Maybe I’m wholly alone in what I am about to write here. Maybe I quit playing baseball too early and coached only those who are too young.

In a “meaningless” spring training game on Thursday, San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito, normally a deeply philosophical former Cy Young Award winner, drilled Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder in the back. It was not an accident.

You see, it comes to this. Last September, when the games did count and the Brewers and Giants were involved in a wild card chase, Fielder hit a walk-off home run against the Giants. Only Fielder’s teammates didn’t walk off. They fell down.

In a preconceived celebration, Fielder rounded the bases and jumped with his 270-pound frame on home plate. At that moment, his waiting teammates all fell over backward, like bowling pins struck down at the hand of Tom Smallwood (now there’s a guy with a narrative!).

This Brewer joy, however creative, had, according to the game report on the Giants’ web site, “nagged the team” for the nearly six months since it happened. Honestly, the way the sentence is constructed, you get to wondering how many Giants sat on their couches all winter, stewing in their emotional juices that another team had not only beaten them but had gotten overly happy about it.

And so we have a fine example of “the unwritten rules of the game.” That is, we are schooled in the lessons of offense.

I watched for years as some parents wanted us Little League coaches to teach these lessons to kids as young as seven and eight. Sorry, I won’t go there. Here’s why.

If kids are playing ball on the diamond sans adults at school lunchtime, there are no such rules. If your team is up by ten runs and you’re standing on third when the pitcher throws a wild pitch, you’re heading home. And not one kid will say a word. In their minds, the offense in that case would be the foolishness of a kid who wasn’t smart enough to go as far as possible when the other team made a mistake. No one’s offended that you score. That’s the object of the game!

But look what happens when adults get involved. You have to know every situation, every nuance, lest you offend the one maniac in the other dugout or the other stands. So all season long, you coach kids to go all out, be aggressive, run when they have an opportunity (and yes, it takes some kids 90 percent of the season to learn this). Then all of a sudden, middle of a game, when you don’t have six seconds to explain all the subtleties and ramifications of this goofiness, you find yourself saying to a kid, “Don’t you dare run.” In a word, it’s ridiculous.

If “grown men” need to play vengeance-tinged games within a game, I suppose that is their business. As one who, frankly, agrees with John Bevere that offense is the bait used by Satan to claw our hearts from attention to God, I won’t get involved in that game.

Maybe the lesson from the playground is a lesson from Scripture: Wisdom comes from the lips of children, and also from their running legs and swinging arms and plate-stomping feet.