Maine high school baseball is in serious trouble.

Notice I didn’t use “dying” or something of that alarmist genre. Full seasons and tense playoff games were still play with teams of nine. Trophies were hoisted heavenward. Winning coaches were baptized with whatever was left in the cooler. Top-level talent was on display between April snowflakes, May raindrops and June wind gusts.

If you get defensive about those celebratory details and ignore the many trends lurking just beneath the surface that support my conclusion, sorry, but you’re living in denial and deception. Even in peak form, the overall quality of the game played on local diamonds this spring was the most depressing I’ve ever seen it.

I don’t want to say pitchers were ahead of hitters, but seven out of nine battles in any given lineup looked like Randy Johnson vs. Bob Uecker. The number in the ‘E’ column has become the largest in some teams’ linescores with alarming frequency. When I woke up one night in a cold sweat, tapped my wife on the shoulder and mumbled “walks and mental mistakes will kill you against a good team like that,” I knew we had a serious problem.

We just completed a season in which 126 schools played a full season and not one emerged with an undefeated record. Only two, Class D champion Bangor Christian and Class C runner-up Sacopee Valley, ran the gauntlet with one loss.

Some would say that’s indicative of parity and strength of competition. No, it is not. It’s a sign of across-the-board mediocrity. And I could accept that — this is a state-sanctioned learning activity for fun and exercise, after all — if it were not for the precipitous drop that the game has taken over the past 10 and 20 years.

If you’re even a remotely dispassionate observer who is honest with himself, you’re seeing it too. It doesn’t make you one of those gloom-and-doom, “grrrr, back in my day” guys. It means you’re legitimately concerned for the future of the game. Should things continue to unravel at this rate over the next decade, it’s reasonable to question who would be playing or watching at that point.

Much of this is fallout from trends we’ve previously decried in this space, and a vast majority of them are beyond anyone’s control.

Baseball is a measured game of subtleties in a society that values bluntness and immediate gratification. Kids bypass it for lacrosse, where the action is continuous, or outdoor track and field, where the playing time is guaranteed. Or they skip it in the name of (gadzooks) “concentrating on the weight room” for football season.

I still believe that the youth baseball establishment shares responsbility for young people giving up the game at 12, 13 and 14 years old. In Maine, the all-star season (including the younger age groups, where the concept of having “all stars” is deplorable) is longer than the regular season.

The best of the best are chosen, with politics often intervening in the process, and the rest are left on the sidelines all summer. So they grow weary and quit, understandably, eliminating all opportunity of late bloomers improving the overall depth of the game in high school.

Those are relatively minor details.

One more recent and tangible change — the mandating of BBCOR (Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution) bats by the National Federation of State High School Associations in 2012 — has triggered a seismic shift in the game.

BBCOR bats are composite bats that replaced the aluminum tools primarily used by high school hitters for decades. They are designed to reduce the speed at which the ball flies off the bat, theoretically making the game safer for pitchers and infielders.

Admittedly I don’t have a physics or mathematics degree, so I can’t break down the numbers and prove that your son is in more or less danger than we were in a bygone era. But I don’t need that degree to tell you with certainty that your child faces greater risk of injury on the bus or in the family car traveling to and from the game than he ever would while standing on a pitcher’s mound and staring down the barrel of an aluminum bat.

What I also know from three years’ worth of scribbled-in scorebooks and seeing-eye data is that the game has fundamentally changed. And by fundamentally changed, I mean, “is darned near unwatchable most of the time.”

Yes, it’s still possible to hit line drives and towering home runs with a BBCOR bat, but only if a hitter is fortunate enough to make contact with the nearly non-existent sweet spot.

Otherwise every game is a symphony of bunts, bloops, bleeders, seeing-eye singles and erroneous attempts to keep up with it all. The filled-in diamond that represents a run in my book all too frequently is surrounded by shorthand such as BB, E6, SB, PB.

It’s a game that’s hard on adult eyes and even harder for a teenager to justify devoting his spring and summer.

My gut feeling is that BBCOR bats are just another symptom of our alarmist, “if it saves one child, it’s worth it” society. And like so many overcorrections, it’s difficult to undo. Those traditional bats, like rotary phones and the Walkman, aren’t making a comeback anytime soon.

I’m afraid the same can be said of the game they used to facilitate.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.

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