Tuesday, January 12, 2010

This is not wiffle ball.


While searching for more baseball than a weak Mark McGwire confession can offer me, I turned my lonely eyes to NESN where I found some people playing some serious wiffle ball. I've caught bits and pieces of The Yard before but tonight I got to see pretty much the whole thing and it was disturbing on a bunch of levels.

Saying this as a straight guy, they do some crazy sh*t with those balls. Back in the day in my front yard you could throw a curve, a slider and some variation of a combination we commonly called "The Diesel". Maybe now there are more holes in the ball or half these guys are double jointed because they throw some rising, dropping, bending, double curve, split finger somethings. It's crazy. It looks like the mound is about 12 feet away from the plate and they play on these mini fields, sometimes replicas of larger ones. One of the parts of the documentary that bothered me was what is commonly referred to as the "frat boy" anger that these guys play with which kind of made me hope I didn't play wiffle ball like that 20 years ago. Chances are since I had no clue what a "frat" was at 8 years old I'm guessing I didn't act quite like that.

Also, I couldn't even dream of hitting one of their crazy pitches.

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