This is a baseball story, of course, but it's also a love story — 35 years of marriage through thick and thin and even Cleveland.

Well, to be accurate about this relationship, you've got to tack on another 10 years, going back to when Mike Hargrove was in eighth grade and Sharon Rupprecht was in seventh, back in Perryton, Texas.

Mike had spied Sharon at the swimming pool, and Sharon had seen Mike at the firecracker stand, and they both liked what they saw. That fall at a Perryton High football game, Mike sent an emissary to ask Sharon to sit with him, the highest compliment of all when the Friday Night Lights are shining on the Texas panhandle.

"Someone came up and said Mike Hargrove wanted to meet me," recalls Sharon. "I said, 'I'm not positive who that is.' They said he was sitting by Don Williams, and I said, 'I wish it was Don Williams. He's really cute.' Then I looked at Mike, and said, 'He'll do.' "

Mike sat quietly watching the game, while Sharon laughed at her own jokes ("I still do," she admitted.) Afterward, "I thanked him for allowing me to be seen in public with him. I went to leave, and he said, "Sharon, come here."

They were the first words he had spoken to her. The next: "Will you go steady with me?"

"And we've been going steady ever since," said Sharon.

Steady through 19 cities and 13 states and 97 different moves (yes, she's keeping tally), the latest of which, just this past week, brought the Hargroves to their new digs in Seattle, where on Monday Mike Hargrove launches his Mariners managerial career.

Sharon will be in the stands, just as she is for most of the home games he's played, coached and managed (though she still rues the day Mike called from the clubhouse to tell her not to bother to come out to Cleveland Stadium on a gloomy, rainy afternoon; that night, the Indians' Len Barker threw a perfect game).

"There's never been a couple God created that was so perfect for each other," said Rich Donnelly, the Brewers' third-base coach and one of the Hargrove's closest friends.

The story of Seattle's new manager is also the story of Perryton — "our little hometown," says Sharon. "It's flatter than a pancake. Four traffic lights, full of family and friends you started kindergarten with and graduated high school with. In Perryton, you're in a little cocoon of being totally protected and not very worldly."

It's a town so small, "it doesn't even have a Wal-Mart," jokes Jim Page, Mike's closest friend, who lives across the street from Dudley Hargrove, Mike's 78-year-old father.

What it does have, though, besides the farms and oil fields that sustain most of the 8,000 residents, is what they still like to call, with pride, small-town values.

"It's a little red-necky," says Page, and then thinks better of the term. " 'Country' is better than red neck. We're in the Bible Belt. It's pretty much family and friends. Things are simple and laid back. No one gets too excited about anything."

Check out the Perryton Web site ("Wheatheart of the Nation") and you'll discover that it's in the county, Ochiltree, that had the highest percentage of votes in the country for George W. Bush in the last election.

You'll find out it's the hometown of Hank The Cowdog, the popular children's series by John R. Erickson, a Perryton resident.

And, they boast, it's the hometown of Mike Hargrove, manager of the Seattle Mariners, who after a 13-year career with the Rangers (where he was known, to his chagrin, as "The Hot Roman Candle From the Texas Panhandle" after a Jimmy Buffett lyric), Padres and Indians, and after managing the Indians to two pennants and two outs — two stinking outs — from a World Series title, he is still a Perryton boy at heart.

"There's nothing outstanding, nothing extraordinary," he mused of Perryton, sitting in his office this spring in Peoria, Ariz. "It's just a good, solid, conservative, independent-thinking mix of people in a small town."

And Hargrove, by all accounts, is a good, solid, conservative, independent-thinking manager — and man.

"I don't know about the good and solid part," he smiles, "but conservative and independent-thinking, maybe."

An aficionado of the Chip Hilton kids' books, which he read voraciously as a youngster, Hargrove led the Hilton life — team captain, all-state quarterback, voted Most Handsome, Mr. P.H.S. and Best All-Around as a senior.

Sharon Hargrove

Says Page: "Mike puts a lot of value on looking someone in the eye and saying, 'This is what we expect of you.' I think players respond to that. There's not enough of that anymore."

Says Sharon Hargrove: "I can honestly say he's not changed one bit in any way. He doesn't have an ego now, and he didn't have one growing up. He still cares about everyone around him, and he did that growing up, too."

When Hargrove was faced with an extraordinary crisis early in his Indians managing career, the boating deaths of Cleveland pitchers Steve Olin and Tim Crews in 1993, he was so compassionate in his dealings with the team, that finally general manager John Hart had to gently urge him to focus on managing again.

"Mike was like a no-show until midseason," Hart would say.

Sharon, it should be noted, became a leading supporter of the two widowed wives, helping them get their shattered lives back together.

"She's just the best," Hargrove says. "I honestly don't know where I'd be without her."

The family has faced two baseball crises, the first coming when Hargrove was fired by Cleveland in 1999, coming off a season in which the Indians won 97 games and their fifth consecutive division title, but blew a two-games-to-none lead to Boston in the Division Series amidst criticism of Hargrove's strategy.

Hart, with whom Hargrove had, by most accounts, clashed frequently, said that the team needed "a new voice," but Hargrove still won't accept that rationale.

"It probably ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me," he said, "but I still think it was the wrong thing to do. I can still get very angry about it, when I think about it. But it's long enough ago, I don't hate anybody, I don't hold a grudge against anybody."

He didn't have long to fume. Baltimore contacted him three days later, and three weeks after that he was given a three-year contract to manage the Orioles. But with far less talent than he had in Cleveland, Hargrove was fired again in 2003, after four losing seasons.

Hargrove told reporters he might not manage again. He took a consulting job with the Indians, and settled into a civilian's life at their Richfield, Ohio, home. He bought a Harley ("it was either that or a girlfriend, and I figured Sharon would like a motorcycle a lot better," Hargrove joked) and went with Page to a motorcycle rally in New Mexico, where Sharon made sure he was about the only one wearing a helmet.

He grew a goatee, played a lot of golf, and found out how the other half lived.

"I got to be home when my daughter came home from school. I was able to eat supper at home on a beautiful spring evening, and after supper walk around the deck, and then sit with my wife and watch the sun go down."

It was a rewarding experience for a man who deeply felt the pain of leaving his five children so often while he went on road trips.

"He's so much more a better father than he gives himself credit for," Sharon said.

In a Cleveland Plain Dealer Story from 1996, Sharon told of a time that their son, Andy, then 14, got in some trouble at school that prompted a call home from his teacher. Andy told Mike, "People say I can get away with anything because I'm Mike Hargrove's son."

Sharon Hargrove told the Plain Dealer, "Mike put his head in his hands and just sobbed and sobbed. He never wanted his name or occupation to be a liability to his kids."

Here's how his daughter Pam, then 16, described Hargrove's parenting in another Plain Dealer story: "First he yells, loud. Then he repeats the same thing in a softer voice. Then he gives you a bear hug and repeats the same thing, only he's telling you, 'You're a beautiful girl and I only want the best for you.' I imagine that except for the hug and the beautiful-girl part, he's pretty much the same with them (his players)."

With one more daughter, Shelly, still at home — she's a 15-year-old sophomore, and will be allowed to finish out her high school in Ohio — and Andy, now a senior first baseman on Kent State University's baseball team, it was tempting to keep living the homebody life.

But the hurt that followed his Orioles firing had subsided, and the desire to manage started to burn again, especially when the Mariners called shortly after firing Bob Melvin last October.

"There were just things I was tired of dealing with," he said of his mindset after leaving Baltimore. "And I didn't know if I had the energy to try to do it again, because of that. I think it was more out of frustration than anything. I went to camp the next year with the Indians and realized real quickly, 'Yeah, I want to do it again.' "

Ask him about his evolution as a manager, he says, pointedly, "Maybe I'm a little tougher discipline-wise. It's kind of human nature — you give someone an inch, they want to take a mile. I don't care who you are. I've found with players, you have to be real careful about giving them that inch."

Donnelly loves to tell a story he thinks sums up Hargrove — and his relationship with Sharon, too. It seems that one night in Renden, Texas, the two men and their wives went out for a night of country dancing at a place called Chip's Dance Land. Mike slipped off to the bathroom, and, well, let Donnelly pick up the story.

"He comes out, and he's got this guy around the neck. The guy's bleeding — his face looks like cherry pie. Mike drags him over to the bar and says, 'Give this man a beer.'

"I say, 'What the hell happened?' Mike said, 'Oh, he was pulling the wood off the wall in the bathroom. I said, 'Hey, don't do that.' He told me to go to hell. I'm sorry, but I hit him.'

"Sharon says, 'Oh, yeah, you're the big, tough, major-league cowboy. You're the Matt Dillon of Renden.'

"Mike had his temper. Still does. He saw something that wasn't right, and that's the way he corrected it. But it was like the old cowboys — he took him to the bar and bought him a beer. I was saying, 'That's perfect.' "

And here's the kicker, the part that still makes Donnelly grin: "The next day, Sharon made him call me, the other guy that was with us, and our wives, at home, and apologize to everyone."

Going steady, indeed.

"She's just perfect for Mike — the anti-Mike," said Donnelly of Sharon. "You walk in their house, and they'll be making fun of each other, like the players in the clubhouse. Then five minutes later, they're sitting there holding hands.

"I tell Mike, 'Why don't you be the first guy to hire his wife as a dugout coach?' You know what? They'd fight the whole game, but they'd get it right."