By Pam Walatka

A young man I once knew who was visiting from Australia said, “You Americans are so competitive and so mean to each other about it. I went to a baseball game and could not believe they were actually keeping track of the errors.”

It could be argued that competition made America great - and this area rich - but Vince Scarich and Charles Knell, in their new novel, “Celebrating Joy … the Rebirth of Baseball” (Torchbearers Press, 2005), argue that life could be more joyful with less competition, especially in baseball. What if a team decided to play the game for the joy of playing it?

“When we let go of our preoccupation with winning, we can discover the joy in the process of striving towards our highest potential,” they write.

In the opening scene, the Giants are batting in the bottom of the ninth inning of the final game in the pennant race with the Dodgers. The player at bat hits a potentially pennant-winning drive over the fence, but the Dodger outfielder jumps and catches the ball on the other side of the fence, with a stunning display of talent. The Dodgers win the pennant.

The Giants’ players and coaches are thrilled by the beautiful catch. Do they feel bad about losing the pennant? No: “You can’t lose what you did not have.”

Hmmmm. How did this attitude come to be adopted by a major league team? The next chapter jumps back in time to when the Giants hired major league baseball’s first woman manager, at the suggestion of a mysterious caller with powerful connections. The new manager, Joy Wilcox, who likes to celebrate every event with a glass of sparkling cider, teaches the team about honor, loyalty, nobility and all the other virtues, and gets the players to take an 80 percent salary cut. The novel tells how she instilled each of these qualities into the team and into baseball in general.

As is often the case with philosophy-driven novels (books where the authors choose fiction as a means of illustrating an idea), this novel is more interesting than most philosophy books, but less interesting than many plot-driven novels. Don’t read it for the plot.

If you are intensely competitive, this book will be too improbable for you - you might find yourself competing with the authors for the logical high ground. But if you’re not overcome with the killer instinct and you’ve sometimes wondered if maybe winning isn’t everything and sports are part of your future, then this book could change your life. I hope it influences the future of baseball.

Much of the morality is applicable beyond baseball and even beyond sports. When discussing whether or not to retaliate for a beanball, Wilcox says, “I use this test, ‘Is it virtuous?’ … Yes, Matthew, not retaliating could cost us the game, and that’s fine with me. Better the game than our peace of mind.”

Wilcox bans retaliation, then comes up with a cool solution that will please readers who have cringed when a pitcher throws a fastball at a batter, intending to hurt him.

The coach closes down the error light on the scoreboard, saying “I don’t want to tell people about their mistakes, let alone remind them for the whole game.”

You will need a tolerance of punctuation mistakes to get through this book. The authors, like too many other authors, seem to have felt that professional proofreading was an optional expense.

But the ethics are good. The theories behind the book appear to be based on the book “A Course in Miracles,” which is quite popular among seekers these days.

According to the Course in Miracles Web site, these books teach that the way to universal love and peace - or remembering God - is by undoing guilt through forgiving others and emphasizing that it is but one version of the universal curriculum, of which there are “many thousands.”

Consequently, even though the language of the course is that of traditional Christianity, it expresses a nonsectarian, nondenominational spirituality. “A Course in Miracles” therefore is a universal spiritual teaching, not a religion.

For more information, visit http://64.77.6.149. Knell and Scarich, longtime Los Altos residents, will sign books at Main Street Cafe & Books, date to be announced.