Introduction:

Is there anything better than playing backyard sports with family and friends?

The gaze of a warm summer day, a bright blue sky and the warm of the sun on your back, burgers on the grill and a cold drink in your hand; These are all signs of summer!

Add in this image the sound of plastic on plastic combined with some youthful screams of fair, foul or homerun!  Playing backyard ball is as much a family tradition in the summer as Turkey is on Thanksgiving Day. Children and adults alike have all picked up a plastic ball and bat. We have all tried to crush your friends or nephews wicked curved ball. Feeling like a superstar when you get a hold of one! Jog the bases even if they do not exist. I have spoken to hundreds of backyard players and they all say they have their own “Wicked Curve” or spout their batting prowls. In our yards we are all kings or queens are we not? 

When I was just a young boy, I lived in the city. We had places to play but nothing matched our Cottage in Cape Cod that my parents rented every year until I graduated high school. Our cottage had the perfect set up, a garage that provided fair and foul lines, a wall, roof and reachable home run. My Dad always supplied us with a few dozen balls, bats and a viable player. It was perfect! I can still remember those Red Sox and Yankee lineups, we would bat left or right handed according to the lineup from the previous day.

Then as we got older the yard had a longer section that we used, it was over 100 feet to the fence. The trees made it awfully hard to hit one out.

My friends and I spent day after day playing ball and we would play 3 to 5 games a day, every day for months.  We did this year after year and we made a lot of new friends and relatives joined us all the time. We played for years and then in my late teens backyard ball became a good memory for me. What I did not notice at the time was how great the design of the game is.

"The beauty of it is that you can get a guy 30 years old playing against his son who is 12 years old and he can't overpower him with size or strength."

Dave Mullany, owner Wiffle© Ball

“Backyard ball is a sport that can be played equally well at 14 or 40.”

-Pat O’Connor, owner Little Fenway

He is right, because the ball, if you learn how to throw it, does most of the work and the bat weighs but a few ounces so that anyone can play. Whether you are, tall, small, short, stocky it does not matter because the rules of the game allow all types of people to play. My uncles in there forties were just as good as the teens. It was a lot of fun to play ball with friends and family and in that yard we were all kings.  

I stopped playing for many years, I was too busy I guess. Fifteen years went by and then I picked it up again when my daughter was 15 and my son was about 8 years old. I got them a bat and a dozen balls and my nephews, daughter, son and I would hang out in the back yard playing ball. It was a lot of fun and after a few years I bought more various types of balls and some other type of bats. Then a funny thing happened, I went to Petco Field in San Diego to see the World Baseball Classics.  They actually had a Mini Field. I watched with my daughter in amazement as hundreds of kids were taking turns at bat and running the bases on a Mini Diamond. At this point in my life, time was something I had an abundance of. I had sold a company and I was filling my days with working out mostly. When I got home from San Diego, I started researching all types of backyard ball on the Internet.

WOW, was I in for a surprise. There were a lot of products; fields, Leagues, Tournaments and the amount of things related to Backyard Ball were amazing. Hundreds of web sites, bats, balls. It was a sea of new supplies. You can debate the usefulness of the Internet and its affects, but if you need information and special products it is the great equalizer for business’s offering such a product.

I started talking to people, sending out hundreds of emails the over all interest in the sport on a casual and more then casual level was intense. I never would of thought Backyard ball was anything but going out buying a bat and ball and just playing.

I was going to build some type of field in my backyard. I had enough land, but we had huge Trees and some other restrictions including a slopped yard. The hurdles were many to build a state of the art field and it soon became obvious that state of the art was not in the cards. So we made the most out of it, which I will detail later. We didn’t need a perfect field, picture a reverse Fenway Park, which we called The Ball Park by Lake Gardner worked out great. We played thousands of games, entertained some out of state guests and had many fun filled days April through October for two years.  We also had many of our own funky rules, which make it extra fun. Making it your own is really the fun part.   

Moving from that house was bitter sweat, as that field held a lot of great memories. However when the family moved I Built ‘Little Ebbets Field’ which I believe is one of the finest backyard Fields ever built, as I will detail later in the book.

Why this guide? I noticed that there was so much information to be found and it was random. I could provide people interested in the sport with a service. I could compile as much information as possible to help the readers make better choices on purchasing and where to find items that it took us a long time in some cases to find.

For instance, there are various bats and some are expensive and there are several different plastic balls. In addition, you can find Nets, Strike Box’s, Pitching Machines and this list is not limited to the aforementioned. Some equipment works great, and others don’t. As a consumer, I became very frustrated by this. So I developed a separate FREE Catalog Guide. The Guide has Web Addresses and the performance that we experienced as players.  This equipment was used by good to very good players, if you are a superstar or a below average player your results may vary slightly. Some points that will be discussed in this guide is:

Ø  Equipment durability

Ø  The distance balls can travel

Ø  How to customize a bat

Ø  What pitching machine can throw certain types of balls?

I also explain pointers on playing such as the pitching grips and expected action. I give pointers on hitting and although I never made the pros I have been professionally trained in hitting. I give an easy to follow version so that you could self correct your hitting. It was my best talent on a ball field, to hit and adjust myself from swing to swing.  There are also gave a pointers on fielding a ball which changes greatly depending on the ball you use.

There is advice towards tournament play, league play, and how to run both. I also included National Web Sites, Local Web Sites, Fields, Tourneys, various rules and all things about Backyard Ball. If you are finding yourself wondering how you too can make your own field of dreams that is discussed in ‘building a field’.

I hope you enjoy this Book and I hope my experiences help you decide what to buy, what tourneys to play in and how to run your own.

He played Wiffle ball in his backyard with his brother, Dennis. Dan would be the Red Sox and Dennis would be the Orioles.

-- Article on Dan Duquette, Boston Globe, 6/9/95

Who among us baseball lovers, hasn't ripped one of those 70-foot home run shots onto the left-field garage roof and imagined himself Roger Maris or Henry Aaron, taking some ace fastballer downtown?