Ecstatic Truth Scholarship: Wiffleball

There’s a fine line between living meaningfully and living in a fantasy world, between possessing a child-like sense of wonder and just behaving like an child. The authors of The New Enthusiast have no idea where that line is. To prove it, we bring you Ecstatic Truth Scholarship [ETS], a pastime that exists somewhere between soft science and drunken lies.*

In our first installment of ETS, we turn our gaze to a subject near and dear to our hearts: Wiffleball. The authors of this amusing little weblog have spent the better part of the summer in the warm embrace of this game, which has been described by (totally anonymous, probably imagined) luminaries as “the most noble conceivable use of plastic.” Huzzah to that, I say.

Using a combination of time-tested research strategies (involving the Dewey, Library of Congress, and Bliss library classification systems), and also our own instincts, we’ve cobbled together some of the more obscure, fascinating history of Wiffleball.**

*Any resemblance between this and other works of similar bent, including those by Flaubert, the Pataphysicians, John Hodgman, or whoever did this, is most likely due to the fact that we have stolen the idea. I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said, “Mediocre writers borrow; writers who’ve never benefited from even one original thought ever steal.” 

**Ross McSweeney is not responsible for the any of the potentially offensive material that follows. He’s just a good guy doing what he can to get by.

Our findings include, and are probably limited to, the following:

The first ever Wiffleball game was actually played at the exact same time as the first ever baseball game, just one field over. It’s a fact!

That said, Wiffleball is actually based on a Native American game, which, translated into Latin, means TIMEO ANGLO-SAXONES ET DONA FERENTES.

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Wiffleballs and -bats are manufactured in Connecticut, the New England state that borders Rhode Island to the West. Here’s a fun fact about Rhode Island: 97% of people on the West Coast think it’s actually an island.

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Chinese people hate Wiffleball and freedom, in that order.

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In the Roman dialect of Italian, there’s a word that sounds alot like “Wiffleball,” but is actually quite a crude suggestion about what your mother should go do with a rolled-up copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport.

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Fantasy Wiffleball has failed to catch on with the general public the same way its hardballed cousin has.*

*Note: this marks the first time a native English speaker has used the term “hardballed” in a sentence. My hunch is, it won’t be the last.

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Wiffleball is fun for the whole family—except if Uncle Marty is playing, in which case it becomes sad and sometimes even dangerous. 

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Pitches in Wiffleball don’t have the same names as in real baseball. The hamball, the sleepyball, the staph infectionball, the dowryball, the papsmereball, and linimentball are all common and do basically what you’d expect them to do based on their names. One pitch, the Father Geoghanball, which was accused of sexually abusing more than 130 children, has been outlawed.

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Speaking of Wiffleball pitches, Carson Cistulli’s FIP versus Ross McSweeney is historically great. I’m just saying.

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Only the Ball Was White by Robert Peterson would be markedly improved if it were a history of legendary black Wiffleball players and all-black professional Wiffleball teams.

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If Ray Kinsella’s father had loved Wiffleball instead, he (Ray) would’ve only had to plow under, like, a tenth the crop—a quater, tops. Think about it.