I just noticed that there’s a MapQuest pin for the Don Young Corkball Fields at Jefferson Barracks Park. Here’s the link: https://www.mapquest.com/us/missouri/don-young-corkball-fields-jefferson-barracks-park-438973410
Now I just need to figure out how to get the Tower Grove Park corkball fields on there, as well as getting them all added to Google Maps. Anyone have any tips? TIA!
EDIT: I figured it out. Here’s the location on Google Maps:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/HnV51hEeZZ1v73aU7
Edit: St. Louis Sandlot Baseball now plays regularly on Sundays at noon at the “Y” baseball field at Carondelet Park in South St. Louis. Their travel team is called the St. Louis Slingers. Follow @stlouissandlot on Instagram for details, time changes, etc.
A group of us are trying to form a sandlot baseball league in St. Louis. We currently play on occasional weekends (schedules and weather permitting) at Fox Park at Shenandoah & Ohio just west of Soulard. There’s a really nice baseball diamond there that rarely ever gets used called PAL Memorial Park (the Cardinals built it over 20 years ago as part of their Cardinals Care Ball Field Program using money from a grant from the late Daryl Kyle). Still very casual but we run the bases, keep score, etc. Will try to play into December if the weather allows for it. If anyone has catcher’s gear that they’d be willing to borrow that would be greatly appreciated!
We will be meeting up there to play again this weekend (Sunday) Nov. 12 at 10am. Longer term goal is to get involved with the Sandlot Revolution next summer.
Rules are pretty loose at the moment but there are no called strikes, just swings and misses and foul balls count as strikes. Balls have to be obviously out of the strike zone to be called a ball, but I know other leagues around the country don’t even count balls or strikes. It varies from place to place. I haven’t been able to play since the first week due to injury, but when everyone gets there the guy leading it (Josh) gets everyone together for introductions, explains the rules, and picks another person to pick teams to play a game against each other. This is if there are enough guys there for two teams, which is basically at least 10 guys. The day I was there we ended up having 14 or so after a few local neighborhood guys playing basketball came over and joined us. By the way, that’s the nature of sandlot ball. It’s very laid back. It’s about building community, not about competition. Getting together on a baseball diamond and having fun. You have players who play semi-pro ball (we have one) and several others who maybe haven’t played in years, and even a few who may have never played ball before at all. It doesn’t matter (nor should it). Totally inclusive. No umpires, no managers, just getting together to have fun playing ball, just like when we were kids!
There are a couple of really great podcasts out there to check out that I highly recommend listening to to get an idea of what this “sandlot revolution” is all about. Here are the links: Sandlot Revolution and Sandlot Social Club.
Anyway, if you’d like to come out and play some ball, please join us! Bring your gloves, bats (wood only), and drink(s) of your choice. We have an Instagram account you can also follow for updates: @stlouissandlot And our team is called the Southside Slingers.
Thanks, and play ball!
Ernie B——t was one of the first fellows that I got to know when I began working at the Chrysler truck plant in Fenton in 1968. His real last name was Bullock and maybe still is if he’s around. I was 18. He was 33. He’d be 88 today.
Ernie grew up in south St. Louis. I have always been fascinated with the city. All of my grandparents lived there or had at one time or another. Grandma Amy lived on Virginia near Marquette Park. Grandad and Grandmother Jackson lived on Potomac near Hampton and Chippewa. To a boy from the country, they lived in another world.
They had something in St. Louis that we didn’t have in Jefferson County. Pavement! I can still remember how great it was to ride a bicycle on pavement. Didn’t matter what pavement. Streets, sidewalks, parking lots. They were all fabulous compared to the gravel road that ran in front of my house. We had no pavement anywhere. None. Roller skating was impossible. Riding a one speed, balloon-tired bike on a gravel road wasn’t impossible but you weren’t going far. I was always comparing city life with rural.
On a Sunday, you might find Ernie at Sandrina’s on Arsenal. He once told me of an alley game called Bottle Caps. I’m not sure if he played it there. It had rules like baseball but was played with bottle caps and a broom stick. I’ve never tried it but it seems like it would be very tricky to hit the pitched bottle caps.
This post about Charlie Notter and his corkball games put me in mind again of Ernie and his bottle caps.
Much thanks to Charlie’s son, Ed, for sending this along.
Posted over on the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame website.
Cork ball’s history is almost as old as professional baseball in St. Louis itself! Apparently it was first played at Mueller’s, a boardinghouse and saloon on the corner of Grand and Greer on the city’s north side where the team’s owner, Chris Von der Ahe, was the saloon-keeper. The story goes that sometime in 1890, one of the Browns’ players pulled the bung out of a keg of beer, carved it into a ball, and began pitching it to a teammate using a broomstick as a bat. Three others played behind him and another served as catcher.
It didn’t take long (perhaps a few busted windows, pint glasses and mirrors) before the game was relegated to cages, which were erected in just about every part of town. Leagues were organized and manufactured “corkball” equipment became commercially available thanks to several local sporting-goods manufacturers, including Rawlings, Wilson, Worth, Leacock, Sisler Hummel, Murson, Proline, Anchor and Markwort.
R.H. Grady is credited as being the first to develop a horsehide-covered, stitched ball, which dates to 1920. Area big league players who played the game as kids Yogi Berra, Joe Garagiola, and Pete Reiser.
Despite its longevity and almost cult-like following in St. Louis, corkball hasn’t spread much across the country. There’s a club in Chicago, and other locations in Illinois. In Jacksonville, Fla., Butch Trucks and Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band are known to have played the game as kids.
During World War II, Howard Rackley introduced the game to his fellow servicemen on the deck of the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill, which did a lot to disseminate the game to other parts of the country. But lacking the history and cultural connections, it has struggled to survive. There are four major clubs in St. Louis – Sportsman’s Corkball Club (established 1957); South St. Louis Corkball Club (est’d. 1936); Lemay (est’d. in 1947), and Gateway (est’d. 1929). Today, corkball is played on open fields with a pitcher, catcher and fielders. These clubs get together at the end of the year and compete in a one-day tournament.
We invite anyone interested to check out our clubs!
Welcome to the first installment in an occasional new series of blogposts called “Games We Played.”
The idea behind this series is to — in a quick and hopefully fun way — pass on to my grandchildren’s generation the games we played as kids. And by games I don’t mean Monopoly and Chinese Checkers and I certainly don’t mean any game that can be played sitting on the couch with a computer, tablet or phone in your hands.
I’m talking about the games we played outside with friends in the neighborhood. For me, that was in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a North St. Louis neighborhood called North Point, nestled up against Walnut Park, Baden and the St. Louis County line with Jennings. But what I’ve learned talking to some friends and family about these games is that our memories of the rules of these neighborhood and schoolyard games are widely inconsistent. Even the names of the games varied by when and where they were played.
But that’s kind of the point. We all remember the games and the rules differently not because we’re all old people losing our memories — although that most certainly is true in the case of some of my friends (naming no names here and present company excepted) — but because there were NEVER any firmly established rules to begin with. These were the games we made up ourselves or inherited from older siblings and changed to meet our own needs and abilities. Making up or adjusting the rules was all part of the game and, I think, that made us smarter, more resilient and more creative kids.
Today I begin with THE seminal game of my childhood. Fuzzball was one of many, many derivatives of baseball that we played in North Point. No doubt kids in other parts of the country played some version of this game, but this one has a distinct St. Louis heritage because its roots are tied to another St. Louis-born game called corkball, which was originally played with broomsticks and roundly carved and tape-wrapped pieces of cork from beer barrel bungs. That game became so popular that official bats and balls were eventually manufactured to meet the needs of the many who played it. According to a Wiki page, the game was played in the streets and alleys of St. Louis as early as 1890, and as time went on the game travelled around the country as St. Louis servicemen taught it to their buddies during World War II and the Korean War.
But enough about corkball, other than to say that little ball was hard and could blacken an eye or knock out a few windows if not played in a big old field (like the corkball fields at several city parks like Hickey Park in Baden) or inside a rectangular cage like those that popped up adjacent to taverns around town. It also hurt like a dickens when it hits you.
So for brevity, which is already waning I realize, let’s just say that in the interest of safety, the cost and hassle of window replacement and childhood innocence, someone eventually replaced the corkball with a tennis ball, which is, of course, how fuzzball got its name. The game could now be played in backyards, alleys and schoolyards without incurring the wrath of neighbors and principals. Usually. By the way, some kids burnt the fuzz off the ball to make it go faster.
+ The game was usually played with four players, two to a side, a pitcher and a catcher. There were no bases to run. It was simply a game of pitching and hitting. Here are the rules as we played it:
+ There’s no ump so no “called” balls and strikes. Just throw the ball over the plate.
+ Two strikes and you’re out.
+ One strike and you’re out if the catcher cleanly catches a swing and miss.
+ Foul tip behind the plate and you’re out. And by “plate,” I mean whatever was laying around, usually someone’s glove or jacket.
+ Foul tip caught by the catcher is a double play, if there is an “imaginary runner” on base. More on this in a minute.
+ Ground ball or fly ball caught by either player is an out.
+ Ground ball bobbled or past the pitcher is a single.
+ That single gives you an imaginary runner on base, and these “ghosts” move around the base path one base at a time with subsequent hits. A double would move the runner two bases.
+ See rule about double plays above.
+ A pop fly or line drive past or over the pitcher’s head is a double.
+ If you’re playing in a schoolyard with a fence, over the fence is a homerun and off the fence a triple.
+ If there’s no fence, you can designate anything you want as the homerun marker, of course.
Three outs and you switch sides. If the innings seem to be passing too quickly, you can always call for “double innings,” but any imaginary stranded runners do not get to stay on base when you begin the second set of three outs. Unless, of course, you change the rules.
That’s it. You can play with more kids and put people out in the field. You can play with just three and just rotate between pitcher, catcher and hitter. You can do what you want.
Until next time:
Get outside (when you can)
Play with your friends (when it’s safe to do so)
Make up your own rules.
Most importantly, have fun.
Make youth baseball fun again. Leave the adults out of it!
At 71 years old, Alan Van Praag is just happy to be playing a kid’s game.
The Wellington senior doesn’t see himself as an inspiration despite the fact he was a promising young tennis player whose career was cut short by a freak injury that left him paralyzed on his left side.
“I thought my life was over,” said Van Praag, who was playing football in the streets of Brooklyn when an object went into his eye and penetrated his brain. He was paralyzed on the left side of his body. He was critical for six weeks and hospitalized for seven months.
“I had great support from my family and friends,” said Van Praag, whose team is the Brooklyn Bums, is one of 85 seniors playing in the Tuesday afternoon Wycliffe Stiffs Stickball League at Village Park in Wellington. He is also a prominent attorney practicing international law. “I came back. I have traveled all over the world and been to more than 100 countries as an international lawyer. There is nothing I don’t do or won’t do. I have had a wonderful life and a wonderful career.”
He quickly dismisses the notion of being an inspiration. Van Praag was a member of the U.S. Junior Davis Cup team when he was in high school.
“I think I am just a regular guy,” Van Praag said. “I don’t think of myself as an inspiration. I just put one foot in front of the other and do my thing.”
Van Praag said the camaraderie among the players is second to none.
“We all care about each other and there is always some good-natured ribbing,” he said. “We always pick on each other and we love each other. If you can’t hit the ball, it’s okay. That’s the way it is. It is a lot of fun. They accept you as a person, which was wonderful.
“I am very tough,” he continued. “I have been hurt a lot in my life and I just keep going forward. I came back, and nothing stops me. I’ve been practicing international law for 47 years.”
The support from the start has been something not lost on Van Praag.
“It makes me feel very comfortable that everyone is rooting for you,” Van Praag said. “Since day 1, they have been rooting for me. I couldn’t hit a ball for a while. They are always giving me encouragement and they always are saying good things about me. They always come over and give me a handshake whether I strike out or not. Whatever I do they give me encouragement.”
Van Praag said he never thought he’d be playing stickball five years later.
“I didn’t think I would be competent enough to play stickball when I first came here,” Van Praag said. “Marty Ross is a great guy, who encouraged me and I came out and the guys just keep me going. I just love what I am doing.”
Van Praag has overcome obstacles his entire life. He used to be a left-handed tennis player and converted to playing right-handed. He also taught himself to write right-handed and went back to college and became a prominent attorney.
“I do everything,” Van Praag said. “I play stickball. I play tennis. I am in the gym seven days a week, two hours a day. I work out all of the time and I have a wonderful, wonderful wife. The best decision I ever made in my life was my wife Lynne. We just celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary.”
Van Praag draws praise from his peers.
“Alan gets up there and tries and there are others that get up there and they can’t do it,” said Steven Menzer, 70, who also plays for the Brooklyn Bums.
Ross, who is affectionately known as “The Commish,” has been running the stickball league for the past 17 years and said Van Praag is definitely an inspiration to everyone he comes in contact with.
“That is the coolest thing to see,” Ross said. “I invited him to play in the league four years ago. He couldn’t even walk properly. This gives him happiness that is second to none. He’s been playing since 2014-15 and we make him feel welcome whether he hits the ball or not.
“He couldn’t even walk or standup when he got here and just by being in this environment, the therapy, the closeness of everything, he’s made just great strides,” Ross added. “He is all heart.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
This is cool! Obviously these are plastic caps, but it looks like fun! Go out and try it.
Below is an article that was posted November 25, 2016, on the Missouri Historical Society website by Sharon Smith, Curator of Civic and Personal Identity.
This post has been adapted from the 2006 MHM Press title Hidden Assets: Connecting the Past to the Future of St. Louis.
How did corkball get its start? One legend suggests the sport originated in an East St. Louis tavern in the early 1900s when a man began tossing cork-lined bottle caps to another man who whacked at them with a broomstick. Another legend says it began in a Carondelet brewery where workers would pass their lunch breaks carving balls out of cork bungs that plugged holes in beer barrels.
Regardless of how it was born, corkball is great for small groups because the teams aren’t very big. A team usually consists of a pitcher, catcher, outfielder, and possibly a second catcher. The rules of corkball are modified from those of its parent game, baseball. For example, in corkball the pitcher is only 55 feet from the batter (that’s 5½ half feet closer than in baseball), and the game is fast pitch, thrown overhand. A batter is out if he swings and misses the ball and the catcher holds onto it, if he gets two called strikes and the catcher holds onto the ball, if he hits a foul tip that’s caught by the catcher, or if he hits a fly ball that is caught by the pitcher or outfielder. Also, the batter can’t bunt. When the batter gets a hit, there’s a “base runner,” but unlike in baseball the base runner exists only on paper. Every hit is a single, unless otherwise designated by the local field rules, and four hits count as a run. Each subsequent hit counts as another run. A home-run marker is established, and anything hit past the marker is a home run, counting every “runner” on base as well. A game is made up of five innings, and each inning ends after three outs.
The equipment for corkball is a bit different from that of baseball. The ball is much smaller but looks very much like a baseball, down to the sewn leather cover. As for bats, two kinds exist. The regulation bats are made by Spalding or Louisville Slugger and resemble their baseball counterparts, except that the diameter is much smaller. Homemade corkball bats are actually broomsticks, as they were in the original game.
By 1930 corkball had its first organized leagues, and by 1940 it was being played in special corkball cages. Many of these cages were located near taverns, which sponsored league teams. The taverns would even pay the initial fees for installing corkball cages, which back in 1950 varied from $500 to $800. At that time there were 22 enclosed corkball cages in St. Louis. Although corkball cages aren’t seen very often today, corkball is still played around the city in wide-open spaces, such as in the Jefferson Barracks corkball fields and the Tower Grove corkball fields.
Cork & Fuzz 