![]() The previous game of the week had attracted seventeen thousand views, more attention than most college baseball games receive. “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. “Got to the point where I had people in the neighborhood saying I took it too seriously,” he said. “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. These, apparently, include a screwball, a riser, a slider, a super curve, and a change-up drop, among others, thrown from various arm angles. ![]() “I would say I usually hit the zone consistently with nine or ten pitches,” he said. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() “We have a couple guys from Boston,” Bevelacqua said. They’re from the weird, cousin-loving part of Jersey.”īy now the major leaguers were arriving, some from considerably farther away. “They’re not on drugs, but-well, they might be on drugs. “They call themselves ‘Boyz with Feelings,’ ” Bevelacqua said of the showboats, who turned out to be pretty good players. 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. 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. “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. “The rest look like me,” Bevelacqua, who is sturdily built, with a certain middle-aged heft, said. convenes on fourteen Sundays between late April and the end of September. 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. 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.”īevelacqua 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. “By the end of the day, there was so much trash talking, we agreed to do it again the next weekend,” he recalls. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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