The Men Who Have Taken Wiffle Ball to a Crazy, Competitive Place

Brett Bevelacqua, who calls himself “the most hated man in Wiffle ball,” is forty-nine and sells residential real estate in Westchester and Rockland Counties, in New York. When he was thirty-seven, and heavily into motorcycle stunts, he had an accident while attempting an endo, or a nose wheelie, and shaved some skin off his shoulder blades and ass. Feeling like a professional athlete who had aged out of his prime, he began selling off his bikes and assorted gear; at the back of his newly spacious garage he saw a yellow bat and a plastic ball, and got the idea to organize a game, in his yard, that better reflected the competitive level he figured he was settling into. Four friends showed up. “By the end of the day, there was so much trash talking, we agreed to do it again the next weekend,” he recalls. By the next spring he had begun work on a documentary about the sport, called “Yard Work,” and had made himself the commissioner of the Palisades Wiffle Ball League, which he now describes, on its Web site, as “the most recognized Wiffle league on the planet.”

Bevelacqua estimates that there are ten to twenty thousand “active” Wiffle-ball players, meaning people who compete, and keep stats, in semi-structured environments, not just at back-yard barbecues. Of those, he said recently, “about a thousand, or maybe five hundred” are of a calibre to play—on the grass abutting an elementary school in Blauvelt, New York, where the P.W.B.L. convenes on fourteen Sundays between late April and the end of September. “The rest look like me,” Bevelacqua, who is sturdily built, with a certain middle-aged heft, said. “Except they’re twenty-five, and fat kids.” He wore a bandanna over his closely cropped hair and sucked on cigarettes to settle his nerves amid sporadic efforts to tamp down stakes in the spray-painted carpet remnants that he uses for pitchers’ mounds and batters’ boxes. Earlier, a pair of S.U.V.s had entered the school parking lot and paraded around in tandem, with windows down and music bumping, while a passenger in the lead vehicle brandished a paddle. These were “minor leaguers,” part of the Palisades farm system, ten teams deep, for which Bevelacqua has recruited promising athletes from local flag-football leagues. “They call themselves ‘Boyz with Feelings,’ ” Bevelacqua said of the showboats, who turned out to be pretty good players. “They’re not on drugs, but—well, they might be on drugs. They’re from the weird, cousin-loving part of Jersey.”

Brett Bevelacqua.Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

By now the major leaguers were arriving, some from considerably farther away. “We have a couple guys from Boston,” Bevelacqua said. “A guy from Connecticut. Five or six from Long Island. Two from Pennsylvania. A kid from Delaware, but he doesn’t come that often, so I don’t really count him.” Collectively, the big leaguers make up eleven teams, of five or six players apiece, with names like the Royals, the Dodgers, the Pirates, and the Expos. Some players, not yet in uniform, wore T-shirts with printed messages such as “A backyard game taken way too far” and “The 8th Annual Greenwich Wiffle Ball Tournament.” A couple of others, I gathered, responded not to their given names but to Wiffman and Johnny Wiffs, respectively. Bevelacqua mentioned that his fields used to be stalked by “con artists” who would promise big cash payouts for their upcoming regional and national tournaments, only to stiff the eventual winners—Palisades players, often—with mere fractions of the touted rewards. “I’ve never handed out money,” he said. “It’s all pride here.”

Nearby, a lean twenty-three-year-old named Daniel Whitener was dressed in a vintage White Sox jersey and stretching his right arm with a rubber exercise band. A sidearm relief pitcher for the Chowan University baseball team, in North Carolina, he said that he prefers Wiffle ball because it allows him to deploy a more varied repertoire. “I would say I usually hit the zone consistently with nine or ten pitches,” he said. These, apparently, include a screwball, a riser, a slider, a super curve, and a change-up drop, among others, thrown from various arm angles. “Depending on the wind, I can probably get it up to sixteen.” He learned his techniques by watching YouTube videos and practicing in his parents’ back yard, in Chesapeake, Virginia—a seven-hour drive from Blauvelt. “Got to the point where I had people in the neighborhood saying I took it too seriously,” he said. “I wanted to do this.” He nodded toward Bevelacqua, who was busy adjusting a mounted iPad that would soon broadcast the “game of the week,” between the Brewers and the Giants, on Facebook Live. The previous game of the week had attracted seventeen thousand views, more attention than most college baseball games receive. “You don’t get this in Virginia,” Whitener said.

Games in the Palisades league are five innings (four for the minors) and last about an hour. The teams typically play doubleheaders. Instead of using a beach towel draped over a scrap of spare deck lattice to represent the strike zone, as my friends and I did twenty-five years ago, Bevelacqua makes (and sells) his own stand-alone strike zones, which consist of Plexiglas targets bolted to frames of polycarbonate piping. Any pitch that hits the target, which is twenty-four inches wide by twenty-eight inches tall and starts thirteen inches off the ground, is a strike. Three strikes and you’re out, naturally, but a walk requires five balls. Take your base, too, if a pitch hits you in the face, but not below it. Take an imaginary base, that is: there is no running, aside from home-run trots, which are purely ceremonial. (Bat flips welcome.)

The pitcher’s carpet is forty-five feet from the plate and forty-eight feet from the strike zone—a distinction that matters more than you might think in Wiffle ball, where the pitches break as sharply as an R. A. Dickey knuckler. Lineups can have up to five batters, and no fewer than three, while only two players are allowed to help the pitcher defensively. Ground balls must be fielded cleanly before they cross a painted line that marks the extent of the infield, and then thrown into a net, eight feet by eight feet, which serves as a backstop behind the strike zone. Any hit that’s bobbled, or that touches the ground beyond the painted line, counts as a single—unless it rolls or bounces all the way to the chain-link fence, in which case it’s a double, or hits the fence on the fly, for a triple. The fence is about ninety feet from the plate in the left- and right-field corners, and about a hundred and fifteen feet in center. The flat, grassy area next to the school is large enough for four such fields, so multiple games can be played simultaneously. Five years ago, with favorable easterly gusts, a Dodgers batter hit a ball over the house behind the fence on what players call Field No. 2. Bevelacqua estimated the distance travelled at two hundred and thirty-five feet.

Give or take some poison ivy, an ornery neighbor, and a tall evergreen that swallows foul balls, the description above may sound familiar to anyone who has ever tried to simulate baseball on a suburban lawn. What was new to me, at least—for a start—was the complete absence of yellow bats, which are thought to be too thin and too short to hit the pitching of someone like Daniel Whitener. I mentioned to Bevelacqua that I had fond memories of “doctoring” my yellow bats as a teen: sawing off the top, stuffing the barrel with wet newspapers, sand, or even discarded wine corks, and then using duct tape to reattach the cap. “That’s the fun part about it,” he said. “But then we’ve taken it to this crazy, competitive place.”

Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

My mistake, it turns out, was to have performed surgery on the barrel end rather than on the handle, thereby making my bats top-heavy and unwieldy. Bevelacqua makes and sells what he calls G.T.S.O.H. bats, for Get That Shit Outta Here, starting with a blue plastic “Screwball” model, from Champion Sports, which wholesales for five or six dollars. It has a barrel with twice the diameter of the Wiffle-branded yellow bat. He then replaces its plastic handle with a longer, one-inch wood dowel, which he screws into a wooden knob, at the bottom, for anchor weight. This improves control and bat speed. (He also wraps the dowel in tape, for better grip.) “My stepfather used to lathe these,” he said, pointing at a worn oak knob on one of the bats. A commercial for the G.T.S.O.H. bats that he posted on YouTube (“Can’t get the job done with that little stick?”) has been viewed more than seventy-five thousand times. Thirty bucks plus shipping.

More coveted than the blue bats are the orange bats, made by Nerf, with even broader barrels. “They stopped production around 2011,” Bevelacqua said. “I bought about twenty of them. Eighteen have since broken.” He showed me one of his remaining specimens, into which he’d inserted an aluminum rod, through the bottom of the plastic handle. A player on the Brewers later told me that there was a thriving secondary market for pre-modified Nerfs. “I remember there was a bidding war on the forum where one sold for, like, two hundred.”

And then there are the knives. At any given moment that afternoon, a handful of players were sitting in camping chairs, in foul territory, dipping and vaping and studiously carving balls with X-Actos or multi-tools for the purpose of altering airflow and exerting greater control over a plastic toy. Pitchers supply their own balls in the Palisades and carry buckets or baskets full of them to the carpet each inning. Wiffle brand only, with eight oblong holes, or slits, around the top half. A couple in any bucket, perhaps, will be factory-smooth—those are for “clean sliders,” which break hard and late, though only if you throw them nearly ninety miles an hour (not impossible, believe it or not). There are forces moving both around and inside the ball simultaneously as it travels; Bevelacqua told me that, as far as he understood it, once the ball reaches highway-speed-limit velocity, the swirling air inside begins to dominate and actually provides a boost of about ten per cent over the trajectory of a solid baseball. But in general an “uncut” Wiffle ball is thought to be too inconsistent—too vulnerable to imbalances among the forces acting on the respective hemispheres of the ball—and therefore a recipe for endless walks.

Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

Any ace has his own signature scuff styling, or several; a standard pattern involves scratching “X”s on the thin strips between the holes and then a crosshatch over the top. Among other curious effects, this reverses the factory settings: instead of curving, or sliding, in the direction of the holes, the ball will now drift away from them. One pitcher showed me what he called a “loose scuff,” with “X”s on the solid bottom half of the ball, which he uses for throwing a riser, and then a more comprehensive crosshatch that he uses for fastballs and “drops.” Another Palisades pitcher prepares a knuckleball by serrating stripes on the bottom, so that it looks almost like a basketball. (He then places his fingers inside the holes and pushes the striped half forward.) Sandpaper is sometimes used to make the balls “hairy.”

The modified bats and balls are a subject of what Bevelacqua calls “Wiffle wars,” fought among aficionados around the country who differ in their beliefs about what constitutes an improvement on, or a perversion of, their favorite pastime. Sam Skibbe, for instance, is an elementary-school music teacher, as well as the longtime commissioner of the Skibbe Wiffleball League, in St. Louis, and a frequent guest host of the “Two Wiffle Dudes” podcast. He mandates yellow bats (though you’re allowed to tape the handles) and forbids scuffing, which he thinks gives the pitchers too much of an edge over the hitters. Skibbe’s is one of fifty-four organizations that make up the National Wiffle League Association, which hosted a championship tournament, in July, featuring teams from ten states, in the town of Morenci, Michigan, population two thousand. A Palisades veteran competed in the N.W.L.A. tournament, but I overheard another player dismissing it: “I watched eleven and a half minutes online, and it was the same pitch again and again. It’s ridiculous!”

Bevelacqua argues that the Texas Open, held on Columbus Day weekend by an organization called Fast Plastic, is a truer national championship, because it plays by his less restrictive rules. (“Yard Work,” his documentary, showcased the 2008 Texas Open.) The Palisades league is sending ten players to the Open this fall. “The N.W.L.A. is not important at all,” he said.

“I can tell you I personally don’t hate Brett,” Skibbe told me. “You need people that are like a dictator.”

The rival commissioners share a sense of grievance when it comes to Wiffle Ball, Inc., a family-run business in Shelton, Connecticut. “All they want to do is regulate,” Skibbe complained. “They have an application to be a Wiffle-sanctioned league, but they require you to change everything about yourselves.”

“If you don’t use the yellow bat, Wiffle Ball will have very little to do with you,” Bevelacqua said.

“I can’t get them to be a guest on our podcast,” Skibbe added.

David J. Mullany is the president of the company and the grandson of its founder and inventor. “We don’t have the ability to fully support all these leagues,” he said. “There’s hundreds of them!” (He said that he does not recall Skibbe asking him to appear on a podcast, and that he would be happy to do it.) He added, of his family’s trademark, “Please make sure you spell it properly. Two words.” Mullany’s father, who was twelve years old at the time of the company’s founding, in 1953, is responsible for the spelling—or misspelling, rather. It was meant to be a play on “whiff.” “And then my granddad said that’s one less letter you got to pay for on the sign,” Mullany went on. “So it’s a little bit of Yankee frugality underneath it all.”

The first Wiffle bats, incidentally, were made of wood—meant to suggest broomsticks. The iconic yellow design is a technological modification.

On Field No. 1, the game of the week was about to begin. Jason Paraskevas, the No. 4 hitter for the Brewers, announced that his wife was due any day now with their second child, and said that he’d made her promise not to call unless she was going into labor. He wore Pokémon socks, and the name printed on the back of his jersey was “Godhelpsyou.” Bevelacqua said, “Hopefully, it’s raining everywhere else in the country and we can get a bunch of people sitting at home and watching.” He retrieved his radar gun from a car—“Got it tuned two years ago, because I try to do things on the up-and-up”—and handed it to Eddie Martinez, a New York City policeman who goes by Bumpy. Martinez plays for the Royals and writes articles for the league Web site on a volunteer basis. “I started in the Hudson Valley Wiffle Ball League,” he told me. “Won that league. Came down here and found out the hard way.” Martinez appeared to struggle with the gun at first, capturing the batter’s swing instead of the ball in flight, and Paraskevas, hoping to get a read on his opponent’s velocity, teased him, “Aren’t you a cop, man?”

Jason Paraskevas.Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

The twins Ryan and Tim McElrath.Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

The Giants’ pitcher, Ryan McElrath, from Kingston, New York, was the reigning Cy Young winner and M.V.P. (the league also crowns a Rookie of the Year), with a career E.R.A., as of this writing, of 0.63. (His twin brother, Tim, played in the field behind him.) He wore a fluorescent yellow compression sleeve on his throwing arm and paused each windup at the midpoint, before torquing his upper body away from the plate and then uncoiling. Jordan Robles, the ace of the Padres, provided color commentary from behind the iPad. “If you’re watching this at home, it may seem extremely hittable, because it’s not like a Whitener velocity,” he said. Whitener has been clocked at ninety-eight miles per hour. “But McElrath mixes speeds and hits spots so well that he almost freezes you.”

Martinez finally had the gun working: eighty-eight, eighty-three, eighty-eight, seventy-seven. Bevelacqua, noticing the eighty-eight, shook his head and said, “We’re looking for the hundreds.”

For the record, nothing about these pitches—neither their velocity nor their darting movement—looked remotely hittable to me. That goes for pitches by the Brewers’ starter, Connor (Soup) Young, too. Given the forty-five-foot distance to the plate, in terms of reaction time, the batters might as well have been facing Sidd Finch. And yet some of them managed, occasionally, not to wiff. It was impressive, though not, after a while, particularly dramatic. Competitive Wiffle ball, it occurred to me, presented an extreme distillation of the problems plaguing Major League Baseball, where every at-bat seems increasingly to result in a strikeout, a walk, or a home run. Except in this game, at least, there were no dingers—no runs at all.

Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

Joe Gallo, another Brewers batter, stepped behind the backstop after fanning, and hinted that he was nearing retirement. He’d joined the league in 2009, as a sixteen-year-old, after finding some of Bevelacqua’s videos online and sending an inquiring e-mail. (“He wouldn’t admit that he was a little kid, but I could read through the lines,” Bevelacqua said.) Gallo had a learner’s permit at the time, and drove down from New Canaan, Connecticut, with his father in the passenger seat. He hit .545 that year: a phenom. He then went to college, in Ohio, and started flying back for playoff games. Now he lives in Manhattan and works in publicity. To get to Blauvelt, he had to take a train to Stamford and borrow a car from his parents. “Back in the day, I was the hardest thrower in the league, at eighty,” he said. “Then people started knifing balls. Now half the people in the league”—Gallo included—“are batting under .150.”

Bevelacqua stepped up to the iPad in the fourth inning and delivered a message from a sponsor: “Hey, if you’re looking for online travel needs, check out ejourneytohealth.com and use promo code PAL.” (The site, which is owned by a dietician in Bridgeport, sells Bevelacqua’s bats and supplies his league with Wiffle balls in exchange for Facebook Live shout-outs.) Robles, looking for more action to narrate, noticed the return of an apparent regular, beyond the center-field fence: “Wheelie Kid!” A young boy was performing stunts in the parking lot on his BMX bike and flashing a thumbs-up, as though he knew his moves were being televised. “Makes for a good background piece,” Robles said.

Photograph by Timothy O’Connell for The New Yorker

The viewership stats on this day were a disappointment, numbering in the mere hundreds. “Terrible,” Bevelacqua said. He surveyed the grounds of the elementary school and allowed that he, too, was thinking of retiring, and maybe ceding the commissionership to the McElrath twins. His real-estate work was suffering, not only from all the weekends when he couldn’t show houses but from long nights editing his popular video series “This Month in Wiffleball,” and from tweeting at David Cone, the former big-league pitcher, every time Cone mentioned Wiffle ball during his YES Network commentary. (Cone eventually followed the league on Twitter, Bevelacqua noted.) He took pride in the fact that he had shipped his strike zones and bats to more than forty states. And “Yard Work,” he said, had aired nearly three hundred times on SNY and NESN, in New England. Looking over at Field No. 2, meanwhile, he couldn’t help noticing that some of the players weren’t wearing hats. It drove him to distraction. “I want to tell them, ‘You can’t play,’ ” he said. “My goal has always been to make this thing like a real sport. I always wanted it to be the Major Leagues for the guys that could never play in the majors.”

Back on Field No. 1, Jason Paraskevas stepped into the batter’s box with one out remaining in the top of the sixth—a lone extra inning, after which tie games are settled by total bases. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he called a time-out. It was his wife!

“Yeah?” he answered, and then quickly frowned. “Give me a break.” Turning to his teammates, he said, “She wants to know what kind of gyro to get me.” He put the phone back in his pocket, tapped the edge of the plate with his bat, and assumed his stance.