OAKLAND – Glenallen Hill never knew what it was like to play catch with his dad. Nor did the father take the son to a Santa Cruz ball field and hit him grounders.

Yet, before you think this is another story about a deadbeat who wasn’t there for his kid, stop. Glenallen Hill didn’t have the chance to try and sting Felton Hill’s hands with a hard throw or tell him to hit the two-hoppers harder. But dig this: without the father, the son wouldn’t have made it much farther than Santa Cruz.

We all know Felton Hill. Well, not really. But we know men like him. Therefore, we know Felton. Men toughened by a hard life of work who keep to themselves. Men who are very proud of their kids but don’t make a habit of telling everyone about it.

“I never played catch with my dad and he never hit a ball to me,” Glenallen says through steely eyes that lock onto yours so hard you can feel the back of your sockets burn. “But he came to every game and stood out there and watched me.”

Felton Hill, who lost his father, Earley Hill, in a mill accident, when he was seven and who himself went to work at 14, stood off to the side at Santa Cruz and watched in silence. And when it was time to take Glenallen home, Felton didn’t tell Glenallen his hands were too high on the bat, that he dropped a pass or missed a layup.

“A couple of times he asked me if I had a good time,” Glenallen recalls.

Hill, who is very big and strong, then looks you right in the eye and says, “The most important person in my career is my father.”

At that point, the 35-year-old Glenallen isn’t the man who has helped save the Yankee season with 12 titanic homers produced by a short swing in the first 70 at-bats in Pinstripes. The biceps that are bigger than dock rope look small. An upper body so sculpted that it could be made of form-fitted plastic, recoils. Even the stare has lost its lasers. At this moment, at 9:30 on a weekday morning in a sleepy Yankee clubhouse, Glenallen is a boy in Santa Cruz waiting to take his cue from Felton, a man so quiet the son calls him Moses.

“I wanted him to have it better than I did,” Felton says from his home in Santa Cruz, where he and his wife, Francile, raised six kids. “But I wanted him to earn what he got. I wasn’t going to hand it to him.”

Felton worked the Arkansas oil fields when he was 14. Later he drove 50-foot trucks throughout the south. Then it was into construction. Now, 71, Felton has the voice of a man who understands you get exactly out of life what you put into it.

And a voice that has no quit in it.

“One thing I remember my dad telling me was when I asked him if I could play, he said, ‘If you are going to play, don’t quit.’ I never forgot that.”

One of two high school players to be offered full scholarships in football and baseball to Arizona State – Reggie Jackson was the other – Glenallen has never quit. Well-traveled and with his seventh big league team (two stints with the Cubs) since reaching the majors with the Blue Jays in 1989, Glenallen has seen the twisted way major league baseball works and at times, when his friends ask him why he isn’t making a whole lot more money than he is, wonders about the profession he chose.

Then, it all comes back to Felton.

“The way he raised me, the way he talked to me and showed me things that he was trying to explain instead of just telling me not to do stuff,” said Glenallen, who is in his 11th big-league season. “He showed me cause and effect. My father was smart enough to realize that I was a kid who could handle freedom and he extended it to me and I appreciated that. He didn’t have to say a whole lot to me but he was there to support me at every moment.”

As Glenallen progressed into a two-sport star at Santa Cruz, Felton was watching the youngest of his three sons develop into a man.

“I came from the old school and I wanted him to have freedom to do some things,” Felton says.

Letting Glenallen decide for himself robbed Felton of having Glenallen go to ASU.

“I have no regrets about him,” Felton said. “I wanted him to go to college but he said, ‘I can always go back to school and the Blue Jays are offering me money.’ I wanted him to get a good education but I never said anything about it. He never gave me a problem, never was disobedient. He wanted his freedom and I gave it to him. I was a bridge for him.”

Hill the big-league player has always been an interesting study. Some say he should have been a lot better player than he is; others insist he has gotten the most out of his abilities. The detractors bring up his defense; the supporters point to his power that has been prominently displayed as a Yankee.

Since he joined the Yankees, Hill has displayed the respect Felton says he had since he was a lad. One look at the serious attitude in the clubhouse and Hill cut off his mini-dreadlocks.

At first blush, you peg Glenallen for a loner, a tag he insist isn’t correct.

“I beat to my own drum, but I am not a loner,” says Hill, who counts Giants superstar Barry Bonds and former Giant second baseman and current coach Robby Thompson as his closest friends in baseball. Hill was a Giant from 1995-97. “I love hanging out with my teammates and going through the battles.”

“The last time I saw him in Chicago, he gave me a big hug,” Thompson said. “A couple of [Cubs] were standing around and he said, ‘This is the guy who taught me how the game should be played. You talk about compliments, that was pretty awesome. It made my day.”

Felton is at the mercy of who the Yankees are playing in order to see his son on television. Yet, he doesn’t need to see Glenallen to know all these years later that he raised Glenallen the right way.

“I couldn’t give him everything, but I gave him the necessities,” Felton explained.

Including the freedom to be his own man.