A Saturday Afternoon Reminiscence

When I was a kid, I had two great friends named Travis and Chad. The three of us lived within a few houses of each other and did just about everything together for a good number of years - we started growing apart in about eighth or ninth grade, and by the time we graduated we were down to just-say-hi-in-passing status. But before then we had a lot of fun, and one of the things we used to do was play night wiffle ball.

With three of us, it went like this: there was a batter, a pitcher, and a fielder. We used my driveway because it was the flattest one, and the batter stood right in front of the closed garage door. The pitcher stood at a mark on my driveway that was also used as one of the three-point-line markers when we'd play basketball, and the fielder stood out in the street. Three strikes to an out, three outs to a side, three sides to an inning with the players roatating, five innings to a game. Other than the good old-fashioned strikeout (which was always accompanied by a great deal of razzing, because it's just flat-out weak to strike out in wiffle ball), the only other way to make an out was for the pitcher or fielder to catch the ball on the fly. A batted ball that didn't get by the pitcher was the same as a foul ball, one that got by the pitcher but landed before the street was a single, one landing between the near curb and the middle of the street a double, one landing between the middle of the street and the far curb a triple, and one landing on the other side of the street was a dinger - but these could still be caught no matter how deep, because we found that the regular robbing of home runs added a lot of excitement to the game. There's nothing like taking certain runs away from a friend, especially if he had just absolutely hit the snot out of the ball.

The way we determined what was fair and what was foul was tied in to the way we had enough light to play at night. The light on the front of my house was good enough for the batter and pitcher, but out in the street it was pretty dark. So what we would do was get two ladders out of my garage and set them up on the far side of the street in the grass to act as foul poles. Then we'd run big fat bright yellow extension cords out to each ladder, and those showed up quite well enough against the grass and pavement to act as foul lines. To finish it all off we'd plug in a couple of those adjustable garage lamps that people use on their workbenches and to work on their cars, attach them to the top of each ladder, turn them on, and voila! Wrigley Field West (although this was back before Wrigley had lights, if you want to be picky about it).

Looking back, it's a little surprising that nobody even once complained to us or our parents about the bright lights and us yelling in the street in the middle of the night all summer long. Of course, most of the neighborhood had kids and so they were probably just used to it all at this point, because all of us used to get into all sorts of shenanigans at all hours - our wiffle ball games were nothing compared to, say, the simply epic games of flashlight tag we played. A dozen or more kids running around in the dark, some of them with flashlights, well-planned assaults on "homebase" to free captured prisoners, loud boisterous ambushes, trees and even rooftops regularly coming into play when the chase was on... those weren't nearly as regular as the wiffle ball/twenty-one/horse games, though. You'd think that sooner or later, somebody would have yelled "just give me some freaking peace!!!1!" and shaken a clenched fist at us before retying their bathrobe and walking back into the house muttering under their breath about kids these days, but it never happened. I had a pretty crazy cool neighborhood back then, and I'm sure I'll talk about that sometime. It was like growing up inside of an archetype.

Anyway, I was thinking about old school nighttime wiffle ball earlier today, and it made me want to play again in the worst way. Maybe this spring I can figure out somewhere and someway to set up a game, because we always had a blast. I guarantee you Gary would be up for it. Find a third who has a house, and I think it's gonna be on.