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So who was I to argue? Besides, the kid deserved the ball more than I did. In many ways we try to keep in our mind's eye the image we had of the game as 10-year-olds, which explains both why we keep being disappointed by the business of baseball but why we can't forsake this great sport, either (and, truthfully, why I'm in right field in the first place). For him, then, the game is still perfect and pure, the way it is, rather than the way we like to remember it. Baseball, to paraphrase Campanella, is a little boy's game, regardless of our age.

I smiled because I was happier for him than I was disappointed for myself or my team.

Of course, I thought, too, about the Jeffrey Maier play at Yankee Stadium during the 1996 American League Championship Series. I was at that game, and saw Maier reach into play to turn what should have been a fly ball out in the glove of Orioles right fielder Tony Tarasco into an erroneously called home run for Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

As I waited on deck to bat for my third and final time on Monday, Baltimore director of media relations Bill Stetka called down to me from the tiny grandstand behind home plate.

"Now you know what the Jeffrey Maier play feels like," he said.

"Exactly," I said, "but I don't think this quite makes up for it for you guys, does it?"

At that point I knew I had to make solid contact, an achievement that had escaped me all day both at the plate and in the field. Baseball, the sages say, is a game of failure. What I learned is that it is, more specially, a game of isolated failure. Miss a block in football or a defensive switch in basketball, and few people know unless they happen to be breaking down the coaches' tape.

But mess up in baseball and even the fan attending his or her first game knows it. There is even a running statistic kept in bright lights to track these failures, something no other sport so publicly polices: the error. There is no place to hide when, as I did, you lose sight of the ball in front of 10,000 people. The error is the sport's great equalizer, which is how Baltimore All-Star second baseman Brian Roberts came to follow a sportswriter in the infamy of the box score, courtesy of his dropped pop-up.

The daytime sky was beautiful if you're a daydreamer or watercolorist, with its gauzy, thin, low white clouds brushed against faint blue heavens, but sinister if you were a right fielder without sunglasses or pro experience. When Chris Gomez of Baltimore lofted a ball into that sky, it disappeared into that background for a moment. I took a couple of steps back and to my right, mostly out of guesswork, before it finally presented itself to me with an entirely different trajectory. It was in front of me and moving toward the line. I scrambled, not at all too smoothly, like a commuter rushing for a train pulling away, and made a desperate diving attempt at not only the baseball but a last shred of credibility. I came up empty.

The ball hit off the end of my glove. I either tumbled, rolled, cartwheeled or somersaulted while getting to my feet to recover the ball -- Toronto manager John Gibbons and the coaches had great fun trying to decide exactly what the maneuver was, as if trying to decipher the species of some exotic bird. I threw to second on one hop, but Gomez arrived there easily. Willie and I: Legends of the fall.

At that point the sky and my own limitations didn't matter. All that mattered to everybody who had witnessed it was that I didn't catch a ball that should have been caught. Period. Baseball is so coldly cruel in that definitive way. I imagined that kind of mistake in a game that really mattered, maybe even a World Series game, with millions, not 10,000 people, clucking in disgust, horror or humor. These are strong men who play this game.

My at-bats were predictably underwhelming, though given their incremental improvement I figured I would have been in decent shape if the game happened to go, oh, about 33 innings. On my first swing, having last taken batting practice in the 2005 Jays camp, I swung over a nasty 1-and-1 curveball from Jason Berkens. The Class A pitcher smartly threw another hook, with the same result.

Berkens, who struck out six in his two innings, was on the mound when I batted again. This time I managed a seven-pitch at-bat, fouling off two pitches. But at 2-and-2, as I was looking for something away, Berkens threw a nasty two-seamer that broke down and in. I swung over it for strike three.

The third and final at-bat came against Dan Lonsberry, Berkens' Fredricksburg Keys teammate. I sat on a first-pitch fastball, got it, and made sweet contact. The impact of wood bat upon a new baseball is one of the great sensual pleasures in life. The feeling is so dead-solid perfect as to become an almost lack of sensation: no vibration, no resistance from the hands, arms and shoulders as they rotate through the path of the baseball. This wasn't quite so sublime -- the ball was not squared up on the barrel, striking the top of it -- but it was contact nonetheless. It was an old-fashioned major league pop-up to first base.

(Orioles VP Mike Flanagan later gave this scouting report to a Toronto writer: "Pretty good swing, but, uh, late.")

The Orioles won the game, but that hardly mattered to anyone who was there. The game itself, and the community of those of us who love it, is what mattered. I asked Toronto shortstop John McDonald before the game about what the players thought of making this side trip. Some, he said, might not have liked giving up a rare off day, but almost all were impressed by how much the game meant to Cooperstown.

McDonald had hit the first home run of his life at Doubleday Field, as a 16-year-old kid playing American Legion ball. Back now as a big leaguer, he considered how much about himself had not changed.

"Sometimes," McDonald said, "a day like this is something that we all need, just to remind us why we play the game."

I thought about that and that kid in the right-field seats after the game. His family had asked me to sign the baseball in the bottom of the eighth, but the inning was about to begin and I told them I would gladly do so later. Alas, there was no bottom of the ninth and I did not see them on the way out of Doubleday Field. I was happy for the kid, glad that he had the baseball and, like McDonald, a memory to last a lifetime.

The Blue Jays, just like an American Legion team, boarded the buses in their uniforms. Then it was a return to the big league life, a chartered plane taking them to Baltimore and the fans who expect every ball to be caught and every game to be won. As their buses pulled away, I changed alone out of my uniform in a dusty groundskeeper's room underneath the grandstand. Then I walked out into the sunshine, disappearing into the crowd.