Dave Hollins defined Macho Row for the 1993 Phillies. He wants his son to chart a more pleasant course.

A series in St. Louis presented a perfect chance for the Phillies to entice their second-round pick, who grew up nearby and was flirting with the idea of playing college basketball. So they gave the teenager a uniform and sent him to third base at Busch Stadium in June 1993 to take grounders and taste the majors a few hours before the game started.

There was just one problem: Third base belonged to Dave Hollins.

Hollins, wound tighter than the seams of the ball, soon emerged from the dugout for batting practice to see the kid in his spot. He had just returned from a broken hand — Hollins rushed back after missing just two weeks — and didn’t have time for pleasantries. He told the draft pick to scram.

“I said ‘What the [bleep] are you doing?,’” Hollins said. “Like a jerk, I ran him out of there.”

That was how Hollins played — “I was really unapproachable,” he said — but it worked. He lived on Macho Row, spent 12 seasons in the majors, and was an All-Star when that wacky, wonderful bunch of throwbacks won the 1993 pennant. He hated pitchers, didn’t have much time for reporters, and cared even less for teenagers who were in his way.

“That was Dave,” said Larry Bowa, the intense shortstop for the 1980 champions and the just-as-intense third-base coach for the ‘93 Phils. “It could have been Mike Schmidt walking in there and he would’ve said the same thing.”

But more than 30 years is enough time to change. The 57-year-old Hollins has mellowed and is no longer the guy who growled through that magical summer when the Phillies went from worst to first.

Hollins can usually be found in a lawn chair behind the outfield fence at high school ball fields in South Carolina, watching his son chase his own big-league dreams.

Beau Hollins is a 6-foot-4, 225-pounder who hits 400-foot home runs and throws a blazing fastball. The 18-year-old is a switch hitter who plays first base and pitches left-handed for River Bluff High School in Lexington, S.C.

A high school senior, Beau Hollins is signed to play at the University of South Carolina — the same school his father attended — and expects to be a major-league draft pick in July. And as Dave Hollins watches his son from that lawn chair, he realizes how far he has come from Macho Row.

“I was too intense. Meaning I could have been a better player if I backed off a little bit,” Hollins said. “I overdid it. I hated everybody and then the persona grew. I want my boys to be different because they’ll play better. They have enough of my genes that they’re intense. But I always tell them, ‘I don’t care what happens in the game. I know how good you are. We’ll get them tomorrow.’ I don’t want them beating themselves up like I used to do over a bad game.”

Hollins returned to the Phillies as a scout in 2009, traveling the East Coast to write reports about players in the majors and minors.

“I tried to make sure that I treated people really well when I came back to work in Philly because I knew how I had been,” Hollins said. “I played angry. That’s the way I was raised and the way I was taught. It was hard to break away, but finally I was able to see, ‘That’s not the way to do it.’ Even though guys say, ‘You can’t change. Look how far you got.’ I still say, ‘I could’ve been better or stayed healthier.’ ”

The scouting job had Hollins on the road for 25 days a month, but the gig had its perks: Unlike a coaching role, his scouting position allowed him to manipulate his schedule and be home for big events.

“I called it the best-kept secret in baseball,” Hollins said.

But the secret ended in November 2020. Hollins was laid off after 11 years when the Phils trimmed their scouting department. It was a gut punch. Hollins had just moved his family — Hollins and his wife, Kerri, have five children — to South Carolina and he was now without a job.

“It turned out to be a great thing for me and my family. It really did,” said Hollins, who receives a pension from Major League Baseball for accruing 10 years of service time. “I would have never quit or walked away from the job. And I really needed to at the time. It had to be taken away from me and that’s why I called it a blessing in disguise.

“I thanked John Middleton last summer. I worked on and off for the Phillies for three decades as a player and scout. What do I have to be bitter about?”

The timing was perfect: Beau Hollins, the youngest of Hollins’ children, was getting ready for high school. His dad could be home to throw him batting practice, travel with him to tournaments across the country, sit in that lawn chair in the outfield, and remind him that it’s just a game.

Near the end of his career, Dave Hollins spent two seasons with the Angels and watched how stars like Jim Edmonds, Garret Anderson, Darin Erstad, and Tim Salmon played the game hard but remembered to smile. They were enjoying it. Perhaps it was OK, Hollins finally thought, to relax. And now he wants his son to play like those guys.

“He says that a lot,” Beau Hollins said. “He doesn’t want me to be like he was. All serious and a hard head. He wants me to play my game because I’m a little different guy and have fun and enjoy it more. It’s a game. Obviously, we’re leaving everything on the field, but he was such an intense player and doesn’t want me to be like that.”

Dave Hollins thought his son was lying when he kept saying his basketball sneakers didn’t fit.

“He wanted new sneakers all the time,” Hollins said. “These are expensive, beautiful sneakers. I said, ‘Beau, what the …’ He’s a 12, a 13, a 14, and now he’s a 16. I thought he was making this up just to get new shoes.”

Beau Hollins just kept growing — his size 16 cleats are specially ordered off the internet — and eventually gave up hoops for baseball. He hit 25 homers as a fifth grader — “He was different,” Dave Hollins said — and the power kept building.

He homered 18 times last season to lead the state of South Carolina while playing with a bone spur in his left elbow. Beau Hollins stopped pitching midway through the season and hit only from the right side but still led River Bluff to a state title while being named his area’s player of the year by the State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C.

“I tell these scouts that I was an average player in the big leagues and played 10 years, but he’s going to be a lot better than me,” said Dave Hollins as major-league scouts stop by their house and come to his son’s games. “They can see it.”

Beau Hollins had surgery last June to repair a stress fracture and bone spur and stopped playing for five months. He told his father after pitching last month that it was the first time in three years that he didn’t feel any pain. Healthy again, Hollins can continue building his draft stock this spring and summer.

“There’s a small little cup, not even a bucket of guys who you’re like, ‘That guy’s going to have real power’ and he was one of them,” said Jered Goodwin, the vice president of scouting for Perfect Game. “ … Had he been healthy last summer, I think he would’ve proved that his power is up there with anyone in the class.

“Switch hitters typically evolve later in their careers. There’s not a lot of guys where you’re at 17, 18 years old and they have a hit tool and power from both sides. If he comes back healthy and does what he’s capable of doing, word is going to spread very, very quickly. He’s a big, strong kid. No one ever called his dad small, either. He’s still a big human.”

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Dave Hollins took his son last summer to Philly for the 1993 team’s 30th anniversary. Bryce Harper gave Beau a tour of the clubhouse and introduced the teenager to the big leaguers. It was a taste of the life Beau dreams of living. Harper — “We love Harper. He’s the man,” Beau Hollins said — gave him a few bats, a pair of batting gloves, and tried to get him a pair of cleats.

“He looked at his feet and said, ‘What size are those?’” Dave Hollins said. “He told him, ‘I don’t have anything for those.’ ”

The story goes like this: Dave Hollins was in Las Vegas with a few teammates in December 1992 and found himself at a blackjack table next to Greg Maddux, who had hit Hollins a few times earlier that year with pitches and broke Lenny Dykstra’s wrist with a fastball on opening day.

Hollins told him he understood that Maddux liked to pitch inside and that Hollins was still a young player. But if Maddux hit him with a pitch one more time …

“And he never hit him again,” Curt Schilling said.

That was Hollins, just as intense in Vegas in the winter as he was a few days after Schilling joined the Phillies earlier that year. The Phillies dropped the opener and Hollins was steaming at his locker while a group of reporters waited for him to face them.

“He turns around and goes …,” Schilling said, as Hollins welcomed the press the same way he greeted that teenager in St. Louis.

So consider Schilling’s surprise at how Hollins is now: a baseball dad who golfs nearly every day before sitting in that lawn chair in the outfield.

“I get chills thinking about it,” Schilling said. “I love the thought that someone I love so much has found legitimate happiness. He’s happy. For anybody at this age, that’s a great thing. He lived on the edge his entire career.

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“That’s why Beau is going to be so far ahead in the game. Dave took everything that he thought he made a mistake at, got rid of them, and taught a kid to love the game, be passionate about the game, but most of all, respect the game.”

Schilling lives in North Carolina and drives a few times a year to watch Beau Hollins pitch. He taught him a split-finger changeup and regularly talks to him on the phone about the mindset a pitcher needs to succeed. Dave Hollins knows hitting, so he turned the pitching over to a friend.

“I’ve always had a real passion for teaching young men because pitching was an art to me, not a job,” Schilling said. “I take teaching it and coaching it very seriously. So when I run across someone like Beau, which is rare as hen’s teeth, I’m kind of all-in. I want to give him every opportunity.

“When young pitchers came to the big leagues, I would ask them to write down the things they think about before a pitch. Number those steps for me. Most young pitchers, it would be anywhere between five to 10 things. I had a list I made and my list was 49 items. I said this is where you are and this is where you want to get to. I’m getting him past the 17-, 18-year-old mentality of ‘Gosh, I hope I throw a strike.’ He’s so far beyond that.”

The Phillies told that teenager to shag balls in the outfield after Hollins booted him from third base. A few weeks later, they signed Scott Rolen and kept him from playing hoops at the University of Georgia. He was in the majors three years later, shared a clubhouse with Hollins in 2002, and was inducted last summer into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“In hindsight, it would have been different if someone would have said something like ‘We drafted this guy. We want to get him some grounders,’ ” Hollins said. “No, they sent him out there and I’m a jerk back then trying to get locked in coming back from a hand injury. I said, ‘What the [bleep] are you doing?’

“Poor kid ends up taking my job and being a Hall of Famer, by the way.”

Hollins, Bowa said, was never disrespectful. He was just intense. A few months before chasing Rolen, Hollins told the team’s pitchers that they had better be ready to throw at an opposing hitter if the other team hits Hollins. If not, then the Phils’ pitchers would have to deal with Hollins. That’s how a sleepy spring-training exhibition against St. Louis turned into a bench-clearing brawl.

“All hell broke loose,” Bowa said. “They said, ‘Hey, I’m either going to have a free-for-all with the other team or I’m going to have to fight Hollins.’ They said, ‘I think I’ll have the free-for-all with the other team because I don’t want to mess with Dave.’ If you get in a fight with Dave Hollins, you have to literally kill him. He’s going to keep getting up.”

“We called him ‘Mikey’ when that alter ego kicked in. I’ll tell you what, he has a big heart and he’s a caring person. He’s a great teammate if you’re on his side. If you’re not, then he could be hell to deal with. If someone would have told me when I had him in ‘93 that Dave would be the way he is now, I would say, ‘No way.’ When the umpire said, ‘Play ball,’ that’s what he did. He played hard.”

Beau Hollins has watched the 1993 pennant clincher when his dad homered off Maddux, his old blackjack pal. He loves watching his father and his teammates celebrate that night at the Vet. And he has heard stories about Macho Row.

“I’m actually thinking about growing my hair out like they had it,” the son said. “I don’t know if I can pull off a mullet, though.”

It’s hard to imagine that the guy who sits beyond the outfield fence in that lawn chair is the same guy who was so intense back then. Now, Hollins is a father who reminds his son to turn down the intensity that he struggled to control. His demeanor made it to the big leagues, but Hollins wants his son to chart his own path as he chases his dream.

“I always tell my kids, ‘This is your time. I’m done playing. I want you to have every opportunity to follow your dream and make it to the big leagues,’ ” Hollins said. “He should be a lot better than his father and everyone who sees him says the same thing, but you need to stay healthy and you have to play. We’ll let it go and I’m enjoying watching this journey. It’s going to be fun.”