Both by statistical probability and the gravitational pull of the relevant culture, America's typical adult male remains, for now, a failed baseball player.

For the great majority of us, this realization arrives in our early teens (and for most of the rest, sooner) with all the metaphorical subtlety of a fastball to the small of the back.

Except it hurts a lot worse.

So you sit there amid the hysterical onset of puberty, and you peel the increasingly hopeless layers of that little mental onion.

You notice that you can't really be counted on to field a ball hit right at you anymore. That you've never hit a breaking ball hard anywhere. And then it starts to smell. You never will hit a breaking ball hard anywhere. All of which would be OK if you could throw a ball 90 miles an hour, but you can't throw 70 without having to lie down for, like, July. And, oh man, does this stink now. And here's the absolute worst part:

Boy, you are gonna have to work for a living.

Sat for part of yesterday in a booth at Eat'n Park with Nate Buttenfield, who is 30 years old this summer and thus a typical American adult male except that he's 6 feet 7 and kind of suddenly throws 94 mph with his right arm, and who admits to no acquaintance whatsoever with our little mental onion.

"I never really said I'd give it up," he said during a 10-day stretch in his life that's playing out like Dennis Quaid's role in "The Rookie," the 2002 feel-gooder about last-shot pitcher Jim Morris making it to the majors at 35. "I've always stayed with it, struggling to get noticed, trying to perform when it counts."

It doesn't count for much when you're blowing away hitters for Allegheny Valley in the Federation League or for Saxonburg of the Butler Eagle League, and it counts less if you've had, umm, mixed success for the Canton Crocodiles of the Frontier League or the Alexandria Aces of the Texas-Louisiana You Probably Can't Get There From Here Association. That's the bulk of Buttenfield's applicable pedigree.

But eight years after the Seattle Mariners cut him from their spring-training roster after an accomplished varsity spin at IUP, something happened to Nate Buttenfield in the so far ridiculously eventful summer of 2007.

"Guys just started striking out a lot more against me," he said. "I could just tell I was throwing harder."

Goaded into finding an open tryout somewhere, Buttenfield, a health and physical education teacher and the varsity baseball coach at North Hills High School, drove to Philadelphia two weeks ago to throw for Brad Fidler of the Major League Scouting Bureau, who had assembled dozens of suspects for a mass inspection of no particular promise.

"It really has been like that movie I guess," Fidler said on the phone yesterday. "There's definite interest in him, but, right now, right after the draft, teams are pretty set and people are trying to sign and place their draft picks. It's unfortunate, but a lot of teams just don't have a spot.

"Nate's got a good body, a good arm, and he's really stayed in shape. I don't have hardly any history on him. He told me that in college he topped out at 90-91, but he's thrown 94 for me and for a bunch of scouts. I guess it's just one of those freaky type of things."

At the open tryout, Buttenfield hit 94 on 15 consecutive pitches, then got invited to pitch in a TriCounty League game near Allentown for a team Fidler helps to coach. Scouts from the Diamondbacks, Indians, Dodgers and Pirates were invited to see Buttenfield suffocate the Gablesville Owls with five innings of 94 mph heat.

Which probably means nothing, but might mean ...

"I don't know," Nate said. "I just wait. I talked to all those scouts after the game and I got calls from the Reds, the Cubs and the Orioles. They told me to wait. There were some scouts at my game the other night at Etna, but I don't think that was a very good outing. I might have thrown 90. I think it's because I'd been throwing every single pitch as hard as I could for awhile."

Just like Buttenfield, Dennis Quaid, uh, Jim Wilson was a high school baseball coach. Just like Buttenfield, Wilson took his team to the playoffs to punctuate the school's long history of failing to do that. Just like Buttenfield ... all right, this is just too weird.

"I've seen it twice," Buttenfield said, picking off the movie question. "I'd pursue it, like him, if I got the chance. I'd hope to work out some kind of extended leave from the district. I'd tell my team that it's a positive thing for me and them because I can bring back experiences that would help all of them out in pursuing baseball."

Fidler said that major-league scouts might wait until next season on Buttenfield, but would have to re-verify that 94 after another unforgiving winter.

"Time is clicking away on him, and it's clicking away pretty quick," Fidler said. "Most guys his age are either at Triple A, in the big leagues, or are out of baseball."

At its long-buried core, baseball is really all about hope. The evidence still pops up in some terribly odd places, every now and then, like when 30-year-old Nate Buttenfield looks you in the eye and tells you he does not, nor did he ever consider himself, out of baseball.

"I work out hard, sometimes throw 500 pitches in batting practice, because I always tell my players that you have to work hard," he said. "I'd be a hypocrite if I gave up on myself, because I'm always telling them, you can't ever give up."