Straight ballin’

Could Wiffle Ball be sport’s saving grace? Not likely.

By Sam Pfeifle

The world of sports officially entered the ninth circle this past Sunday when, after winning a thrilling game seven, the Los Angeles Lakers fell inexplicably under the mercy of one Jim Gray. Who’s that? He’s an absurdly self-important sports announcer (oh, right, reporter) who visibly pushed other microphones out of the way so that he could ask the Sacramento Kings’ Mike Bibby, “What’s it like to be so good?” Was this so a pressing a question that it obviated Bibby’s desire to say “Nice series” to a few of the Lakers who’d just taken part in one of basketball’s better series in recent history? Apparently. Then Gray proceeded to make his way into the Lakers’ locker room so that he could ask more annoying questions (“Did you worry you might lose?”), and so that Kobe could get the Sprite can he was being paid to get on camera front and center. It’s hard to say which was more revolting: the fact that a ballplayer was being paid to drink a sugary, carbonated beverage after playing 65 minutes of basketball; or the fact that NBC had clearly paid for the rights to watch the players undress.

If this isn’t proof that professional sports have become corporatized to the point of sickening disinterest, I’m not sure what could be.

So I couldn’t have been happier when I learned last week of the United States Perforated Plastic Baseball Association and their New England Regional Championship Qualifying Event. Er, that is to say, there’s an organized Wiffle Ball tournament in Rhode Island. Round one was held June 1, so I missed that, but there’s another round June 22, July 19, and into August before playoffs begin to see which of the teams will represent the New England region in the national championships.

“Great,” I think to myself (and, yes, I did know about all of this well before the June Atlantic Monthly story some of you pedants may have actually read). “I’m a pretty darn good Wiffle Ball player. Haven’t lost to my old man but once in the past four years or so. I bet that would be fun.”

But then, of course, I looked into the whole thing. It doesn’t seem as fun as you might think.

In some ways, the organized tournaments held by the USPPBA are just like the backyard game many of us, in the Northeast especially, spent (and continue to spend) countless hours playing on hot summer afternoons — or, in some cases, on days when the temperature gets above freezing. This organization still uses the David Mullany-invented Wiffle Ball, which is still produced by the Mullany family in Shelton, Connecticut. And the rules are much the same: You can’t walk. Three swinging strikes and you’re out. Called strikes are possible if a pitched ball goes by the hitter and hits a prescribed strike zone (some of us use a bucket, or the back of a chair). There is no baserunning. Singles are balls past the mound on the ground. Doubles pass the mound in the air. Triples bounce off the wall. Home runs clear the fence. And scoring results after invisible men — ghost men, in backyard parlance, invisible and ghost people in some circles — are forced across home plate.

Why no baserunning? Originally it was because you could get a game going with just two kids. Now I like it mainly because it allows me to play with little chance of spilling my beer.

That’s basically where organized Wiffle and what kids should be playing ends. It turns out the USPPBA doesn’t even use the Wiffle Ball’s long-time partner, the yellow Wiffle Bat. Instead, they use metal (actually, I think some sort of light-weight graphite polymer) bats! And they pay upwards of $150 for them!

I can see duck-taping the bats up a bit for longevity (or to send tennis balls into the stratosphere), but metal?

And it gets worse. One of our cardinal rules was that any Wiffle tourney had to start with a pristine, just-out-of-the box (now bag) ball. These guys? They’re allowed to do anything they want to the ball, and bring it with them to use as their own personal weapon. They scuff it, put it in the microwave, make holes, deform — the end result is a projectile they can whip nearly 80 mph with a seven-foot break. That’s unhittable. And not just for me. According to their own site, wiffleball.net, certain players are legendary for going 16 innings straight without allowing a hit. No-hitters are the norm. Boy, that certainly sounds like a rousing good time for the fans.

To me, that sounds like a recipe for just about the most boring game in the world — like basketball where every player can dunk at will, or baseball where 150-pound second basemen hit 50 homers a year, or hockey where smashing a guy in the face with your elbow gets you a two-game suspension. That’s right, corporatized, codified, leaving fans stupefied.

Sorry, I’ll get off the soap box with a quote I found on Slaid Cleaves’s Web site one time that seems to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of Wiffle Ball: “We always stayed with family at our destination. There would be aunts and uncles and cousins we hadn’t seen in years, or maybe had never even met. We’d be shy at first, clinging to mom and dad, then slowly venture into this new place. Playing hide and seek or Wiffle Ball or Monopoly or model race cars or hiking around the neighborhood. Our long-lost cousins would, in a few hours, be best friends, and when it came time to leave, no one wanted the fun to stop.”

When people are earning money from a professional Wiffle Ball circuit, it’s possible that the fun has officially stopped.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com. “Game On” tackles all manner of marginal sports and runs once a month.