It’s a crisp 82 degrees on a Sunday afternoon, and the upper deck of the Victory Lane clubhouse on the outskirts of north Phoenix feels like the vortex of every good vibe imaginable to the average adult male.

Start with the awesome view. Spread out over 80 acres of unspoiled desert land between Water World and the Hedgepeth Hills mountain range, Victory Lane is a sportsman’s paradise blanketed with six softball fields.

Secondly, there’s baseball – well, actually, slow-pitch softball. But what the teams taking their turns today in the Coors Light Invitational tournament may lack in pitching speeds and baseline distances, they make up for in sheer heart and enthusiasm.

And then there’s beer. A big meat locker full of Coronas, Coors and kegs behind the snack bar counter on the first level and up here, and a full selection of ice-cold suds on tap.

It’s like stepping into a page of Arizona Highways and finding six fields of dreams and a Hooters. About the only thing generating stress for the handful of guys leaning over the railing right now is whether to re-join their team currently warming up for their turn on the field, or duck into the sports bar one more time, where “Eye of the Tiger” is blaring invitingly on the jukebox.

“Better take it easy today,” advises one ample-bellied player to another, motioning toward the wives and girlfriends sitting below behind the dugout. “Cindy’ll kill me if I get too plastered again.”

It’s called “the beer leagues” of America’s pastime – and not just because the sport’s biggest tournament sponsors are, coincidentally, Coors and Hooters.

While many of the men and women joining softball leagues in their 30’s, 40’s and sometimes 60’s claim any number of reasons for taking up the bat and glove, adult softball is a loopy continuation of Little League – only with alcohol and fully-developed hormones added to the mix.

Some social players simply consider it a more athletic alternative to the bar scene – although most clearly prefer to take the bar along with them.

“We do see a lot of that at the parks, at least with the first-timers” says Tim Nisbet, the softball league coordinator for the City of Scottsdale. “The rules are no beer or anything during league play. It is required that you have an alcohol permit to consume beer in the parks, but even then, the permit does not include the ball fields. So sometimes, after their games, they’ll go up to the ramadas. And that’s fine, because it’s not on the field of play.”

Other times, teams will pass on the permits altogether and sneak in their own tailgate parties in the parking lot, which is not okay. “In that case, we just ask the police to make a little patrol through now and then,” Nisbet says.

At the privately-owned Victory Lane Sports Park, however, which on this particular weekend is hosting one of the biggest tournaments of the season, pitting 57 Valley adult softball teams against one another for a shot at three trophies and the kind of bragging rights that make the $275-per-team entry fee worthwhile, such restrictions don’t apply. Beer flows freely at both the concession stand and the upper-level sports bar. And sometimes, the combined scent of freshly mowed playing fields and ice cold hops is just a little too much heaven for the players.

“We had a fight on one of the fields yesterday,” reports the amiable Joan Lawson, assistant director of Tournament Sports, an organization with an 18-year history of running slow-pitch softball tournaments throughout Arizona.

“And the fight wasn’t even between competing teams! They were both on the same team. And these were big boys – 275, 300 pounds. But that’s what happens when they get to drinking too much. They start picking at each other until one goes bananas.”

On co-ed days like today, Lawson says, the men tend to ease up on the elbow-bending and behave a little better for the benefit of the ladies. But the presence of wives and girlfriends on the field can lead to its own peculiar skirmishes.

“We had a tournament where a girl slid into second base and the second baseman, although he wasn’t trying to injure her, managed to hit her pretty hard,” Lawson says. “Next thing you know, her husband runs out on the field and just starts pounding on the second baseman. I mean, pow! pow! pow!”

Mike Krueger, owner of Victory Lane, admits the combination of alcohol and testosterone can lead to some pretty rowdy action on his perfectly manicured turf. Nevertheless, Krueger believes in keeping the suds flowing.

While Krueger goes out of his way to provide a family-friendly environment – “I built that whiffle-ball field so the kids can have something to do while mom and dad are playing” – he also knows the adult softball scene ain’t exactly fueled by Gatorade.

“We sell these big beers, but you’re only allowed to carry away one at a time, because of the size,” he says. “Well, one week I asked the softball players, ‘What if somebody came around on a cart to the dugouts, selling beer?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, man!’ So we set up a golf cart and started sending around a ‘beer cart girl,’ who drives around the park to every dugout all night long.”

Krueger, who roughly resembles a bespectacled, less manic Woody Harrelson – befitting for his role as proprietor of this sports nuts’ Cheers – smiles broadly.

“They love that!” he says.

Of course, there are some more serious softball players who resent the whole stereotype of the beer-guzzling, overweight brawler that’s commonly associated with their pursuit – the type of character immortalized by Howard Stern sidekick Artie Lange in the recent R-rated comedy Beer League (tagline: “No gut, no glory”).

“A lot of people can enjoy the camaraderie without really drinking,” insists Rick Seifman, tournament sports’ director and head of the Arizona chapter of the National Softball Association. “I mean, there are church leagues, there are people who come out with their sons or daughters. It’s not all a bunch of drunks!”

Seifman acknowledges there are a lot of “bar leagues” – teams sponsored by the local Applebee’s or Stackers where the get-together after the game is actually the bigger draw. “But you can’t bring alcohol onto the fields, and most of the parks monitor that pretty well,” he says. “So the idea that weekend softball is all about drinking is really a misconception.”

Not all adult softball players are gut-flapping, out-of-shape couch potatoes, either – and some of the best players are actually the gals.

“There are a lot of guys playing who are not in that great of shape,” admits Rick Petrol, a Valley insurance salesman who moonlights as a coach for his daughter’s high school softball team and also plays on an adult co-ed team.

“But on the girls’ side, most women that are out of shape aren’t playing softball,” he notes. “So the ones that are out there, at one point in their lives, were pretty good softball players, and may still be. A lot of them played fast-pitch in high school. And they’ll get out there and, especially on defense, they’ll be better than the guys.”

Naturally, that makes for some bruised egos among the men – and can sometimes trigger some surprisingly immature fights.

“If you talk to some umpires who’ve worked with both kids and adults, you’ll find it’s tougher to work in adult softball,” says Seifman. “It’s hard officiating adults, telling adults what to do.”

If there’s any blanket statement that can be made about adult softball, it’s that everybody’s in it to have fun.

“That’s really what it’s all about, no matter what your skill level is,” says Seifman.

“I mean, we have four over-80-year-old teams still playing in the country. And they’re playing to stay in shape, but mostly they’re playing because they still love the game.”

Hector Maldonado never played ball while he was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. But after only two months in the Valley, he’s probably one of the more knowledgeable softball players on the local scene.

“Most of the players around here are what you’d call rec [recreational] or D-league,” he says with a pair of blue metal bats poking out of his backpack.

“Those are the teams you usually see on weekends – the weekend warriors – which are basically more for fun than for competition. But you can move up in skill levels, from C to B to A, and then there’s even double A, triple A and A minors, which are pretty much professional softball players. They have sponsors who send them on tour to different major league stadiums, and have home run derbies before the games. But there’s only a handful of people in the states that can actually get paid to play softball.”

Maldonado himself prefers the D-leaguers – “the guys who’ve been playing since high school know exactly where to hit the ball, and can sometimes get nasty and hit it back at a pitcher intentionally,” he says. Fortunately, immediately upon moving to Phoenix, he found a community forum on the Internet (phxasa.org).

“It’s great, because most parks will charge you at least $35 to use their fields for two hours,” Maldonado says. “And that can add up, especially if you only get a couple guys to show and you like to play every week.”

In the few weeks he’s been playing, Maldonado says his Wednesday night group has grown from a small handful to about a dozen regulars. He even met a woman who hails from a Fort Worth suburb near his hometown, and the still-single sportsman hopes more young women will take up the invitation he’s posted on the forum.

“I’ve never been into the bar scene,” he says with a shy smile, “so it’d be great for me to meet some ladies out here.”

For now, Maldonado is just happy to hang out with a few guys who share his passion for the game he never got the chance to play in high school. As the eight o’clock hour rolls around, Maldonado, his brother, a couple of other young men and even an ASU West professor trudge out onto an open field and begin tossing around a softball along with a few good-natured jabs.

No beer. No girls. Only a handful of guys who love the game. And a cool, clear Wednesday night under the lights.