Sunday Night With John: That's How You Wiffle!

was a Friday and I was finishing up my shift at a before and after school program while in college. I tossed a 3rd grader a whiffle ball to hit on the playground. We started to attract a crowd of 5th grade boys. Two of the 5th grade boys asked to join, and then two more, and then four more, and then the fourth grade boys and a whiffle ball game broke out. The parents begin to pick up their children and the 5th grade boys are trickling away but fighting with their parents to stay to play one more inning. Two things came to me, first a smile because I finally found an activity 5th grade boys wanted to be there for and the second was an idea.

We closed up shop and my roommate who worked with me had participated in the game and commented on how much fun he had. I suggested we could do this at our house, he just nodded in agreement. We went home after a detour to the local Wal-mart to pick up a wiffle ball and bat. We surveyed our backyard and began to design a wiffle ball field. We had a deck at our house serving as most of the home run fence. Right field was a different story as we had 30 foot tall evergreens lining part of our yard, but it was short, only 45 feet to hit a home run. We measured for bases, and ran to Wal-mart again to grab spray paint to map out foul lines.

Saturday morning we were up early mowing the yard, and spray painting batter’s box and foul lines. We called as many people as it took to find 8 guys who wanted to play whiffle ball. Seeing how I lived with 5 guys it wasn’t that hard to find 3 more. We played the first game and created rules as we went. There was a couple of trees in the field of play, one being a pear tree, and the first time a ball was hit into the tree and plink-oed it’s way out of the tree and my roommate caught it. We all looked at each other and decided it was an out and the plink-o rule was born. A ball hit into a tree was live until it hit the ground. The evergreen trees were exempt from this rule because they made up part of the home run fence. The evergreen tree fence was also given the nickname, the ever-green monster after the famous green monster in Fenway Park.

We finished up our first game with an outline of rules that would govern our field, and my friend stated the field needed a name and the home team needed a mascot. One of my roommates remembered there were a bunch of a baby bunnies hopping around the yard when he mowed it in the morning, and stated we should be “The Bunnies.” Another roommate noted how odd it was we had a pear tree in the middle of our yard.  He asked, “Don’t pear trees usually belong in an Orchard? Bingo our field was named. We called it “El Orchard.” or Spanish for The Orchard, after the restaurant/bar in the movie Out Cold which was named El Matador. Our name was born, we were the El Orchard Bunnies and the Flying Eagle Wiffle Ball Association was created (The Flying Eagles is a story for another day).

We eventually found matching uniforms at a Goodwill store and we proceeded to add red spray paint to the field in the form of a logo for the bunnies and the field, and the ground got really hard around home plate so we dug out the dirt and put in sand.  Lastly, we told our YMCA boss about our oasis and he offered up an old YMCA scoreboard for us, which completed the back transformation from yard to wiffle ball heaven. For two summers we played doubleheaders every Saturday with many different people. There would be weekends where we carved out a game on Sunday, and I may or may not have skipped a couple of college classes on Fridays to ensure the field was in working order for Saturday games. It lead to my friend hosting his own wiffle ball weekend at his house. He wanted his three brothers in on the fun, their fence featured a life size cardboard cutout of Ricky Bobby. Two bachelor parties were wiffle ball games. We finally created official uniforms as well, and they were not cheap. The final transformation of our wiffle ball occurred on a rainy drenched camping trip.  After hours of watching the rain, we said screw it, let’s have some fun. We turned to our old friend wiffle ball and played a game in the pouring rain. My friend Adam, rounded third well after the field we created turned to mud, and as other campsites watched and laughed at us from the safety of their dry awnings, when the relay throw was coming home, Adam slid under the tag, and popped up screaming, “that is how you wiffle!” We all exploded into cheers and laughter as we wiped mud away from our face.

We never could capture what playing wiffle ball on our creation meant to us until, “that is how you wiffle,” was born. We finally could say it was about having lots of fun and pushing past the boundary of fear about only going half way. El Orchard and wiffle has brought us together time and time again because we were deeply committed to having such a great time we never noticed anyone laughing or making fun of us.  We made it our own complete with inside jokes, and memories replayed every time we get together as friends. We have long since moved away from the house holding our wiffle oasis but the spirit of over committing to having fun has stayed. No one, not a single sole has said on their deathbed, "I wish I would have toned down the healthy fun a little."  So my dream is to one day with my friends in tow, knock on the door of the house that holds El Orchard in the back yard and ask can we have one more 9 inning game with our old friend? We get one more go around with the plink-o rule, the evergreen monster and the El Orchard Bunnies, because that my friend would be the definition of, “that’s how you wiffle!”