This story didn't make the online edition for some reason. And got severely lobotomized in the printing/editing process. So here it is in its entirety.
SOUTH PLAINFIELD: Steve Cavico of the Kane Park professional whiffle-ball team in South Plainfield heard more than he saw. Standing stolid, 48 feet from the mound and gripping the wooden handle of his wide plastic blue-barreled bat, he last saw the hollow, hole-filled ball leave the pitcher's hand near his ankles, whipping the grass with a sputtering whistle until it quickly rose and smacked the sheet- metal striike zone, almost at his neck. Cavico could only freeze in admiration.
"Oohh, nice pitch," he said. "Whoa!''
If you haven't heard of Kane Park, it is likely you have never been in Kevin Kane's backyard, which bears that stadium-like nickname and which is where the team had its humble beginnings. And you likely haven't heard of the FastPlastic professional whiffle ball league, which had its last regional qualifying tournament of the season yesterday at Veterans Park in South Plainfield. Kane and Cavico's teammate Kris Nagy is the Northeast regional director.
"What you can do with a whiffle ball simulates high competition baseball, and the guys are great,'' said Nagy, 25, who is from South Plainfield but currently lives in The Bronx, N.Y., and works for an environmental engineering firm in Manhattan. "It's all see-the-ball, hit-the-ball with this game. Half the battle is seeing the ball.''
And this sport, moving from backyards to the big time across the country, is something to see.
Yesterday morning, Kane Park, whose four-member team wear matching blue-and-orange jerseys, battled mightily in a 2-0 loss against the pitcher from The Old School Risers, a Maryland team that traveled the farthest for this 16-team all-day tournament. In addition to that wicked rising fastball, the Maryland pitcher throws an evil split-fingered something that looks like a beautiful meatball before dropping clear out of sight.
"If you've never seen a pitcher before, he's very tough to hit and see what he's doing," said Cavico, 34, a technology salesman from Brick. "But we've hit guys like this before. Sometimes it's early in the morning, and you're barely awake."
Rather than wake before dawn, Nagy and Kane, 27, who teaches history and law at Woodbridge High School, set up the eight fields Friday, taking five hours to erect the carefully measured orange construction netting and PVC pipe that mark the backstops and outfield fences. Kane said that the materials cost about $1,500, which includes insurance to use the park, and comes out of each team's $100 entrance fee.
The top prize for this tournament was $400, with second place worth $200. But the real prize is in accumulating enough points over the season to qualify for the playoffs, and a chance to win travel expenses and the honor of representing the region at the national tournament in Austin, Texas, this Columbus Day Weekend.
Last year, The Swingers from Middletown blew through the field of 40 teams from 14 regions across the country, riding a 9-0 record to the national championship and a $3,500 cash prize. With the sport's growing popularity, this year's prize is expected to be $5,000.
FastPlastic plays six innings of whiffle ball, in which teams of two to five players compete in a game with imaginary runners. Three strikes are an out, and four balls are a walk. A pitcher and two fielders can field ground balls for outs if they catch them on a fly or handle them cleanly in front of a line painted on the ground and then make a smooth throw to the backstop. Balls that stop rolling before a fielder or that pass them are singles. Balls that roll to the outfield fences are doubles; those that hit them on a fly are triples. And over the fence is a home run.
Hits advance imaginary runners much as real runners would in a baseball game. A single scores a man on second. Doubles clear the bases. There are other peculiar rules, but mostly they adhere to those of Major League Baseball.
The average age of players hovers in the mid-20s, though Kane said that they had a 45-year-old play in a previous tournament. And although one-time San Francisco Giants pitcher Chuck Hensley played in Texas last year, these are not world-class athletes.
The Niffs, a team from New Hyde Park in Long Island, N.Y., swig from Budweiser cans at 9 a.m. and smoke cigarettes between at-bats. Does this cause them any trouble with, say, eye-hand coordination? "Right now, no,'' said Nick Tullo, who said he was "20...um, 21."
But, as The Wiffled Wonders from South Plainfield are learning, it takes some considerable skill. Playing against the Hit Men from Vineland, Wonders pitcher Jimmy Quartuccio was feeling his age: 15.
"I thought I'm gonna play people my own age," Jimmy said of his first pro game in April. "And I come here and people are driving their cars and bringing their kids. I'm the youngest guy around here."
Jimmy, who plays baseball for Colonia High School, was on the mound against the Hit Men in his green-sleeved baseball shirt and green kneesocks. As sweat fell from his brown moptop and scraggly facial hair, he slid into his wind-up again and again, throwing hard, but throwing many more balls than strikes.
After the game, Elvin Cortez, 33, of the Hit Men told Jimmy: "You've got to take your lumps. Throw strikes. If you overthrow all the time, you're gonna get hurt."
Which is just what happened to Jerry Riso, 31, of the defending champion Swingers. "I threw too much last year, and it was doctor time," he said. "I never thought I'd have to go to the doctor for whiffle ball."
But the ball itself requires doctoring to achieve that insane movement. "You've got to scuff up the ball the right way," Kane said. "You can't take it out of the box and throw.''
Dan Erhardt, 17, of the Wiffled Wonders said he buys a dozen balls at a time. "I have a two-hour ritual," he said. "I sit in my driveway and rub them against the pavement in the blazing sun and number them. One time we used a cheese grater."
As the sun receded and the Mud Ducks beat the Swingers 3-0 to win the tournament at 7:30 p.m., almost everyone agreed their sport was ready for primetime.
"This should be on ESPN," Dan "Neif" Ennis of the Niffs said between drags on his cigarette. "They have hot-dog eating contests, Scrabble and Foosball tournaments. Why not whiffle ball?"
The answer was easy to see.
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13 comments:
So they don't use our rules involving a garbage can strike zone? I think that adds a very unique element that you can't get in a real baseball game - in our game, you can strike someone out looking on a single lob pitch (if you throw it well). These rules seem to mimic MLB too much perhaps.
Any of these guys could take one of those lob pitches and knock it into the river.
None of us can throw even half as well as these guys can. The best pitchers throw 70 mph from 48 feet away.
A competing league, Wiffle Up, uses the traditional yellow bats and has a rule that any called strike is an out. Quick innings in that game. Most prefer the FastPlastic rules.
seductive visuals, great metaphors (as expected), but dude, where's the news? in the fourth graph! :)
i hope you know i am just teasing.
And as I hope you know, I don't care about news. Just want to write pretty stories with pretty words.
i'm sure my slow, big breaking right-to-left curve would be pounded by these guys, but i'd still love to try my stuff out on them one day anyway
but i'll say this, they shouldn't be allowed to scuff up the balls. i mean, that's just plain bullshit. they should have to throw brand new whiffles. if you can't get your movement on a brand new ball, tough shit. scuffing it up seems to defeat the purpose of trying to match major league baseball's rules, no?
- chief
Timbo is right - absolute bullshit. The balls are already designed to move more than a MLB ball - it's got a bunch of freakin' holes in it!!! - What more do ya need?
Perl is right about me being right.
And another thing, they need to outlaw sunglasses and headphones in poker. Baseball hats I'm fine with. But you gotta be able to see someone's eyes. It's total bullshit when people cover up like that.
- Chief
RURURRRR!! (authentic frontier gibberish - agreeing that Timbo is right)
those folks are right about me being right
- chief
given that batters are allowed to use bats with wooden handles and wide plastic blue-barrels, I would put my money on schleg over any of these chumps . . . our skills were honed using standard issue yellow, plastic-handeled, plastic narrow barrelled bats
Ess - Harma
August 9, 2005 -- They Wiffle to win
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
By SOFIA KOSMETATOS
Star-Ledger Staff
Sweating in the hazy sun, Anthony Balacich rummaged through his team's lucky ball box, an old White Castle Crave Case, turning the balls over in his hands to find the initials on the good ones.
Each of the dozen hollow, perforated balls in the box was scuffed and dirty. But the ones Balacich sought had special qualities. They would work well with all his pitches.
With the game tied in the bottom of the sixth, an aching shoulder and the pressure to win each game as the reigning national champions, he needed the ball with the "better bite."
"It's getting tougher and tougher every tournament," he said. "All these teams ... want to claim to beat us."
With a featherweight ball and the trademark slender, hollow, yellow bat, Wiffle ball is a staple of childhood -- a game to be played in backyards too small for a regulation baseball and wooden bat.
But for a growing number of players, mostly men in their late 20s and early 30s, Wiffle ball is a serious, competitive sport.
And nowhere was that competitive spirit more evident than on a field in South Plainfield, where 16 teams competed one recent Saturday in a tournament for a slot in the New Jersey regional playoff game Aug. 27.
The winner will face teams from 14 other regions around the country for the Fast Plastic National Championships in Austin, Texas, in October.
Formed just three years ago, the Fast Plastic league has about 180 teams across the country with more than 700 players. In New Jersey, there are a dozen teams, though some players on the teams hail from neighboring states.
Balacich's team, the Swingers, whose players are from Middletown, won the 2004 national championship.
At the South Plainfield tournament on July 30, the Swingers won the semi-final game, but lost in the finals to the Mud Ducks, who hail from New York and Pennsylvania. Despite the loss, the Swingers still have enough points to make it to the August playoff tournament.
Wiffle ball was invented more than 50 years ago in a Fairfield, Conn., backyard by David Mullany, who watched his son and a friend play with a broomstick handle and a perforated golf ball.
The game is similar to baseball, but there is no base running, there are six innings instead of nine, and there are only two to five players per team. Wiffle ball is also played on a smaller field than baseball. Fast Plastic's pitching distance is only 48 feet as opposed to 60 feet, 6 inches.
Serious players still use the traditional white balls, but, like Balacich, they scuff them up before using them.
They also prefer plastic bats thicker and heavier than the yellow bats of childhood games. Plastic or aluminum, these bats are the same width and length of baseball bats but are less than half the weight.
According to Fast Plastic's Web site, the game's popularity exploded along with the Internet in the mid 1990s, and leagues and tournaments can be found throughout the United States.
"The strongest Wiffle ball in the country is played in the Northeast," said Kevin Kane, the assistant regional director of the New Jersey region.
Many of the players at the South Plainfield tournament said they found out about Fast Plastic through the Web, including Kane.
He's been playing Fast Plastic Wiffle ball for two years. And, like the other guys sweating all day in Veterans Park, he spent many summer days in the backyard playing the game as a child.
"What kid didn't play Wiffle ball?" Kane asked.
"On Long Island, that's kind of what you did," said Rich Boscarino, who drove one and a half hours with his two teammates from Miller Place, on the island, for the tournament. His team, the Screwballs, has played for three years.
Boscarino, 41, and teammates Jerry Ceccio, 43, and John Ceccio, 37, were among the oldest players on the field. The youngest were 15 years old.
Being older than most players doesn't phase the Screwballs. "We like that," Boscarino said.
The Screwballs take their game -- and staying fit -- very seriously.
"We stopped playing softball and everything for it," said Jerry Ceccio, who unabashedly played shirtless, displaying a muscular upper body, in the afternoon heat.
But for at least one team, playing Wiffle ball is more a chance to socialize than to excel athletically.
"We're not doing it seriously," said Kevin Croeger, 27, of Montclair. He and Beer teammate Matt McGowen, 28, of Mahwah, played together in college.
Playing today is "an excuse for guys who don't live too close to each other to get together and drink beer," McGowen said.
Their three-man team was eliminated after three round-robin games at the start of the tournament, but the trio sat in the shade afterward watching other games.
They were among the few spectators at the tournament, who were mostly family and friends of players who left as teams were eliminated. They left before the Swingers and Mud Ducks faced off in the early evening.
Though the Swingers lost, they're not discouraged. It just means they've got some work to do, said Balacich, including figuring out how to overcome their biggest obstacle -- staying fresh for the last game.
Teammate Jerry Riso, who usually pitches in the final game of a tournament, hasn't been able to because of an injury. That left only Balacich and John Riso to pitch, while the Mud Ducks had more players.
Balacich is upbeat about the playoffs and another game against the Mud Ducks.
"They're a great team," he said. "But we know we can beat them."
alright.. in defense of the pro wiffleball players.. and this is probably very belated.. but here goes anyways.
I'm Dan Erhardt. Yes, THEE Dan Erhardt, 17, from the article. (KICKASS JOB, by the way.)
No, your 'honed skills' with the yellow bat... nice try. we've likened hitting with the yellow bat to trying to eat soup with a fork. it's simply not the right tool for the job. AND! Scuffing the ball is COMPLETELY neccesary for the sport. when you actually get into the game, and not just when you play at barbecues every so often.. you'll realize that the ball DOESN'T curve how you think it does. the only way to do that is to rough it up. Trust us. We know what we're doing. I'm only 17, but I've been at this gig for 6 years now. Granted, it was on a much smaller scale when i started, but it was still the same principle as it is now. If you ever actually see how some of these guys throw.. you'll realize that the bigger bats are absolutely necessary, and that scuffing the ball is the only way to really be effective.
so suck on that. homie.
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