I get asked quite a bit why I hit the way I do, how I became a hitter that doesn’t walk a lot, strike out a lot, or even really take pitches. I’ve always been a hacker, just trying to get the barrel to the ball where ever the pitch may be. My Dad will always try to blame himself saying his batting practice was all over the place (relax Walt your BP is money), I tell people it’s because of a game that I love almost as much as I love baseball, Wiffle Ball.

          Not only did playing countless hours of Wiffle Ball teach me how to hit the ol’ Uncle Charlie, but it made me a great ‘bad ball’ hitter (a hitter that can hit pitches out of the strike zone well). Whether the pitcher was my Dad, my Mom, my Grandma or one of my friends, I always felt like a stickler if I would take borderline pitches waiting for a good pitch to hit, so I would swing at nearly everything. For better or for worse, those habits in Wiffle Ball translated to the baseball field. Some help me out in some instances, while others are why I will sometimes get myself out by chasing bad pitches.

          Who hasn’t pictured this scenario when they’re playing Wiffle Ball? Game 7, World Series, bottom of the 9th, two outs, bases loaded, down by three. I have seen quite a few interviews with Major Leaguers, talking about their playoffs and the World Series experiences, saying those moments brought them back to when they dreamed of those scenarios while playing Wiffle Ball in the backyard with their friends or parents. I have done the same thing a million times, but lets just say… I took it a little further than that when I was a kid.

          My Dad and I used to set these situations up on the Wiffle Ball field in our backyard, and that man had a pretty good curveball, I had to work hard to hit that walk-off jack to earn my dinner. He’d come home from work and I’d ask him if we could play “the bottom of the 9th game”, where we would create that situation and I had to hit a tater or live with myself for the night in disgrace. He and I transitioned to regular batting practice down at the town field after he was tired of giving up walk-off Wiffle Ball bombs in Game 7 of the World Series, and that’s when Wiffle Ball started to get more serious than you could imagine.

          The North West Wifflers Association (NWWA) was founded by one of my best friends, Angus Gracey, along with myself and quickly became one of the most elite and renowned Wiffle Ball leagues in the history of the sport. Originally known as the Major Wiffle Ball Mountain League (MWML), the league was founded in 2006, but sadly folded in the middle of the 2014 season due to an unresolved players strike, despite many attempts during Collective Bargaining Agreement meetings between players and owners (I give that elaborate excuse for my friends who lost interest). There are home videos in the early days of the league in 2006 of Angus and I playing our hearts out in an attempt to capture a league title. I would wear a full Yankees uniform and he would wear a full Red Sox uniform, there were brawls, web gems, walk off homers, tears, and above all a foundation of passion that led to the expansion of the league (I’m being serious here folks, we took our Wiffle Ball extremely seriously).

          After our league gained popularity, we could no longer sport our favorite MLB teams’ jerseys (Trademarks and such), so we produced our own team names and jerseys.

2012 was the peak of the league’s success, as we featured a draft and had six teams with player contracts, all vying for a NWWA ring. My team that I owned and played for was the West Sharon 39ers, featuring Zach McCabe who was robbed of a Walter Wallace Award (Cy Young Award) that season by the knuckleballing excellence of Timmy Haan (Zach did earn a Rookie of the Year award, though). Angus’ team was the North Kent Wiffling Whalers who, despite taking highly touted prospect Nathaniel O’Niel early in the 2012 NWWA First Year Draft, did not have the season they were expected to as they were bounced from the playoffs in the first round (believe it or not I’m not spewing randomness from faint memories, check out the NWWA website for validation, I remember it all like it was yesterday).

The 2012 North West Wifflers’ Association World Series featured, of course, the West Sharon 39ers (in honor of the founding of Sharon, CT, in 1739) and the North Canaan Canes, comprised of two power hitters in the form of Jeremy Stiewing and Trevor Dakers. After the 39ers gained a 3-1 lead in the seven game series and were just one game away from the promise land, we went full-blown Golden State Warriors and blew it.

The Canes rattled off three straight gutsy victories, hitting balls over the fence left and right, and took the ring right off my finger.  That loss still haunts me to this day, and I still hear it occasionally from Jeremy and Trevor.

          Long story short people, Angus and I made Wiffle Ball our obsession. That’s what we did in our free time. Outside of school and baseball (hockey for Angus), we played Wiffle Ball. But we didn’t just play, we created a website, kept track of/compiled statistics, when we were really young we had Wiffle Ball Tonight home videos highlighting the days action, heck, we even made a MWML/NWWA National Hall of Fame in my attic. Yup, Angus and I went full nerd mode for Wiffle Ball, similarly to baseball.

          That long and nerdy tangent about mine and my best friend’s obsession with Wiffle Ball wasn’t just to reinforce how weird we were as kids, rather, it was to delve into some of the origins of my passion for baseball and all forms of the game. At the time I was equally obsessed with baseball as I was Wiffle Ball,

but when I realized my Wiffle Ball professional career had peaked during my time in the NWWA, it seemed I had to focus on becoming a professional baseball player instead. At the end of the day, ballplayers just want to play any form of the game, any chance we can get to put some dirt on the uniform.