The participants are wearing cleats, but the rest of us ought to prepare for the frightening overexposure of next week’s Little League World Series by getting hold of the tallest pair of hip boots you can buy in the tri-county area without a prescription.

It’s time for the parade of ex-jocks in the ESPN booth to thank heaven that the camera’s zooming in on an 11-year-old right fielder’s tear-stained cheeks so they can tell us straight-faced that this game between Lafayette, La., and Owensboro, Ky., is the purest and most important thing that’s happened to baseball since “Field of Dreams.”

Don’t go online reading other papers without protection, either, lest you subject yourself to the glorified, sanitized, softball view of Little League as a beacon of light in a dark sporting world that teeters on the brink of Armageddon.

Save yourself from stepping in this big, steaming pile of hooey, one that’s sure to accumulate higher in our neck of the forest now that a team from Maine has advanced to the sizzling spotlight of Williamsport, Pa., for the first time since 1971.

First of all, and I mean this from the bottom of my charitable but never hemorrhaging heart, sincere congratulations to the gang from Westbrook for winning the trip that no other Pine Tree State team snagged in my lifetime.

You earned it the hard way after losing three straight games to christen the tournament, and yes, the fact that I even know that statistic is a sign that something’s wrong. Still, hundreds of thousands of kids in your home state, me unabashedly included, have daydreamed of going the distance. You did it. Slap yourself on the back until it hurts. I mean it.

You’re probably the ultimate underdog story. Your coaches might be salt-of-the-earth guys who wouldn’t mortgage one shred of your future for vicarious ecstasy.

They are also in the minority.

Little League Baseball is a fatally flawed mess. True, maybe it isn’t besieged by steroid abuse, but it has enjoyed the same brand of artificial growth while being riddled by other equally damning scandals.

Yes, I suppose I’m talking about trying to pass off sideburns-wearing 15-year-olds as prepubescent 11s and 12s, as managers from the Philippines and Bronx did with a temporary degree of, um, success in recent years. But the stuff that goes on in your neighborhood and other dusty diamonds across the fruited plain is just as appalling.

Westbrook won the regional championship on Sunday, August 14. Now, find a Little Leaguer in your town and ask him or her when their league’s regular season ended and when the all-star travel team was chosen.

Never mind, I’ll save you the trouble. It was roughly when school ended, on or around Friday, June 24. By the time the snow melted, mud hardened and most leagues were able to hold their opening ceremonies, the date was Saturday, May 7.

Do the math.

The all-star season is the same length as the all-play season, sometimes even a trifle longer. And don’t kid yourself. If a kid doesn’t break tryouts as one of the chosen ones, you can bet the in-season coach is begrudgingly giving him the mandatory at-bat or two innings in the field that the league requires as lip service to the value of learning over winning.

Participation in Little League Baseball has dropped steadily in this generation. It’s down at least 10 percent nationwide since 1994. And the real knee-slapper is that we blame it on that year’s baseball strike.

We blame X-Box. We blame potato chips and soda. We discount the idea that kids are smart enough to make their own decisions. Maybe they’ve concluded that sweating out six weeks and then being essentially told you’re not talented enough to play the rest of the summer is wrong. Imagine that!

Sure, people will watch the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the World Series, and we had to assume that the network that brought Australian Rules Football and Miniature Golf into our homes would eventually find an advertising dollar in chubby-cheeked kids from Pocatello. But that doesn’t make it right.

They’ll throw youngsters in front of two dozen cameras with last names emblazoned on the back of their uniforms, then act mortified when one kid stares down the opposing pitcher or indulges in a celebration that’s over the top. Nothing like creating the monster and then complaining about its appetite, is there?

I’m sure there will be a dozen, dramatic come-from-behind wins and countless stories to trip the cute-o-meter. But Little League Baseball doesn’t deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card simply because it’s a cute product.

It isn’t pure, pristine or pleasing to the common sense.

Adults make or break the Little League experience, and what they’ve done collectively from the dugout to the production truck is dog-ugly.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].