THE FIRST THING I should probably admit is that I've always had a hard time resisting the roar of a distant crowd on a summer night.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike out to the ball fields on the outskirts of town after dinner. I could steer by the aureole of light above the ballpark, although I had to close my eyes when I passed through the low places where insects were particularly thick.

I'd slide into the wooden bleachers next to the concession stand in the second or third inning. Often the town patriarchs sat nearby, including Raymond Oliver, for whom the field was named. Raymond had been principal of the consolidated high school for decades, but before that he played semipro baseball, where he got the nickname that every kid in town knew but none dared call him to his face.

When "Wire Tail" Raymond and the town of Nooksack, Oregon, were growing up together, the game they played here was baseball, or what used to be called "old-fashioned country hardball." A crackerjack shortshop, Raymond began playing for money before he was out of high school. He might have pursued the game further, but after being gassed in World War I, he turned to teaching school and coaching fast-pitch softball, which was then eclipsing baseball as the most popular participant sport of the American countryside.

Another old-timer often on hand for evening games in the town park was Wynn Noyes, the town druggist. Wynn had pitched in the major leagues during the teens, and was on the Chicago team that allegedly threw the 1919 World Series. He made no secret of his belief that the "skinflint" Comiskeys who owned the Black Sox -- and not Shoeless Joe Jackson -- should have been banned from baseball. "Joe hit a hard .375 in the World Series, and they gave him the boot," he'd spit disgustedly.

Other times, Wynn liked to reminisce about kooky things from his own war-shortened career, like the time when a Boston Braves rookie, Les Mann, lined a double into the gap against the New York Giants. A speedster, Mann took off for third on the next pitch. He got such a good jump that the catcher, Chief Meyers, didn't even make a throw. The problem was that one of Mann's own teammates already occupied third. Fortunately, Meyers was even more startled than Mann and when he finally did make a throw hurled the ball into left field, allowing both runners to score.

I must have heard that story a hundred times over the years. Eavesdropping on Wynn, Raymond, and their cronies drinking coffee in the grandstand, I often had the impression they weren't talking about the action on the field. It seemed they were immersed in some other game, from some other time.

Usually, they didn't pay any more attention to me than the worms in the outfield grass. Once, though, I remember Raymond Oliver turned to me after watching a particularly overpowering fast-pitch hurler strike out a batter.

"He's not on the rubber when he releases the ball," he said.

"Huh?" I replied, doing my best impersonation of a grown-up.

"Look at his feet," Raymond continued. "He's got one foot on the rubber when he starts his windup-like the rules require-but by the time he actually releases the ball he's jumped two or three feet closer to the batter. If I was the other team's coach, I'd talk to the umpire. I'd ask him to make sure the pitcher was touching the rubber at the moment when he released the ball."

Watching the pitcher's next delivery, I realized that Raymond was right. The thing that made the burly blond hurler so hard to hit was that he had found a way to shorten the distance from the pitcher's mound to the plate. After that, I began to look for some of the more subtle aspects of situations that can determine their outcome even though most people don't know what is going on.

This quest carried me far from Nooksack, and the games children play. There were times-years, in fact when I could have described the stupas on the road to Kailash a lot easier than I could have hit the cutoff man on a throw from right field to third base. I didn't play softball, and frankly didn't feel any deep loss.

Eventually, though, I returned to the little town on the Nooksack River, and Raymond Oliver Park. Among the changes I noticed immediately was the blinking traffic light (the town's first) that had been installed at the corner in front of the fire hall. Out at the ball field, I found they had torn down the old two-story announcer's booth directly behind home plate and replaced it with more "grandstand" seating, which brought the capacity to 250 or more.

Raymond himself had died the winter before, which was probably just as well because the game they played out at Raymond Oliver Park was not the game he knew and loved. The softball of my youth-in which the pitcher whipped the ball underhand to the batter at speeds as high as one hundred miles per hour-had entirely vanished. The game they played now was called slow-pitch because the pitcher lobbed the ball underhand to the batter like you would to a child on the front lawn.

In the space of just a few years, slow-pitch softball became the American sport of summer afternoons and evenings. Unlikely devotees included presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter, actors Woody Allen and George C. Scott, singers Barbara Mandrell and Willie Nelson, columnist Mike Royko, New York real-estate operator and media magnate Mort Zuckerman, NASA astronauts Don Williams and Steve Hawley, and even former major leaguers Doug Flynn and Ted Cox.

I really never had a desire to do anything that Barbara Mandrell did, so I didn't exactly jump to get involved. In fact, I thought it was an abomination at first. What changed my mind was playing the game a little. Then I could see it was a lot more fun, since there was a lot more action of all sorts: more hits, more runs, more defensive chances, more pressure pitching. I also learned early on that it was not as easy a game as it looked.

It took me years to figure out the important ways that slow-pitch softball differs from baseball and fast-pitch softball. It was easy to see the contrasts in the pitching, but in time I realized that virtually every aspect of the game differs, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically. As I became more involved, this combination of the familiar and foreign made me feel a little uneasy, but by then I was hooked.

I was playing a couple times a week with a bunch of guys who were about my speed. A friend called us "misfits from all walks of life," and in a way she was right. We had virtually every significant community oddball on our roster at one time or another. The names came and went, just like the names of the sponsors on our shirts. Finally I got tired of it. Deciding the time had come to rise above commercialism, I named the team the Mouth Breathers.

In the early days, people just laughed at us. Always inclined to joke around, we became known primarily for antics such as the Mouth Breather cheer, a panting chant which sounded like an iron lung run amok in a mangrove swamp. We got real loose, and in the process -- like Columbus sailing west to reach the east -- we became real tight as a team.

This is the improbable story of the unstoppable Mouth Breathers, a summer that didn't end until a few days after Christmas on a frozen lake, and some of the slowpitch softball tricks that landed us in the snow drifts.