There’s one guy so lonely at every American Legion baseball game that he must feel like he’s carrying the new, improved strain of H1N1.

Lo and behold, it isn’t the reporter, for a change.

It’s the manager whose team is in the field. He’s sitting on an upside-down bucket and surrounded by dirt, baseballs, sunflower seed shells and ants.

Notice I didn’t say players.

Makes for an easy night after he fills out the lineup card. No substitutions are necessary or possible. His job description includes clapping, spitting, occasionally shouting exhortation and beseeching God and the saints that nobody gets hurt.

From the flagship university down to the most adorable of T-Ball leagues, baseball in Maine is an endangered species. It began its slow decline six cutting-edge video game systems ago.

Legion ball — contrary to the convictions and yeoman efforts of the octogenarians who love it most — will be the first to fade into history.

I’m less than half that age but just as mournful. Legion has been a mainstay for high school students and recent graduates since the end of the first world war. It’s as much a summer institution as the family reunion, the beach, the flies on the potato salad and the raging sunburn.

But it’s headed the way of the ozone layer and paid vacation time. The issues are most vexing in Zone 3, where a majority of our tri-county teams hang on with shallow breath.

“We’ve got to do something to bring this back,” said Todd Cifelli of Gayton Post and Lewiston High School, two of the few entities within a 40-mile radius of where we sit that aren’t having a problem.

But do what? How much enticement should it take to get a 14-to-19-year-old kid to commit three hours on Tuesday evening, three more on Thursday and five on Saturday?

When local Legion teams aren’t forfeiting games, or folding for an entire season, they’re playing Saturday doubleheaders with the minimum of nine players.

Borrowing castoffs from the one neighboring team with a surplus of athletes.  Asking middle infielders who have never crouched behind the plate for an inning in their lives to strap on the tools of ignorance for twin, sweltering, seven-inning affairs.

I know, I know. Our young people have options now. They’re not all sitting at home cramming cheese puffs down their gullet. I get it.

“All our kids want to play summer basketball,” Dixfield coach Todd Fenstermacher said. “Four years of Legion baseball in Dixfield and this (9 or 10 players) is what we’ve got.”

Fenstermacher’s outfit merged with the team next door in Rumford this summer, a move that seemed to ensure participation and prosperity.

No luck. Today, maybe the first baseman is working and the shortstop’s whereabouts are unknown. Tomorrow, the catcher’s family could be heading out of town for vacation.

Cifelli, coach of the defending state champions and the one fellow who’s flush with reinforcements, sympathizes with at least one of the extenuating issues.

“When a kid has a summer job, there’s 9.2 percent unemployment and he tells the boss, ‘I have to leave at 4 o’clock because I have a game,’ the boss says, ‘No problem, I’ll just find someone else.’ And around here you have families that are actually depending on the kid to contribute to the household income,” Cifelli said.

That doesn’t account for posts in communities that house Class A-sized high schools with 600 eligible boys, plus post-graduates, burning up their cell phone minutes 15 minutes before the designated start of a game to unearth a ninth player.

Employment is only one adversary.

Youth sports remains its own worst enemy. The field of potential Legion players is winnowed years earlier by such inane concepts as 9-and-10-year-old Little League all-stars.

Three years prior to puberty or anything resembling a growth spurt, we’re already declaring who has potential and who doesn’t. And the ones in the ‘doesn’t’ category — late bloomers, though they may be — give up the game forever.

Then comes the increasingly silly number of summer options within teenage baseball itself. Babe Ruth. AAU. Wooden-bat, college-age leagues.

Everybody wants their piece of the pie. Sadly, there’s not enough of the main course left to fill Legion’s belly. It has become the last option and the lowest priority.

The few and the blessed have been able to start Junior Legion programs. Gayton is one of about a dozen posts fielding a second team in a well-intentioned but far-flung support division.

“That’s what we need,” Cifelli said. “That’s where towns can start to have teams again.”

But when the numbers in nearby Auburn, Windham, Turner and Farmington barely add up to the necessary nine on any given weeknight, reality pushes that proposal to the back burner in a jiffy.

Cifelli, a scout for the Cincinnati Reds and an amateur historian of the game, wrapped up a meeting with a bespectacled player after a recent game by dropping the name of Chris Sabo.

Perhaps you remember Sabo, the goggles-wearing third baseman who took the majors by storm as a Cincinnati Reds rookie more than 20 years ago.

The kid, born after Bill Clinton was elected president, looked at Cifelli as if he had three heads. It was an otherwise disconnected side conversation that fit this Legion conundrum like a batting glove.

“We don’t teach our kids the history of the game anymore,” Cifelli said.

If we don’t convey Legion baseball’s past to potential players in the present, it won’t have a future.

Then it becomes just another historical footnote to make our young people scratch their heads and walk away.

Those lonely dugouts eventually lead to barren diamonds. And that will be the saddest sight of all.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].