Friday, June 24, 2005
A (Wiffleball ) league of their own
NEWTON -- While most sports fans associate summertime with the crack of the bat, a growing number prefer something that sounds more like a hollow thump.
As any child born after World War II can tell you, that's the sound a Wiffle ball makes when struck with a Wiffle bat. But in competitive leagues across Massachusetts, Wiffleball is anything but child's play these days.
The game is typically played using a hollow plastic bat and a hollow plastic ball, both made by Wiffle Ball Inc. Dimensions vary, but the playing field is typically anywhere from 60 to 90 feet in length and 20 to 50 feet wide.
The game was invented in Shelton, Conn., by David N. Mullany, after he saw his 12-year-old son imitating baseball with a plastic perforated golf ball and a broomstick handle. The boy had given up on using an actual bat and baseball due to space restrictions and the fear of broken windows.
After his son complained of arm fatigue from trying to throw the golf ball, Mullany designed a softball-sized ball with eight oblong holes. Because it was easier to curve than a baseball, kids in the neighborhood dubbed it a wiffle ball for all of the strikeouts, or "wiffs," it produced.
A year later, in 1953, the first Wiffle balls were being sold.
Newton resident Ryan Norris, a mild-mannered software engineer by day, is a Wiffle ball enthusiast by night -- and he's not alone. There are leagues in Worcester, Danvers and Springfield, and tournaments can draw more than 100 teams.
"They are fairly normal actually," said Norris. "Or at least, becoming increasingly popular."
"It's gone from a backyard game, where guys used to show up for tournaments and be totally ill-prepared, to a game where you show up at tournaments and it's a concentration of really talented individuals."
Due to the lack of leagues in the Boston area, Norris and his teammates Charlie Doret and John Phillips have formed the Charles River Wiffleball League. They plan to kick off their inaugural season July 10 at the Lincoln-Elliot School Field in Nonantum.
To break even on the $150-a-week field rental, they hope to attract between eight and 12 teams for the nine-week season.
"If we can't, we're probably going to hold off until the fall season," said Norris. "The town of Newton isn't cheap with their field space, unfortunately."
If the summer league doesn't work out, Norris said they may try to pull together an indoor league over the winter at Newton North High School. So far, four teams have signed up for the summer league.
Wiffle ball teams can consist of as many as five players and as few as one. Doret, Norris and Phillips, who together form team Waaayback!, named for former Boston Red Sox pitcher John Wasdin and his affinity of allowing home runs, have been playing together for four years.
"We started playing in my back yard," said Norris. "We heard about a tournament being run at Natick High School. We decided to try our hand at it. We got beaten soundly, but it was a great time."
To keep the same from happening to beginner teams in his league, Norris is instituting a 40-mph limit on pitches. Some of the more experienced pitchers, he said, can throw upward of 70 mph.
"Guys who have these very elastic arms can just bring it," he said. "Our rule set is adapted so that players of all skill levels can play. The goal overall is to generate interest, to give people the environment where they can improve their skills, and to have fun."
Chuck Freedman is one of those relative newcomers. He played on an intramural team while at Boston University, but he's accustomed to pitching from 25 feet away, not 40.
"I don't think I've ever pitched from that distance," said Freedman. "It should be very interesting."
Freedman and two friends have formed a team in the league, and they're close to getting a fourth player. They haven't decided on a team name, but the front-runners are Triumph and Colonel Angus.
Freedman said he was drawn to the sport because of its spirit of fun and its low-impact nature.
"It's the closest thing to baseball where you don't run the risk of rolling an ankle," he said. "So many of us are actively working and have other commitments. I used to play basketball after work in a league, and every week someone went down with some sort of an injury."
Plus, Freedman said, "you still get the glory of the two greatest things in sports: either striking somebody out or hitting a massive home run."
For more information on the Charles River Wiffleball League, e-mail charlesriverwiffleball@gmail.com or visit http://crwl.sha-bang.com.
By Christopher Moore / Daily News Staff&nbs ¶ 12:57 PM
As any child born after World War II can tell you, that's the sound a Wiffle ball makes when struck with a Wiffle bat. But in competitive leagues across Massachusetts, Wiffleball is anything but child's play these days.
The game is typically played using a hollow plastic bat and a hollow plastic ball, both made by Wiffle Ball Inc. Dimensions vary, but the playing field is typically anywhere from 60 to 90 feet in length and 20 to 50 feet wide.
The game was invented in Shelton, Conn., by David N. Mullany, after he saw his 12-year-old son imitating baseball with a plastic perforated golf ball and a broomstick handle. The boy had given up on using an actual bat and baseball due to space restrictions and the fear of broken windows.
After his son complained of arm fatigue from trying to throw the golf ball, Mullany designed a softball-sized ball with eight oblong holes. Because it was easier to curve than a baseball, kids in the neighborhood dubbed it a wiffle ball for all of the strikeouts, or "wiffs," it produced.
A year later, in 1953, the first Wiffle balls were being sold.
Newton resident Ryan Norris, a mild-mannered software engineer by day, is a Wiffle ball enthusiast by night -- and he's not alone. There are leagues in Worcester, Danvers and Springfield, and tournaments can draw more than 100 teams.
"They are fairly normal actually," said Norris. "Or at least, becoming increasingly popular."
"It's gone from a backyard game, where guys used to show up for tournaments and be totally ill-prepared, to a game where you show up at tournaments and it's a concentration of really talented individuals."
Due to the lack of leagues in the Boston area, Norris and his teammates Charlie Doret and John Phillips have formed the Charles River Wiffleball League. They plan to kick off their inaugural season July 10 at the Lincoln-Elliot School Field in Nonantum.
To break even on the $150-a-week field rental, they hope to attract between eight and 12 teams for the nine-week season.
"If we can't, we're probably going to hold off until the fall season," said Norris. "The town of Newton isn't cheap with their field space, unfortunately."
If the summer league doesn't work out, Norris said they may try to pull together an indoor league over the winter at Newton North High School. So far, four teams have signed up for the summer league.
Wiffle ball teams can consist of as many as five players and as few as one. Doret, Norris and Phillips, who together form team Waaayback!, named for former Boston Red Sox pitcher John Wasdin and his affinity of allowing home runs, have been playing together for four years.
"We started playing in my back yard," said Norris. "We heard about a tournament being run at Natick High School. We decided to try our hand at it. We got beaten soundly, but it was a great time."
To keep the same from happening to beginner teams in his league, Norris is instituting a 40-mph limit on pitches. Some of the more experienced pitchers, he said, can throw upward of 70 mph.
"Guys who have these very elastic arms can just bring it," he said. "Our rule set is adapted so that players of all skill levels can play. The goal overall is to generate interest, to give people the environment where they can improve their skills, and to have fun."
Chuck Freedman is one of those relative newcomers. He played on an intramural team while at Boston University, but he's accustomed to pitching from 25 feet away, not 40.
"I don't think I've ever pitched from that distance," said Freedman. "It should be very interesting."
Freedman and two friends have formed a team in the league, and they're close to getting a fourth player. They haven't decided on a team name, but the front-runners are Triumph and Colonel Angus.
Freedman said he was drawn to the sport because of its spirit of fun and its low-impact nature.
"It's the closest thing to baseball where you don't run the risk of rolling an ankle," he said. "So many of us are actively working and have other commitments. I used to play basketball after work in a league, and every week someone went down with some sort of an injury."
Plus, Freedman said, "you still get the glory of the two greatest things in sports: either striking somebody out or hitting a massive home run."
For more information on the Charles River Wiffleball League, e-mail charlesriverwiffleball@gmail.com or visit http://crwl.sha-bang.com.
By Christopher Moore / Daily News Staff&nbs ¶ 12:57 PM
Thursday, June 23, 2005
An article from the Cleveland Scene about wiffleball
The Future Is in Plastic
Grab your yellow bat -- Wiffle ball has gone pro.
By Joe P. Tone
Wanda Santos-Bray
Jason Kelley (left) and Mike Foley traded their wooden bats for plastic ones.
As Jason Kelley walks out his kitchen door, his wife, Amy, says, "Have fun," with enough sarcasm to fill a swimming pool. She's seen this before, her husband heading out to throw fastballs, sinkers, and sliders until his arm goes numb.
Amy knew what she was getting into when they met at Bowling Green State University, where Jason was a star pitcher. A hard-throwing right-hander, he broke the school record for wins his senior year. His heroics were enough to get him drafted in 1999 with the 1,024th pick by the Milwaukee Brewers.
But in Utah, where Jason played for the club's farm team, his lifelong dream smacked into fiscal reality. He earned just $1,000 a month, riding cramped buses to nowhere towns like Billings, Montana. After one up-and-down season, he quit, moved to Broadview Heights, and took a job as a financial planner. "The money sucked," he says. "I was sick and tired of borrowing money off my dad."
But baseball, if it lives inside you, doesn't just go away when you tell it to. So Jason, now 28 years old, goes to the garage, where he keeps a bat and bucket of balls. Except this isn't the Louisville Slugger of old, but a rod of yellow plastic. And the balls are of the Wiffle variety, available for a buck at your local Toys "R" Us.
"Everybody has a nostalgic relationship with Wiffle ball -- it's the game of their youth," says Bruce Chrystie, director of Fast Plastic, a Wiffle ball organization. "This is just that -- on steroids."
The 41-year-old Chrystie, who lives in Massachusetts, is a pricing analyst for MetLife. But in his real life, he and a handful of other players are responsible for spreading the hyper-organized and competitive brand of Wiffle ball across the country.
Though grown men have been playing in Wiffle ball tournaments for 30-plus years, these Wifflers have taken the game to new heights. They have a magazine, rankings, statistics, and a national championship tournament. They refer to themselves as touring professionals, traveling the country playing for money, wearing uniforms, and toting travel bags embroidered with team names like "Balco Boys" and "Wiffaholics."
"These guys are even bigger dorks than we are," says Mike Foley, a former Ohio University pitcher and a Wiffle teammate of Jason's.
The national tournament began in 2001 with two regions -- east and west -- and a single championship game. Four years later, it features 14 regions, each with their own season of qualifying tournaments. It all leads up to the national championship in October. This year's tournament in Cedar Park, Texas, near Austin, will feature 30 teams and $6,000 in prize money. Next year, Fast Plastic hopes to offer a $30,000 purse.
Chrystie has yet to find players to host qualifying tourneys in Ohio, but that doesn't mean the state isn't chock-full of serious Wifflers. Over the last several years, 341 Ohio players have registered online with the U.S. Perforated Plastic Ball Association, an online Wiffle-ball network with thousands of members nationwide. For a while, there was even a Northeast Ohio Wiffle-ball league. A guy in Canton, much to his wife's embarrassment, converted his backyard into a mini-baseball field and invited teams from throughout the state to play regularly.
There are also local tournaments. Each August, a guy in London, a small farming town in central Ohio, converts a barnyard into a Wiffler's field of dreams: 12 diamonds complete with chalk lines, wire fences, and foul poles. Last year's tournament brought 64 four-man squads and 700 spectators. A dad in Brook Park hosts an August tournament to raise money for a scholarship fund he started when his teenage son died in a car accident. A national tournament, Wiffle Up, comes to Cleveland next month.
Then there's Wifflepalooza. Hundreds of players from around the country trek to Cincinnati each August for a giant tournament; the winner takes home a three-foot-high trophy. The 2004 prize sits on the mantel of Jason Kelley's two-story home in Broadview Heights. "They're rotating it around," Amy says of Jason and his teammates. "It just moved in."
After Jason gave up baseball in 1999, he tried softball, but it didn't hold his interest. The game was too slow and lacked the most intriguing part of baseball: the battle between pitcher and hitter.
By contrast, Wiffle ball is a sport built for the pitcher's duel. The country's best Wiffle-ball pitchers are virtually unhittable. They throw upwards of 80 miles an hour, their pitches dipping and diving as if guided by remote control. "It's nothing like softball," Christie says. "It's 100 times harder."
In most leagues, there's no base-running. "Ghost runners" are awarded bases depending on where and how far a ball is hit. (Past the pitcher is a single, past the outfield a double, etc.) "It's pitching and hitting, and that's what keeps everybody's interest," says David Mullany, president of The Wiffle Ball, Inc., which sells millions of Wiffle balls and bats each year.
The Shelton, Connecticut-based company was started 53 years ago with modest ambitions. Mullany's grandfather, a former semipro pitcher, wanted his son to be able to play baseball in the yard without busting any windows. He bought some plastic spheres and cut holes in them to see whether they would curve or slide. He quickly found the right formula -- eight oblong holes on one side and none on the other. The same balls are used in tournaments today, although most pitchers scuff the shiny gloss off them for better control.
Jason Kelley isn't a scuffer. He's still discovering the ins and outs of high-level Wiffle ball. In fact, he learned only recently that the sport has its own major league. But the promise of pitching in a national championship game clearly intrigues him.
"This is fucking awesome," he says.
"Amy's gonna start hating this," adds his teammate, Foley.
And with that, they're off to squeeze in some practice before nightfall.
From clevescene.com
Originally published by Cleveland Scene 2005-06-22
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.&nbs ¶ 11:21 AM
Grab your yellow bat -- Wiffle ball has gone pro.
By Joe P. Tone
Wanda Santos-Bray
Jason Kelley (left) and Mike Foley traded their wooden bats for plastic ones.
As Jason Kelley walks out his kitchen door, his wife, Amy, says, "Have fun," with enough sarcasm to fill a swimming pool. She's seen this before, her husband heading out to throw fastballs, sinkers, and sliders until his arm goes numb.
Amy knew what she was getting into when they met at Bowling Green State University, where Jason was a star pitcher. A hard-throwing right-hander, he broke the school record for wins his senior year. His heroics were enough to get him drafted in 1999 with the 1,024th pick by the Milwaukee Brewers.
But in Utah, where Jason played for the club's farm team, his lifelong dream smacked into fiscal reality. He earned just $1,000 a month, riding cramped buses to nowhere towns like Billings, Montana. After one up-and-down season, he quit, moved to Broadview Heights, and took a job as a financial planner. "The money sucked," he says. "I was sick and tired of borrowing money off my dad."
But baseball, if it lives inside you, doesn't just go away when you tell it to. So Jason, now 28 years old, goes to the garage, where he keeps a bat and bucket of balls. Except this isn't the Louisville Slugger of old, but a rod of yellow plastic. And the balls are of the Wiffle variety, available for a buck at your local Toys "R" Us.
"Everybody has a nostalgic relationship with Wiffle ball -- it's the game of their youth," says Bruce Chrystie, director of Fast Plastic, a Wiffle ball organization. "This is just that -- on steroids."
The 41-year-old Chrystie, who lives in Massachusetts, is a pricing analyst for MetLife. But in his real life, he and a handful of other players are responsible for spreading the hyper-organized and competitive brand of Wiffle ball across the country.
Though grown men have been playing in Wiffle ball tournaments for 30-plus years, these Wifflers have taken the game to new heights. They have a magazine, rankings, statistics, and a national championship tournament. They refer to themselves as touring professionals, traveling the country playing for money, wearing uniforms, and toting travel bags embroidered with team names like "Balco Boys" and "Wiffaholics."
"These guys are even bigger dorks than we are," says Mike Foley, a former Ohio University pitcher and a Wiffle teammate of Jason's.
The national tournament began in 2001 with two regions -- east and west -- and a single championship game. Four years later, it features 14 regions, each with their own season of qualifying tournaments. It all leads up to the national championship in October. This year's tournament in Cedar Park, Texas, near Austin, will feature 30 teams and $6,000 in prize money. Next year, Fast Plastic hopes to offer a $30,000 purse.
Chrystie has yet to find players to host qualifying tourneys in Ohio, but that doesn't mean the state isn't chock-full of serious Wifflers. Over the last several years, 341 Ohio players have registered online with the U.S. Perforated Plastic Ball Association, an online Wiffle-ball network with thousands of members nationwide. For a while, there was even a Northeast Ohio Wiffle-ball league. A guy in Canton, much to his wife's embarrassment, converted his backyard into a mini-baseball field and invited teams from throughout the state to play regularly.
There are also local tournaments. Each August, a guy in London, a small farming town in central Ohio, converts a barnyard into a Wiffler's field of dreams: 12 diamonds complete with chalk lines, wire fences, and foul poles. Last year's tournament brought 64 four-man squads and 700 spectators. A dad in Brook Park hosts an August tournament to raise money for a scholarship fund he started when his teenage son died in a car accident. A national tournament, Wiffle Up, comes to Cleveland next month.
Then there's Wifflepalooza. Hundreds of players from around the country trek to Cincinnati each August for a giant tournament; the winner takes home a three-foot-high trophy. The 2004 prize sits on the mantel of Jason Kelley's two-story home in Broadview Heights. "They're rotating it around," Amy says of Jason and his teammates. "It just moved in."
After Jason gave up baseball in 1999, he tried softball, but it didn't hold his interest. The game was too slow and lacked the most intriguing part of baseball: the battle between pitcher and hitter.
By contrast, Wiffle ball is a sport built for the pitcher's duel. The country's best Wiffle-ball pitchers are virtually unhittable. They throw upwards of 80 miles an hour, their pitches dipping and diving as if guided by remote control. "It's nothing like softball," Christie says. "It's 100 times harder."
In most leagues, there's no base-running. "Ghost runners" are awarded bases depending on where and how far a ball is hit. (Past the pitcher is a single, past the outfield a double, etc.) "It's pitching and hitting, and that's what keeps everybody's interest," says David Mullany, president of The Wiffle Ball, Inc., which sells millions of Wiffle balls and bats each year.
The Shelton, Connecticut-based company was started 53 years ago with modest ambitions. Mullany's grandfather, a former semipro pitcher, wanted his son to be able to play baseball in the yard without busting any windows. He bought some plastic spheres and cut holes in them to see whether they would curve or slide. He quickly found the right formula -- eight oblong holes on one side and none on the other. The same balls are used in tournaments today, although most pitchers scuff the shiny gloss off them for better control.
Jason Kelley isn't a scuffer. He's still discovering the ins and outs of high-level Wiffle ball. In fact, he learned only recently that the sport has its own major league. But the promise of pitching in a national championship game clearly intrigues him.
"This is fucking awesome," he says.
"Amy's gonna start hating this," adds his teammate, Foley.
And with that, they're off to squeeze in some practice before nightfall.
From clevescene.com
Originally published by Cleveland Scene 2005-06-22
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.&nbs ¶ 11:21 AM
