THE WAYBACK MACHINE travels to my backyard.

There’s nothing quite like it. On a hot, muggy, summer afternoon, broken by the occasional cool breeze, two titans stand off against one another locked in bitter a bitter struggle. It can happen in an orange-grass marred backyard, or on the unforgiving cement of a forty year old tennis court. There are no officials. No teammates. It’s just man-to-man, plastic versus plastic.

It’s wiffleball.

My hometown was ridiculously short on kids. In fact, a large portion of my personality is a complete byproduct of spending the vast majority of my time playing with young girls. As a result of this shortage of playmates, me and my less-than-a-handful of friends found ways to play an awful lot of one-on-one sports. Full -court hockey and pass-to-yourself football immediately come to mind (oddly, we never played one-on-one basketball, because all the hoops in the park were broke). These games were great, but there’s only one thing that taught me about the joy of competition, the agony of defeat, and valor of persistence-- the legendary game of wiffleball.

I was thinking about my love of baseball the other day, and for some reason, I started thinking about those old wiffleball games with my old friend, JR. He was as much a Mets fan as I was a Pirates fan, so those teams played each other about 2000 times during the summers of 1989-92. We took realism to max. We’d make out lineup cards before the games, wear batting gloves to bat, and fielding gloves to field (im STILL not comfortable playing wiffleball bare-handed). Did any of you ever have those plastic team helmets, and wear them during wiffleball games? We’d wear the regular team ballcap while playing the field, and then switch when we went to bat. We drew “wiffleball league” logos on the bats, and even tried to convince our parents to let us line their backyards. And we’d play anywhere.

But my house was the best. About, I dunno, 50 feet from the house was a small hedgeline separating our yard from the neighbors, and it was a tailor-made home run fence. My clubhouse (which my dad built on six-foot stilts) was perfectly-aligned to be our LF foul pole, and the right half of the dogwood tree was our own little Pesky Pole. The only drawback about playing at my house was the huge vine bush behind homeplate, where it was nearly impossible to find balls that had been lost within. Well, that and my dad wasn’t too fond of all the foul balls denting the aluminum siding. Something he still bitches about to this day (sorry I damaged your house, ‘Dina!)

JR’s house wasn’t as good. There were too many trees. But he did have a small hockey goal, which was perfectly re-cast as a makeshift strikezone. In Madison League Wiffleball, you’d best swing at the low ones, because it that ball ends up in the net, it’s a strike. Since his yard didn’t really work, we’d go down to the local rundown netless tennis court, and play within the fenced-in concrete jungle. It was like playing wiffleball in a steel cage match. To this day, no one’s hit it over the “Fence Monster” homerun wall on a fly.

Ahh, wiffleball. I don’t know what’s better about it. The makeshift rules (the rhododendron bush is the ‘first baseman’) or the creativity (I know like 47 pitches). Remember ‘ghost runners,’ and how they could only take as many bases as the regular runner? We’d also announce that we were stealing, which took imagination to a whole ‘nother level. The pitcher would move to homeplate, and the runner would start at first, and take off the 20 feet to second, you either threw him out, or you didn’t. Pitching the ball was an amazing feat. Sure, everyone knows how to throw the curve and screwball, it was right there on the box (let’s be honest, the only TRUE wiffleball is the one with the holes on ONE side) but did you know that if you slightly press in on the hard-bottom of the ball, and throw it sideways, it will flat spin, becoming impossible to hit into the air? Well, now you do. That’s the press ball. Also, the vaunted “Atari Ball” was nearly unhittable. Talk about your “out pitches.” All you do is hold the ball with your index finger along one of the ridges between two holes, and spread your thumb and middle finger out as far as you can, holding the ball with those three fingers (like the old Atari logo). Snap your wrist ever so slightly, and you get wiffleball’s version of the splitter. And yes, I just shared my two best pitches with you.

Wiffleball is truly America’s game, and though I’m not surprised that there are actual leagues, it blows me away that I’ve never played in a sanctioned game. The closest we ever got was selling “tickets” to local neighbors, making them come over and sit in law chairs and watch us play. Otherwise, I’m stuck remembering when I wanted to start a local league, but my parents wouldn’t allow me to build an outfield fence out of chicken-wire and plywood. They always stunted my creative growth. And here they were dealing with a wiffleball ICON. I proudly hold the All-Madison Summer record for Home Runs, at 112.

..though, I used neither the cream nor the clear, I did pump up my stats with an awful lot of games against my brother and chick-neighbor. But I’m not putting an asterisk by my stats! I’m in the HALL, dammit!

Ahh, Wiffleball. The game of games. Did any of you take it as way-too-seriously as we in Madison did?

Until next time, remember that only girls and little kids use the Big Red Bat.

-apk