LITTLE LEAGUE BROUHAHA SERVES AS A LIFE LESSON.

Byline: JAMES BEMIS

I plead guilty. When I heard about the recent eligibility controversy regarding the Woodland Hills Little Leaguers that resulted in the disqualification of two star players, my heart leapt with hidden joy. I know it shouldn't have, but bad news for them, of course, meant good news for us.

``Us,'' in this case were fans of the Thousand Oaks Little League team. What could have led me to have such uncharitable thoughts about another team?

I suppose it is belonging to what English statesman Edmund Burke called life's ``little platoons.'' Our affections are bound first to those nearest to us, and from there can radiate outward to others, like concentric circles moving away from its center. We build our first attachments to our nuclear family, next to our blood relatives, then neighbors, our fellow church or synagogue members and afterward to the residents in our town, our state and our country.

We naturally feel more loyalty to those closer in proximity to us than, say, teams from another valley. Healthy families, organizations and cultures recognize and build upon this principle. Our society will prosper only to the extent people develop affection for life's little platoons - their families, neighborhoods, towns, and finally, their country. Without the civilizing force of affection, there's alienation.

A Little League team is a little platoon. In it, a boy develops a sense of belonging to something larger than himself, learning to subordinate his own selfish interest to that of his platoon. It is a lesson he will later use over and over, as husband, father, co-worker and citizen.

Well, the season ended for our Thousand Oaks Little Leaguers July 27. After winning an excruciating nerve-racking series against Woodland Hills, our guys couldn't pull off their impossible dream of winning it all, as elimination followed two losses last weekend. My guess is that these Little Leaguers and their coaches had a season none of them will soon forget. Boys and baseball seem to work that way.

Little League is baseball at its purest, and thus, its best. Through coaching and endless practice, the traditions of the game are passed on, and with them the virtues of training, teamwork and sportsmanship.

For a boy, the team becomes a kind of family, a place where each member has a place and a way to contribute to the overall good. His coaches are surrogate fathers for the season, teaching him the ways of properly playing the game, how to see it and anticipate its conditions, the way his dad teaches him the habits and virtues that make for success in life.

So the series is over for our team but there's always next season. (``Wait until next year,'' is baseball's most enduring slogan.) I hope that these Little Leaguers enjoyed their golden days this summer, although, of course, no one knows that these are your golden days until years later. They're too busy having fun to think about that.

The ugliness that accompanied the disqualification of two Woodland Hills players - the accusations, recriminations, and inevitable lawsuit - revealed once again the Achilles' heel of Little League and of all youth sports: overzealous parents. Maybe through their excesses, though, they do the rest of us a favor. It is a stark reminder of what happens when the secondary goal of winning overshadows the nobler, more subtle ones of participation and sportsmanship. It ain't very pretty.

Little League can't save the world and shouldn't be expected to. But it can help develop the sort of men that can improve it.

Overemphasizing winning and losing stunts the growth that the game can bring. All that these boys should concern themselves with is playing their best while on the field and acting like young gentlemen while off it. And that's all we should be concerned about, too.