It's that time of year. I can feel it in my bones. The ghosts of Marches Past march past my eyeballs at night, like a baseball skittering over hardpan.

	David Lloyd didn't fit the beefy Little Leaguer model of Sean Burroughs, now of the Padres.

I've bungeed off a bridge into a dribble of river, cold-called a veritable stranger for a prom date, and emceed a Japanese-American awards dinner without a pronunciation guide (Oh, the hubris!). But I've never -- no, I've never -- known pressure like the kind I experienced at Little League tryouts.

Our family would rarely stage piano recitals in the conservatory, so tryouts were my first taste of being on a stage with the distinct possibility of shaming myself and my people. The taste was vaguely metallic.

My mom would pull up, at which point I'd leave the womb of the stationwagon and proceed to registration, where I would register my fear with the kindly ladies at the lawn tables. There'd be some clucking and empathetic half-smiles ("But, my, you're a brave lad to prostrate yourself to the horrors taking place on field two!"), and then I'd leave the women behind, gamely trot into a man's world with my pinned-on number flapping madly behind me.

Little League dads seemed to take a sadistic thrill in really rapping out the ground balls. Anyone remember the John Newcombe camera commercial, where Newk was blasting serves at 6-year-olds? There's a little bit of that in those ground-ball assaults. A 4-foot-2 kid a mere 40 feet away, protected by nothing but a useless hinge of leather, trying to flag down screamers off a pock-marked minefield ... or at least it seemed that way. The "thwock!" of the bat made me ill.

The tryout -- like the SATs -- was a skewed evaluation tool. There was no hitting. Now, I could rake, baby. No power, but a pesky singles hitter. The calculus of the grounder, however, eluded me. I was Kevin Seitzer with Steve Balboni's glove. I tried to cover my fielding deficiencies with a running monologue of chatter ...

"C'mon, Wayne ... hum, babe ... hum, babe ... c'mon, Wayne ... c'mon, Waaaaayne." Or "Nobatternobatternobatter ... swiiiing, batter!" I'm the guy who came up with "This is the beginning of a big inning" ... thanks a lot, thank you.

	Every aspiring Little Leaguer dreams of "the majors."

It was one of the intangibles I brought to the game. Chatter also wasn't on the test.

Throwing was. My arm was of a caliber that would sentence me to a career spent at second base (it's the infield version of right field -- nobody grows up wanting to be Mark Lemke).

So the whole shebang rested on my ability to field a few ground balls cleanly.

"The line" was a solemn place. Scared boys with pinched faces, wishing very hard for this all to be over. It was a little like sitting on a plane, watching your buddies climb through the egress and parachute behind enemy lines. One minute you're standing next to a guy, he's one of you, you're discussing fourth-grade politics, and then the next minute -- omigod, there goes the poor bastard, heroically plunging into the fray. There are no atheists in tryout lines.

And then, suddenly, it's your turn, and you're running to short, and you can't feel your feet, and you can feel your heart. It crosses your mind -- can a 10-year-old go into cardiac arrest?

	Little League is a tough stage to learn life's lessons.

I had four tryouts, the maximum for a kid in Westport Little League. I'd say of the 16 grounders I took in those four years, I fielded five of them cleanly, managed to wrestle four others into submission, scrambled four beyond recognition, and clean whiffed on the rest.

At this time, I was under the delusion that I would make a good first baseman, the smallest, most right-handed first baseman in major-league history. This dream found me as a 12-year-old, taking my position with a comically oversized first baseman's mitt. Scouts immediately scribbled down "malcontent," which, in short order, they amended to "weak-fielding malcontent."

I never did have a pleasant experience at a tryout. I finally made "the majors" because 12-year-olds automatically graduate into the top league, like a kid who can't read matriculating through public school. Once in The Show, I acquitted myself nicely, but I carried the stink of failed tryouts around with me.

When one was over, I'd go wait on a stone wall for my mom to come back. She'd ask how it went, and I'd painstakingly relate the awful circumstances of every groundball. Such a dire situation called for a motherly touch, so she'd cheer me up by dragging me around with her as we "did the marketing," which sounded like we were brainstorming on a new advertising strategy, but really meant shopping for potatoes and cat food.

David Lloyd is an anchorman for ESPNEWS.