 13.

“On the way home, I was tired,” he writes, “and I could tell that my parents were quietly proud of the way I played. That was the great part of growing up, the way they were there when I had new experiences. It was another long drive from a baseball game, and something to talk about and laugh about. All the good things that happened when I was a kid had something to do with baseball.”

It was the next year that he began to be noticed. He got invited to the Area Code Games, a showcase event, and made the all-tournament team. When college recruiting started shortly afterward, he had 65 calls the first day. One was from Arizona State, one of the best baseball schools in the country.

Later, he found out that he’d been helped by an uncle who had become the defensive coordinator for the Arizona State football team and had become his unofficial advocate.

This from Born To Play:

“Hey guys, you need to check out my nephew. He’s awesome.”

Coach Murphy said, “Well, how big is he?”

My uncle said, “He’s 5-foot-7, 130 pounds.”

Coach Murphy said, “Well, we don’t really need a batboy.”

He got the scholarship to Arizona State, but it wasn’t the last time his lack of size was an issue. As a high school senior, he was both MVP of his league and an all-stater, but he wasn’t drafted that spring and wasn’t even part of the discussion.

“I felt that more than anything else, it had to do with my size,” he writes. “I had played well enough that there had to be a reason, that I wasn’t 6-4. No one believed I’d ever have the body to play major-league baseball. … It was kind of a shock, but it didn’t change my goal. I wanted to make baseball my work, and I was just going to have to prove everyone wrong.”

We all know the rest of the story.

Or at least the broad brush strokes, anyway.

He went on to be the Pac-10 player of the year in college. He went on to be drafted by the Red Sox in 2004, and two years later he was in Fenway Park. He was the rookie of the year in 2007, and last year was the MVP of the American League.

He proved the entire world was wrong.

Pedroia has done more than that.

But the attitude remains.

As if even after all the awards and all the fame, Pedroia has more to prove, as if the snubs of the past are his moveable feast.

Remember that draft in 2001? The one in which he wasn’t picked?

Well, when he was named the MVP last year “in fourth place was the guy who had been the top pick in 2001, the year no one had even taken a chance on me — Joe Mauer.”

No one else may remember.

But he does.

The fuel that still drives Dustin Pedroia, the fuel that runs through Born To Play.

breynold@projo.com