Baseball was always there, an integral part of the three men’s childhood and teenage years. All Baby Boomers and sons of World War II veterans, they followed America’s Pastime during the sport’s post-war era, an age when DiMaggio and Mantle and the Yankees ruled October, Hammerin’ Hank was just getting started on his home run odyssey and the Athletics were migrating west from the City of Brotherly Love through Kansas City, finally settling in Oakland. The South Philly kid, Richard Levin, rooted for the A’s – until they left southeast Pennsylvania – and he still relishes the first baseball game he attended at old Shibe Park. Connie Mack was in the final years of a Hall of Fame managing career, and later Jimmy Dykes and Eddie Joost skippered bad A’s teams that rounded out the franchise’s Philadelphia tenure. “I think we were the last A’s family on our block,” says Levin, whose family moved to Los Angeles when he was 12. “They were all Phillies fans.” Bob DuPuy’s Connecticut home was an amalgam of baseball allegiances. The young DuPuy was a diehard Yankees fan, his father Alfred, the president of a New Haven wholesale paper company, pulled for the New…