ATLANTA— The late Jeanne Evans of Fayetteville, who was Jeanne (Mrs. Nat) Carter while living most of her adult life in Vidalia, would have been proud of her grandson-in-law, Jeff Keppinger. As this was being written in late August, Jeff suddenly had become the hottest baseball player in the major leagues.

When a player hasn't had enough at-bats to qualify for the official batting leadership of his league, no figures are available to tell for sure how he would rank if the records of players with insufficient numbers of at-bats were factored in. But it's almost certain that Jeff, now the starting shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, would have been the overall major league leader when he was batting .381 on August 23.

In any event, Jeff's average at that time was higher than that of any player in either of the major leagues with enough at-bats to qualify for the official leadership. It was 41 points higher than any such player in his own National League.

Parkview also is the school that produced Jeff Francoeur, the Atlanta braves' star left fielder. But the two Jeffs never played on the same team, for Jeff Keppinger was a senior when Jeff Francoeur was a freshman. While Jeff F. was playing his high school ball Jeff K. was playing for the University of Georgia, where he was a three-year teammate of Vidalia's Bill Sharpton.

"You've always hit well -- at Parkview, at Georgia, in the minor leagues and now in the major leagues," I said to Keppinger in the Reds' locker room following a game in which he tore up the Atlanta Braves with his bat at Turner Field in Atlanta in early August. He smiled and said, "You're right."

Not so, says Monitor editor Betty McCoy.

"Each and every one of the children featured was from Montgomery County, except for the three girls across the top of the front page," Mrs. McCoy said by e-mail. "Those were my granddaughters, and they live in neighboring Treutlen County."