The following little tale fills me with such disgust that I’m afraid writing it will spoil my good mood. Nevertheless, it’s good material, and no writer worth his salt turns down good material.

It all begins with a weird little anomaly in my men’s league. We have a league president pulled from the ranks of our players. Let’s call him Terry.

Terry also happens to manage a team in our league - let’s call them the Jets. I’ve played in a lot of city leagues, and I have no idea why we need a president, much less one with such a blatant conflict of interest. Why, it would be like a pro sports league designating one of its team owners to be commissioner! Have you ever heard of such a thing?

A week before the playoffs, Terry apparently fired off an email to remind the managers of the courtesy-runner rule - a rule that, allegedly, some teams had been abusing in order to gain a little speed on the base paths.

Now, I go back and forth on the courtesy-runner concept, sometimes wondering if someone who’s incapable of running the bases should maybe just take a week or two off and get healthy. However, I think my team, the Bums, was using the rule in its intended spirit. Our second baseman, Doug, has been battling all kinds of leg ailments, so we figured any chance to lessen the wear-and-tear was a good preventative measure.

Flash forward to the championship game. The Jets are giving us hell, and we’re not helping by missing cutoffs and muffing ground balls. It’s not helping that the blue is calling entirely different strike zones for our pitcher and the Jets’ pitcher, who happens to be Terry, who happens to be the guy who could get him fired.

Still, we’ve been little hitting maniacs lately, so we conduct a nice little rally and, being in the sixth inning, are only four runs behind.

Doug leads off with a single, and our base coach yells for a courtesy runner. Albert, our leadoff hitter, is new to our league but plays in many others, so he goes by the ordinary practices and jumps into service.

Terry then pitches to the next batter, who fouls off the pitch, then he spots Albert on first and protests to the umpire that we were supposed to put in the last batter to make an out.

Ordinary game? We replace Albert with Mace - who happens to be the fastest guy on the team - and we continue playing. Terry insists that Albert is an ineligible runner and should be declared out. He and our manager, Tommy, argue with the umpires for fifteen minutes. The umpires change their minds four times. Finally, when he’s not getting his way, Terry declares the power of his presidency and decrees that Albert is out. (There’s a precedent for this behavior; it’s called the Bush Administration).

The two major points in our argument are 1) why would we cheat when the proper runner, Mace, is our fastest guy? and 2) the ball was never put into play, therefore our illegal runner never actually ran.

But let’s get down to brass tacks. Why would anyone want to win a championship on a technicality? I let Terry know what I thought of his legalistic sophistry in words that I cannot possibly print here, and even now, weeks beyond the ache of defeat, I wouldn’t take back a one. I’ve never seen anything so cowardly and pathetic in my life.

We lost the game with the tying run at the plate. That single out would have helped us tremendously. Enjoy the T-shirt, Terry. Jerk.

* * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of jerks, did you dig A-Rod running behind the third baseman, pretending to be his shortstop and shouting “I got it?” His defense was that players do it all the time. Yeah, and people also cheat on their wives all the time...Oh yeah, he does that, too. Jerk.

* * * * * * * * * *

After a half-dozen nephews and nieces who expressed no interest in the holy game, I’ve been glorying in my nephew Kyle’s Little League career. He’s into minors now - where it finally starts resembling actual baseball - and it’s been fun watching him develop his own style and quirks.

For one thing, he’s speedy, and prefers to run the ball in from the outfield rather than throwing it. At this level, that saves a lot of errors. He also steals bases a lot, helped greatly by his coach’s aggressive playing style.

It’s interesting, too, to note the differences between Kyle’s generation and mine. For one thing, these kids all seem to be looking for walks. Am I imagining things, or did my peers and I prefer to whack the ball somewhere? It’s like they’ve all been reading “Moneyball” or something.

On the positive side, the players switch positions all the time, which gives them more of a chance to learn the game from all angles.

I’ve watched Kyle play third, center, first and pitcher. This last pitching stint, they put him into a game with no outs and bases loaded (no pressure there). They also keep a strict count on pitches thrown, and have ruled out breaking pitches, in an effort to preserve young arms.

As for the snack bar chili dogs, they taste almost as good as when I was ten.

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of seven novels, and also writes for Writer’s Digest and Publishers’ Weekly. Home page: geocities.com/michaeljvaughn.