The Year of Wiffle Ball Statistics

In looking back, the years of 1973 and 1974 had to have been the pinnacle of our Wiffle Ball playing days in the Ninth Street Alley in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona. By 1975, I was starting to get more into basketball and we were all outgrowing the physical dimensions of the Alley. But for those two years before that, we must have played hundreds of games of WB during those summers.

For some reason that I can’t recall, during 1973 or 1974, in addition to the multitude of other “casual” Wiffle Ball games we would play all summer, it was decided that we would have an official league with set teams. We would keep standings, play a defined schedule, and we would track statistics. As overall Alley Neighborhood Organizer (yikes, scratch that, it sounds dangerously close to Community Organizer), I was tabbed to be the Official Scorekeeper. Not sure why I signed up for that – I guess it sounded cool at the time and I always had good chops with numbers and such.

The league would be setup with eight, or was it six, teams? Hmmm, this is going to be a memory test -- let’s  see if I can remember the players. Me, sister Laurey, Donnie Halfpenny, Jimmer Shellenbarger, Mike Blackie, Robbie Furio, Danny Shannon, (Father) Phil Shannon, Sabrina Sprowl, Timmy Cole. I think that is eleven, but I am drawing blanks now. Steve Oswalt was the best all-around athlete in our ‘hood, but he played Little League in the summer and would only occasionally join us for Wiffle Ball (cause it messed with his stroke). Maybe Scott Shultz? I don’t know. Must have been only six teams then. I recall we played a pure round robin - each team played a home and road game against the other – which is like thirty total official league games for which to score and run the numbers.

So here was the deal. After every one of our “official” league games, I would recalculate all the statistics for the entire league. Now mind you, I just covered the basics:  ABs, Hits, Strikeouts, Singles, Doubles, Triples, Homeruns, Batting Average, and Slugging Percentage. Individual statistics for all the players and team statistics for all the teams. What a pain in the ass!  But, hey, I signed up for it and all the kids in my Alley Hood looked up to me, so it is not like I could just bail on them. A commitment is a commitment. I was showing personal integrity even in those days of my youth.

As an aside, I am thankful to this day, that the Elias Sports Bureau wasn’t around then. Jesus, can you imagine running numbers for OBP, OPS, TBP and all of these other state-of-the-art quantifiers? With just pencil, paper, and the bottom-of-the-line Texas Instruments calculator I was pimped out with? It would have taken me the whole goddamn summer to do those – of course it is not like I did anything else in those summers.

The most vivid image I recall from that summer is trudging back to my house after one of those thirty games in The Alley, carrying my spiral notebook containing all the game logs and current statistics, and then settling on my back porch steps to run the new numbers. A gaggle of statistic-hungry vultures, having just completed their game, follows me and then hovers over me waiting to see what their new “line” was. “What’s my average? How many RBIs do I have now? Do I have the most triples?” Enough already! I’ll tell you, those numbers turned those kids crazy that summer, like a bunch of Bert Blylevens had taken up residence in the Ninth Street Alley in Fairview. (Of course, the little dude JR was in the background talking “poop shit” to everybody while I was calculating.)

There was also a controversy that erupted that summer due to our decision to keep stats. I guess I was the unofficial commissioner (as well as stat keeper) and I took decisive action when I saw that the integrity of our Wiffle Ball League was compromised. Mid-season, I noted that the purity of our game had been tainted by a scoring policy we had enacted before the official league games had begun.

Here was the issue. Recall from this blog post that in our 2-on-2 Alley Games, if you were on base and your teammate at bat, you could be forced at home. In other words, you had to make it to home plate on the next batted ball in play or you were out. Well we decided to track those batted balls in that scenario as a single if the batter reached first base before the force out was made at home. Wrong decision. It skewed the Batting Averages way too high and I suspect it impacted how the players were game-planning their ABs.

So after, I think, three league games, I made a unilateral decision that such a force out play would now be scored as a Fielder’s Choice. Official At Bat. No Hit. Oh, and for good measure, I made my ruling retroactive to the start of the season. The aggregate league batting average (and I would know this) must have dropped 300 points overnight. What a shit storm that caused. Can you imagine going to bed one night batting .625 and waking up the next morning batting .325?

Mike Blackie reminded me in a note that he recalls that he and my sister Laurey won the official league that year. My teammate (hey, I was a playing league commish and scorekeeper extraordinaire) was Tim Cole and our team name was the “Witch Doctors”. Chuckle. I must have lost the draft lottery that year. “With the final pick in the 1974 Fairview Ninth Street Alley Wiffle Ball League Draft, the Witch Doctors select…”.