Wifflebrawl – wiffle ball for badasses

You might not get to second base but you just might get religion

In wifflebrawl, when you’re out you’re OUT.

One of the greatest disappointments in my life was the realization that baseball was not considered one of the world’s great religions. Or so I was told.

When I was a kid, we lived baseball 24/7. It was a way of life. And more. When we weren’t playing ball, we’d dream of the immortality a major league career could bring.

If there weren’t enough kids around on a summer day for a pickup game at Buckley Playground, we’d play wiffle ball in our back yard. On Cleveland’s near west side, where houses are lined up eave-to-eave and yards are smaller than some people’s bedrooms, we had to improvise. We invented a game called wifflebrawl — full contact, Texas death match wifflebrawl.

It was similar to cage wrestling in many ways.

The confined space of our tiny backyard forced us to establish some peculiar ground rules. For instance, if a batted ball ended up under the utility trailer in left field — which was roughly between second base and third base — it was a ground rule double. If it went over the fence in fair territory, it was an automatic homerun. Except if it went into the Gaszo’s yard on the right field side. That was an automatic out because the Gaszos were Ozark white trash and we’d have to fight one of the kids to get the ball back.

That’s no knock on Appalachians, mind you. We were Appalachian. Except we weren’t what you’d call white trash; we took the dishes out of the kitchen sink before we pissed in it.

We preferred to play overhand fastpitch, which usually made for low-scoring games. Since there were as few as two players, a baserunner could be thrown out by being hit with a ball fired with gusto, often at close range. Think dodge ball on steroids. Those holey wiffleballs left some impressive welts.

I guess in that way, wiffleball WAS a religion. Many a baserunner got religion when nailed while trying to stretch a single into a double. You could probably hear them four blocks away yelling, “Jesus Christ!”