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Generally, it’s because a House or Senate leader, in a statehouse or Congress, is waiting on a “yes” vote. Or it might be because they don’t have the votes and are pressuring a few “no” votes to turn into “yes” ones.

So it is in the Country Creek Subdivision Homeowners Association in Ballwin. For the past several years, some members of the HOA have been doing battle with Christe Mirikitani and her parents, Jim and Judy Boen. Those HOA members don’t like that Mirikitani has offered fast-pitch softball lessons to girls in her parents’ backyard.

Mirikitani grew up in the house. It’s where she learned to pitch. It’s what propelled her to earn a softball scholarship at the University of Missouri. It’s where she’s passed on her skills to other girls with big dreams.

But some HOA members have accused Mirikitani and her parents of violating rules against running a business from a home.

A year ago, the last time I wrote about the battle, the HOA was planning a vote on new restrictive covenants that would grant the trustees wide power to declare a nuisance and level penalties and liens against a homeowner. The ballots were delivered to homeowners last June — with no deadline.

The vote is ongoing 10 months later. This isn’t a Speaker of the House holding a vote open for a few minutes, or even a few hours. This is a power-grabbing HOA playing havoc with Robert’s Rules of Order.

“They don’t have the votes,” Mirikitani told me this week.

Indeed, in the agenda for its annual meeting, held last week at the Ballwin police station. It was an appropriate location, considering how many times police have been called in the past few years to handle disputes about one woman teaching girls how to throw a softball in her parents’ back yard.

“We need two-thirds of homeowners to pass the amendments and we’re very close to that number,” the agenda read.

Mirikitani went to the meeting and tried to plead her case. She says she was talked over.

“You would think I’m just the most awful person when I stand up at these meetings,” she says. “I’m heckled. I’m belittled. Anytime I opened my mouth, they just shut me down and wouldn’t let me talk. Nobody else in my life treats me that way.”

In a statement he sent me last year, the HOA president, David Hall, said dozens of homeowners had complained and that Mirikitani and her parents were “conducting this business in violation of the indenture document.”

But if an HOA were more like an actual democracy, Mirikitani would have already won. After trying to push her out for years, but realizing the covenants weren’t up to the task, the HOA leaders are trying to re-write the rules.

Mirikitani and some of the girls she teaches went door-to-door to campaign against the new rules, putting hangers on doors and talking to neighbors. “Is she really a nuisance,” , with a picture of a little girl holding a softball. “Will you be a nuisance next?”

Mirikitani talked to an attorney who advised her on how restrictive the proposed new rules would be. In a letter, she warned residents that if they changed the rules and later ran afoul of the HOA board, they also could be declared a nuisance. She distributed a letter from an area Realtor, Bill Devers, who urged a “no” vote, suggesting the rules could hurt home values because they would be so restrictive.

The HOA attorney, Carrie Timko, responded with her own letter, disputing Devers’ characterization. She called Mirikitani’s letter “inaccurate” and said Mirikitani had a “personal agenda.”

Guilty as charged, Mirikitani says. She does have an agenda. She wants to teach girls to pitch in a family environment, the way she learned, in a backyard with trees and shade, with her mom bringing out lemonade and her dad chatting up other dads.

“It’s just a better family atmosphere than any batting cage could offer,” she says. “There’s been so much ridiculous drama over pitching lessons. I just don’t understand it.”

Neither does her parents’ next-door neighbor, David Diers, whose yard backs up to the area where Mirikitani teaches. If Diers opposed the lessons, she’d stop in a heartbeat, Mirikitani says.

But that’s not the case. “I hope they do not prevail and leave you alone,” he texted her, in a message he asked her to read at the HOA meeting. “I encourage the girls to warm up in my back yard. You are doing absolutely nothing wrong!”

The HOA trustees disagree. So they hold a vote open to empower three of them to declare virtually anything in the neighborhood a nuisance, and they hope their neighbors go along.

It’s been 10 months and counting. Mirikitani, as she has many times before, stands tall on the mound and faces down the bully in the batter’s box.