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NEVER TOO
OLD TO PLAY WIFFLEBALL
BY
MIKE SEAY
Whenever somebody
hears I play in a wiffleball league, many questions come to their
mind. Well, alright, not many questions but there are a few, such
as:
- You play what now?
- Isn’t that the
ball with the weird holes in it?
- Hey, I play that
with my five year old.
- Ha, ha hahahahaaa…wait,
you’re serious?
Actually the most
common reaction I get is a polite smile and head nod. But I just
know that they're thinking "I knew he was a dork but wow, I had no
idea".
Okay, I'll concede
that an adult playing Wiffleball is a bit on the nerdy side but it
shouldn't be considered any worse than playing Softball. Like
Softball, Wiffleball is just a modified version of Baseball. But
Wiffleball has the element of pitching that Softball (slow pitch
anyway) doesn't have. In Wiffleball you have all of the pitches
that Baseball has plus a couple extra (the "Cadiwampus" is very
popular). Softball mostly just has the
Toss-it-up-there-so-the-girl-from-accounting-can-hit-it. There’s
also the Huck-the-holy-hell-out-of-it pitch.
Yes, the softball
itself is close to being hard as a baseball and you need an aluminum
bat, like college Baseball (we have aluminum bats in wiffleball
now…go figure). Also, you’re not going to get hurt with a
wiffleball like you could a softball. Although if you've been hit
square in the junk with a wiffleball, like most wifflers have, you
wouldn't say that.
But a major stumbling
block for making Wiffleball considered a less dorky sport is the
whole "played it as a kid and then I discovered there are these
strange creatures called girls" thing.
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Now that
I have managed to fool a girl into marrying me, the fact that
Wiffle is considered a kids game is one of its selling points.
Every time we play I get a little flashback of when I played as
a ten year old. Those summer days of going from breakfast till
dinner, no matter how damn hot it got (by the way, an August
Fresno day feels like Heatmiser himself is lurking about).
There just aren’t many things I can say that about anymore.
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I hope that one day
wiffleball can break out of that kid/geek stigma. I will be waiting
with a “weird ball with holes” and banana-bat in hand.
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*Mike has a
few blogs going: DORKTOWN
BLOG and his podcasts blogs:
AUDIBLE WIFFLE +
AUDIBLE FLUX. Also, you can
contact him by
EMAIL
Would you
like to write a story for the FWL website? You would?
Really? Mmmkaa...well then send us an
EMAIL
and maybe you can impress, well,
nobody by being featured on our site.
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