‘Head down! Keep your head down!’

It is far from the most difficult feat in sports, but anyone who has ever tried to do it will tell you that it’s tough enough: using a round bat to hit a round ball squarely on the button. Tough enough so that the handful of men who do it well become rich, famous, and idolized: the Jose Cansecos, the Mike Greenwells, the Kevin Mitchells. For thousands of boys (and not a few girls), their faces, not the face of Axl Rose or Bobby Brown, are the ones that matter; their posters hold the positions of honor on bedroom walls and locker doors. Today Ron St. Pierre is teaching some of these boys – boys who will represent Bangor West Side in District 3 Little League tournament play – how to put the round bat on the round ball. Right now he’s working with a kid named Fred Moore while my son, Owen, stands nearby, watching closely. He’s due in St. Pierre’s hot seat next. Owen is broad-shouldered and heavily built, like his old man; Fred looks almost painfully slim in his bright green jersey. And he is not making good contact. ‘Head down, Fred!’ St. Pierre shouts. He is halfway between the mound and home plate at one of the two Little League fields behind the Coke plant in Bangor; Fred is almost all the way to the backstop. The day is a hot one, but if the heat bothers either Fred or St. Pierre it does not show. They are intent on what they are doing.

‘Keep it down!’ St. Pierre shouts again, and unloads a fat pitch.

Fred chips under it. There is that chinky aluminum-on-cowhide sound – the sound of someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon. The ball hits the backstop, rebounds, almost bonks him on the helmet. Both of them laugh, and then St. Pierre gets another ball from the red plastic bucket beside him.

‘Get ready, Freddy!’ he yells. ‘Head down!’

Maine’s District 3 is so large that it is split in two. The Penobscot County teams make up half the division; the teams from Aroostook and Washington counties make up the other half. Ail-Star kids are selected by merit and drawn from all existing district Little League teams. The dozen teams in District 3 play in simultaneous tournaments. Near the end of July, the two teams left will play off, best two out of three, to decide the district champ. That team represents District 3 in State Championship play, and it has been a long time – eighteen years – since a Bangor team made it into the state tourney. This year, the State Championship games will be played in Old Town, where they make the canoes. Four of the five teams that play there will go back home. The fifth will go on to represent Maine in the Eastern Regional Tournament, this year to be held in Bristol, Connecticut. Beyond that, of course, is Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the Little League World Series happens. The Bangor West players rarely seem to think of such dizzy heights; they will be happy just to beat Millinocket, their first-round opponent in the Penobscot County race. Coaches, however, are allowed to dream – are, in fact, almost obligated to dream.

This time Fred, who is the team joker, does get his head down. He hits a weak grounder on the wrong side of the first-base line, foul by about six feet.

‘Look,’ St. Pierre says, taking another ball. He holds it up. It is scuffed, dirty, and grass-stained.

It is nevertheless a baseball, and Fred eyes it respectfully. ‘I’m going to show you a-trick. Where’s the ball?’

‘In your hand,’ Fred says.

Saint, as Dave Mansfield, the team’s head coach, calls him, drops it into his glove. ‘Now?’

‘In your glove.’

Saint turns sideways; his pitching hand creeps into his glove. ‘Now?’

‘In your hand. I think.’

‘You’re right. So watch my hand. Watch my hand, Fred Moore, and wait for the ball to come out in it. You’re looking for the ball. Nothing else. Just the ball. I should just be a blur to you. Why would you want to see me, anyway? Do you care if I’m smiling? No. You’re waiting to see how I’ll come – sidearm or three-quarters or over the top. Are you waiting?’ Fred nods.

‘Are you watching?’

Fred nods again.

‘O.K.,’ St. Pierre says, and goes into his short-arm batting-practice motion again.

This time Fred drives the ball with real authority: a hard sinking liner to right field. ‘All right!’ Saint cries. ‘That’s all right, Fred Moore!’ He wipes sweat off his forehead. ‘Next batter!’

Dave Mansfield, a heavy, bearded man who comes to the park wearing aviator sunglasses and an open-neck College World Series shirt (it’s a good-luck charm), brings a paper sack to the Bangor West-Millinocket game. It contains sixteen pennants, in various colors. Bangor, each one says, the word flanked by a lobster on one side and a pine tree on the other. As each Bangor West player is announced on loudspeakers that have been wired to the chain-link backstop, he takes a pennant from the bag Dave holds out, runs across the infield, and hands it to his opposite number.

Dave is a loud, restless man who happens to love baseball and the kids who play it at this level. He believes there are two purposes to All-Star Little League: to have fun and to win. Both are important, he says, but the most important thing is to keep them in the right order. The pennants are not a sly gambit to unnerve the opposition but just for fun. Dave knows that the boys on both teams will remember this game, and he wants each of the Millinocket kids to have a souvenir. It’s as simple as that.

The Millinocket players seem surprised by the gesture, and they don’t know exactly what to do with the pennants as someone’s tape player begins to warble out the Anita Bryant version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ The Millinocket catcher, almost buried beneath his gear, solves the problem in unique fashion: he holds his Bangor pennant over his heart. With the amenities taken care of, Bangor West administers a brisk and thorough trouncing; the final score is Bangor West 18, Millinocket 7. The loss does not devalue the souvenirs, however; when Millinocket departs on the team bus, the visitors’ dugout is empty save for a few Dixie cups and Popsicle sticks. The pennants – every single one of them – are gone. ‘Cut two!’ Neil Waterman, Bangor West’s field coach, shouts. ‘Cut two, cut two!’ It’s the day after the Millinocket game. Everyone on the team is still showing up for practice, but it’s early yet. Attrition will set in. That is a given: parents are not always willing to give up summer plans so their kids can play Little League after the regular, May-June season is over, and sometimes the kids themselves tire of the constant grind of practice. Some would rather be riding their bikes, trying to hang ten on their skateboards, or just hanging around the community pool and checking out the girls.

‘Cut two!’ Waterman yells. He is a small, compact man in khaki shorts and a Joe Coach crewcut. In real life he is a teacher and a college basketball coach, but this summer he is trying to teach these boys that baseball has more in common with chess than many would ever have believed. Know your play, he tells them over and over again. Know who it is you’re backing up. Most important of all, know who your cut man is in every situation, and be able to hit him. He works patiently at showing them the truth that hides at the center of the game: that it is played more in the mind than with the body.

Ryan Larrobino, Bangor West’s center fielder, fires a bullet to Casey Kinney at second base. Casey tags an invisible runner, pivots, and throws another bullet to home, where J. J. Fiddler takes the throw and tosses the ball back to Waterman.