Mike nods and trots over – better late than never.

‘Brewer,’ Dave says, and shakes his head. ‘Brewer at their field. That’ll be tough. Brewer’s always tough.’

Bangor West does not trounce Brewer, but they win their first ‘road game’ without any real strain. Matt Kinney, the team’s number one pitcher, is in good form. He is far from overpowering, but his fastball has a sneaky, snaky little hop, and he also has a modest but effective breaking pitch. Ron St. Pierre is fond of saying that every Little League pitcher in America thinks he’s got a killer curveball. ‘What they think is a curve is usually this big lollipop change,’ he says. ‘A batter with a little self-discipline can kill the poor thing.’ Matt Kinney’s curveball actually curves, however, and tonight he goes the distance and strikes out eight. Probably more important, he walks only four. Walks are the bane of a Little League coach’s existence. ‘They kill you,’ Neil Waterman says. ‘The walks kill you every time.

Absolutely no exceptions. Sixty per cent of batters walked score in Little League games.’ Not in this game: two of the batters Kinney walks are forced at second; the other two are stranded. Only one Brewer batter gets a hit: Denise Hewes, the center fielder, singles with one out in the fifth, but she is forced at second.

After the game is safely in the bag, Matt Kinney, a solemn and almost eerily self-possessed boy, flashes Dave a rare smile, revealing a set of neat braces. ‘She could hit!’ he says, almost reverently.

‘Wait until you see Hampden,’ Dave says dryly. ‘They all hit.’

When the Hampden squad shows up at Bangor West’s field, behind the Coke plant, on July 17th, they quickly prove Dave right. Mike Pelkey has pretty good stuff and better control than he had against Millinocket, but he isn’t much of a mystery to the Hampden boys. Mike Tardif, a compact kid with an amazingly fast bat, rips Pelkey’s third pitch over the left-field fence, two hundred feet away, for a home run in the first inning. Hampden adds two more runs in the second, and leads Bangor West 3-0.