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."