Wiffle Ball Back In The Day

The two young boys that live across the street from me frequently play wiffle ball. They have a net backstop in the driveway that faces their front yard. There are anywhere from four to eight kids playing. They run everything out (not automatics which is explained below). It’s a bit chaotic but it reminded me of my old neighborhood in Oradell, NJ and our wiffle ball games.

In my neighborhood we played a lot of games out in the street. There were many kids of varying ages. My group of friends landed in the middle, spanning three grades. These games could be as simple as throwing a ball against the wall that surrounded my house to football played with a tennis ball. This activity was short lived once we realized falling in the street was not a fun part of the game and football was moved to my side yard or the public park down the hill.[1] Once we created a figure-eight demolition derby with our bikes at the top of the cul-de-sac around the corner from my house. Again, short lived due to injuries and bike damage. But the game that most often dominated our time was wiffle ball.

David N. Mullany invented the game in 1953 after watching his son play with a perforated plastic ball, aiming to create a ball that easily curves and produces "whiffs" (strikes). The ball and bat came as a set (and still does). The bat was yellow, narrow and made of hard plastic. The ball, also plastic, was the size of a baseball. It was solid on the bottom half and had vertical, rounded slots on the top half. This allowed you to throw curving pitches without any twisting of arm or hand.

The game, in our neighborhood, was usually played by teams of one to two players. The reason you could play with only two people is that any hits that the pitcher couldn’t catch were what we called “automatics”. Most of the games were two man with my across the street neighbor Tim. We pitched from the street into the short driveway of my detached garage.[2] The garage door served as the backstop and the four square panels in the center, two made of glass, served as the strike zone.  One time a particularly hard thrown pitch shattered one of the panes. I think this only happened once. The aforementioned automatics extended to my friend Tim’s yard across the street. Grounder past the pitcher was a single; fly ball that didn’t reach the opposite curb, a double; past the curb but short of the lawn, a triple and the lawn was a home run. There was a large tree on the street in front of Tim’s house directly across from the driveway. It was legal to catch balls out of the tree. If you didn’t catch it the ball could land for anything from a double to a home run.  All runners had to be forced to the next base. We had the same mailman in our neighborhood for most of our time growing up named Wayne. If we happened to be playing wiffle ball when he made his rounds, he would on occasion step up and take a few swings.[3]

Sometimes we played at our friend Jim’s house over in the cul-de-sac. We used a net pitch back because they didn’t have a garage. These were usually two person teams, a pitcher and a fielder, with a slight variation on the automatics rule (e.g., fly balls could be caught). Most of the games were played between Tim and me in my driveway. I think we counted sixty plus games one summer. We donned batting helmets and batting gloves. We kept statistics, mostly batting average and home runs. We had a lot of time on our hands in the summer.

With that as the backdrop, there are two notable events from our time playing wiffle ball. The first which became known as the “Oldsmobile Delta 88 Incident” and the second was the “Schaeffer Avenue Heineken game”. I think I was 14 years old for the first event and 17 for the beer game.

The Oldsmobile Delta 88 Incident

I had a friend from Oradell who moved to Saddle River when I was around 11. He wasn’t from my neighborhood and had lived about a half mile west on the other side of the High School. We kept in touch after he moved and I spent a fair amount of time visiting him. His new house was halfway up the side of a large hill with a steep driveway leading up to the house. To the right was a three-car garage with recreation room above it. Wiffle ball was one of our activities also played in his driveway against his garage doors. One day, we went out to the driveway to play and found his older brother’s car parked in front of the middle door of the garage. The car was a green, 1963 Corvette (the one with the split back window). I think it was my friend’s idea to throw the car into neutral and roll it out of the way. There was a wooden retaining wall bordering the back of the parking area. My friend got behind the wheel and we rolled the car back along the retaining wall parallel to the garage (and not too close to the steep driveway). He put the car back in park and we went about our game. A few things are worth mentioning about moving his brother’s car. The Corvette was a small maneuverable car and the parking area was flat. These facts will come into play in the event I am about to recount.

Sometime later my friend from Saddle River was over at my house. We decided to play some wiffle ball only to find my grandfather’s car in our driveway. He wasn’t home at the time. I guess he and my grandmother had been picked up by friends to go somewhere. The car in the driveway was his beige, Oldsmobile Delta 88. Advertisements described the car as a “full-size land yacht with a 455 cubic inch Rocket V8.” We are talking about a very large automobile.

A little background on my grandfather will provide some context. These were my maternal Swiss grandparents. Dolf[4] and Jeanne. He from Zurich in the German part of the country, she from Motier, a small town outside Neuchatel in the French part. My grandfather liked big cars. When we lived in Arizona in the early sixties my grandparents followed us out and bought a home nearby. My grandfather’s car of choice out there was a boat-size, white, Lincoln Continental. He was an average size guy but always drove these big cars.

So, here we were confronted with a similar problem that we solved successfully in Saddle River just a few weeks before. Other than the size difference in the cars, the landscape was also quite different. My house stood at the top of two streets that ran sharply downhill; Taylor to the west and Elizabeth to the north. The plan was to maneuver the car down to the curb on Elizabeth just down from the driveway. I think you can sense the problem that would ensue. I climbed into the driver seat of the car. My friend was positioned behind to help guide it as it rolled out of the driveway. I released the break and threw the car in neutral. The car began to drift backward into the street.  The technology of the Delta 88 was also different from the Corvette and presented another crucial issue: power steering and brakes. As I turned into the street the steering wheel locked and would not budge. As I pumped the brakes they also stopped responding. Stomping on them slowed the car some but we were still rolling. I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw my friend running for safety as the car continued to glide down the hill. The steering wheel had locked in a position that was sending me down neither hill but towards the house on the corner. On that corner was a street sign and a large tree. The next thing I knew I felt the car hit the curb and cross the sidewalk between the tree and the street sign and come to a stop in the front yard of my neighbor’s house. I sat there in this massive car thinking “this is not good”, not realizing yet how much worse this situation could have been[5].

It was early afternoon, and many of the neighborhood regulars were out and about. They all quickly gravitated to the car on the front lawn, staring at the spectacle that had just taken place. The looks on their faces was clear: this kid is in so much trouble. There were probably a half dozen or so on-lookers with more on the way as word spread quickly about the event. The mother of the family who lived next door to Tim on Elizabeth Street, came walking onto the scene. By this time I was out of the car, leaning against it thinking about what to do. She walked up and asked, “you wouldn’t happen to have the keys?” The obviousness of the solution hit me and I ran back to my house to get the keys off the rack in the kitchen. I returned to the scene of the crime and gave her the keys. As she got in the car I asked if she could park it by the side of my house (I was still thinking about saving the wiffle ball game). She parked the car and I thanked her profusely. You never know who is going to be your guardian angel. She headed back to her house and the crowd dispersed. In the end, the duration of the entire event was probably about ten minutes. However, it had been witnessed by most of the neighborhood and the story would no doubt be recounted to their parents later that day. This story would definitely get out and even my less than rational adolescent mind realized I had to get out in front of this.  I had to tell my father what had happened. This all took place in the early afternoon so my Dad was not yet home from work. My Dad was a wholesale furniture salesman. He sold various lines of furniture and accessories to retail stores. The nature of this work meant he was usually home around three o’clock. He would then do the day’s paperwork at his desk in our house.

We laid low for the rest of the afternoon. I think we attempted to play our wiffle ball game but our hearts weren’t in it after the day’s near-death experience. Late in the afternoon I headed back to the house to throw myself at the mercy of the paternal court. My Dad was home and working at this desk. I have to say I was more than a little nervous when I sat down and launched into my tale of misfortune. When I finished my Dad was silent for a moment and then pronounced his verdict: I was very lucky it wasn’t worse, don’t even think about doing something like this again and he’d tell my grandfather he moved the car. That was it. No punishment. No yelling. It was over. I would live to do something else stupid on another day.

The Schaeffer Avenue Heineken Game

Two of my good High School friends, Brian and Joe, lived about a mile west of me on Schaeffer Avenue in Oradell. They were also into playing wiffle ball in their neighborhood. Somehow Brian and I got to talking and one of us suggested a wiffle ball game between them and Tim and me. The game would be at Brian’s house. The stakes were a case of Heineken.[6] This probably was the summer of 1976, before I headed off to college. I was 17 and Tim was 15, both of us under the legal drinking age in New Jersey (then 18 years old) but we were well established under-age drinkers by that summer. I think Brian, and maybe Joe, was 18 so the settling up could be handled by one of them. So we drove my car[7] over to Brian’s, for our first, and it turned out, our only away wiffle ball game. Tim pitched for our side and, as he remembers, this was the first time he was allowed to throw as hard as he could. We kept things less cut throat in our neighborhood games. The layout was similar to the games we played in the aforementioned cul de sac in my neighborhood. Pitch- back in the driveway was the strike zone. Home run distance across the street was around 75 feet. The game turned out to be a pitching duel. I just hung out near the home run line watching Tim mostly strike them out. He had a nasty screwball that came in on right handed batters. I don’t think Brian and Joe were ready for this and they spent most of the game trying to figure out how to hit this pitch. Tim remembers that I also pitched (maybe the ground rules were that both players had to pitch). Somehow we emerged unscathed from my time on the mound. Sometime later in the game I hit a home run which was the only run of the game. With an IOU for the case of beer, we returned victorious to our neighborhood.  No parades but a general feeling of pride from our peeps. We had slayed the west side wiffle ball infidels.

That was our wiffle ball… back in the day.  

[1] This field was a town park across a busy street at the bottom of our neighborhood. One summer the town stopped mowing the field. We took matters into our own hands and rolled an armada of lawn mowers down the hill  and cut the grass ourselves. Then we played our game.

[2] For a time we got into street hockey and used my garage door as the goal. It was pretty much just taking turns as shooter and goalie. Again a two-person game. We could spontaneously generate games.

[3] Tim is the source of this anecdote. He also remembered the mailman’s name as “Wolfie”. I tend not to doubt Tim’s recollections.

[4] His given name was Adolf but he preferred to be called Dolf after World War II for obvious reasons.

[5] Think about the car incident at the end of the movie “Ferris Beuler’s Day Off”.

[6] In discussing this recently with Tim, he remembers it as a case of Beck’s. He could be right.

[7] My ride that summer was my first car, a 1966 sky blue convertible Ford Galaxie 500. I think my Dad paid $100 for it. This was the kind of car the B-52’s wrote about in their song “Love Shack”. It was quite roomy. The car died in late August the week before I went to college.