Let's face it, Little League gets a lot of bad press these days, and not just from the pointy-headed academics on the op-ed pages.

For many, it summons images of uptight players striking out and looking for a bus to throw themselves in front of, psycho parents berating pimply-faced teen-age umpires, ranting, win-at-all-cost coaches who see themselves as the logical successor to Earl Weaver in terms of both baseball acumen and motivational skills.

This is more than a little disturbing to someone who looks back on his own Little League career with fondness, who remembers traveling to the games in the front seat of his dad's 1960 Ford station wagon, with the hole in the floorboard through which exhaust fumes seeped, giving the car the same breezy feel as a smelting plant.

So if you're an ex-player who wants to know if Little League is really in trouble, this is what you do: You take a trip to Gilman School, the quiet, leafy campus in north Baltimore, to check out the Royals, a team of 9- and 10-year-olds in the Roland Park Baseball Leagues, as they play the Colonials.

And this is what you see: No basket cases in the lineups.

No nutso parents causing a scene -- one mom behind the Royals' bench is feeding her kids pizza, which might as well be the clinical definition for well-adjusted.

No drill sergeant coaches straight out of "Guadalcanal Diary," just a quiet, patient man named Ron Sheff ("I'm not a shouter") running the Royals and a calm fellow named Kevin Abell doing the same for the Colonials.

On a cool Thursday evening in the spring, what you have here is baseball and kids and a small group of OK adults, entwined in the same timeless rhythms as always.

The players play, with varying levels of enthusiasm and ability, ranging from neo-geek to hot-shot prospect.

The coaches coach, which basically comes down to yelling age-old advice, much of it maddeningly contradictory:

"Be a hitter up there!"

"Take a pitch, see what he's got!"

"Two strikes on you, protect the plate!"

"Don't be afraid to take a walk!"

"Three balls, don't want to lose this guy!"

"But don't give him anything good to hit!"

And the parents watch and cheer and feel the butterflies doing strafing runs in their stomachs whenever their kid takes the mound or comes to the plate.

And two hours later, after the Royals have pounded out a 15-4 win and the players shake hands and none of the parents has pulled a tire iron on the ump, you're left with one singular impression:

If this is some kind of social Rorschach test to determine how the game is doing at this level, then the game is doing just fine, at least on these few acres of God's green earth.

Coaches love the game

There are 30 teams in the Roland Park Baseball Leagues; 420 kids, ages 7 through 14, participate. The program is in its 43rd year of existence and is thought to be the longest-running such league in the Baltimore metro area. Statistics may be the life-blood of baseball, but they'll put you to sleep quicker than a shovel upside your head, which is why it's best not to string too many of them together.

The point is, all those teams need coaches.

Many men (and some women) say they become Little League coaches because they don't want some jerk coaching their kid, or if the kid has to be coached by a jerk, they would prefer the jerk be them.

You get the feeling, though, that Ron Sheff never had to wrestle with the issue of jerkism.

He is 45, a lawyer, lives in Roland Park. This is his sixth year of coaching young baseball players. Temperamentally, he seems ideally suited to the task. He's patient, thoughtful, able to communicate with kids -- even his own kid on the team, Allison, 10, a fact that would probably keep a battery of sociologists busy for weeks trying to decipher his secret.

Plus Ron Sheff loves the game. In fact, this is how much he loves the game: For his 45th birthday, his wife Pam and his 14-year-old son John went out and bought him a catcher's mitt.

"We bought it at Herman's," Pam says with a laugh. "I don't think it was on sale."

Ron and Pam Sheff met at grad school at Harvard, and she knows what makes this guy tick. Maybe a husband can't give his wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. But when a wife gives her husband a catcher's mitt, geez, he'll do everything but slop ++ the hogs for you.

A good catch

Actually, the catcher's mitt pales in comparison to what Pam Sheff, a marketing consultant and writer, did for Ron's baseball jones four years ago.

She actually began sponsoring his teams. There it is, neatly written on the back of the uniforms: Sheff and Associates.

"I think he's a great coach," Pam says. "He loves it. And he's a born teacher."

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, to discover that Ron Sheff's coaching philosophy is all about kids having fun while learning the game. "At this level, I figure there are going to be a handful of very good kids who will go on to play at the high school level," he says. "But most of these kids are just here to have fun.

"We don't do anything too complicated. We stick with the fundamentals -- get the ball to the right base, that sort of thing. There's a great deal of fun in winning. You should try to win, but not win at any cost."

Maybe this incident tells you a little about Ron Sheff: In the second inning, with the bases loaded and one out, the Colonials batter hits a rocket that appears headed for left field.

But the Royals third baseman, Greg Montgomery, dives to his left and spears the ball, tumbling in the dirt before triumphantly holding up his glove.

"Boy, that was a pretty extraordinary play!" Ron Sheff says. "Even for our league, that stands out!"

Question: How many coaches would use the word "extraordinary" to describe a play?

Answer: Not too many. Not on this planet.

Then again, don't forget this guy went to Harvard. Plus he's got an assistant coach, Dean Pappas, who can sound like Tennyson on occasion.

In the midst of a furious Colonials rally, Dean Pappas, a physics teacher at Friends School, paces behind the Royals bench like the firing squad is about to come for him at any moment.

"I'm not gonna get through this," he says with a smile. "Fortunately, the tension is ephemeral."

You wonder if Earl Weaver ever talked at length about the ephemeral tension of baseball.

Nahhh. More likely, he'd tell you where you could stick your ephemeral.

No-nonsense crowd

Here is the thing about Little League parents. Some of them, if you mention the word "competition," they give you those earnest eyes and that placid "Stepford Wives" smile and tell you, oh, it doesn't matter who wins or loses these games, as long as the little dears have fun.

Then two seconds later, their kid is thrown out at first on a bang-bang play and they're howling and hustling out to the car for a length of rope so they can hang the ump from the nearest tree.

Or else they're berating their poor kid all the way to the parking lot after the game, yelling: "Why, you run like you're carrying a Castro convertible on your back!"

There is none of that at the Royals-Colonials game. Which is a good thing, since you get the feeling that the Royals' moms and dads would not put up with that kind of nonsense.

"The emphasis is definitely on good sportsmanship and having fun -- and everyone here knows that," says Stuart Julis, the father of Daniel Julis, the Royals' catcher.

"There's always a nut you see somewhere," Pam Sheff says about out-of-control parents. "But never on our team."

So, just for laughs, you tell Pam Sheff about the Little League dad in northern Baltimore County, who was standing behind the backstop as his kid pitched a couple of years ago.

Right from the get-go, the dad was getting all over the umpire, loudly (and some said obscenely) criticizing him for not knowing the strike zone.

Finally, the ump, a kid himself, 15 or 16, turned around and said something to the dad, which apparently served only to accelerate the dad's emotional meltdown. It was like teasing a big dog with a stick, actually.

Anyway, now the dad started shrieking at the ump and -- here's where it got real ugly -- clawing the backstop in an effort to get at him. Finally, the dad's wife and a couple of friends dragged him away, presumably to the nearest psych ward.

When the story is over, Pam Sheff's eyes are wide, but she says only: "Well, our parents are very nice . . ."

'Instructive and gentle'

If there is zero tolerance for whacked-out parents on the Royals, the same can be said of coaching histrionics -- at least if Claudia Leight is any barometer.

Ms. Leight is a counselor at Morgan State. Her husband is Dean Pappas. Their son is Alexi Leight-Pappas, the Royals' second baseman. Plus, for the record, she's the heroic mother who brought the pizza along to the game so her family wouldn't starve right then and there.

While Ms. Leight likes the job Ron Sheff is doing ("He seems

great -- very instructive and gentle"), she has nothing but disdain for the gung-ho, ex-Marine-type coaches she's seen in youth athletic programs.

"It spoils the whole atmosphere," she says forcefully. "It's so important for the kids to learn how to lose gracefully. They're here to have a good time, not to advance the careers of their coaches."

So, just for laughs, you start to tell Claudia Leight about the coach in eastern Baltimore County who stormed onto the field to yell at his shortstop for some bonehead play . . . and then you think: Naah, what's the point?

On a pleasant spring evening at Gilman, it's only kids and baseball that really matter.