January 1, 2020 - Game Recap

Pops & Pace vs. Des & Mark
Score: 5-0
Location: Hillside Middle School (Salt Lake, UT)

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?  An emphatic "no" on this auspicious new-years morn which greeted us briskly with a fresh blanket of snow to help usher in both the new decade as well as a feeling of renewal and invigoration.

Despite the mounting snowfall and its attendant logistical complications, we plowed forth and stuck to our plan to conjoin at the agreed-upon spot for an 8:15 game time.

Seeing Pops roll up it was apparent as he strode towards us in his chic black spandex pants that he has not simply been sitting on his wiffle haunches all these years.  His combination of strength and spryness would be enough to intimidate any pitcher, as would later be borne out. 

After we had all exchanged initial pleasantries, we strolled the grounds to stake out our new field.  We were naturally drawn to the metal backstop some distance away, and settled on using its convex side and orienting our field of play towards a fire hydrant (a triple) and a basketball court, using a concrete wall as the right field foul line and a rock quarry as the left field foul line.  This field had no homerun territory except for two basketball hoops a fair distance away which we said would be good for a 6x homer if the ball went through one of the hoops.

We went through the ritualistic self-toss hitting for teams which started with some self-strikes and some very meekly hit balls by me, Mark, and Des, making for the embarrassing circumstance where we all have to stand awkwardly close to the last batter and wince as he tosses the ball to himself, hoping that he doesn't pelt one of us.  John actually belted a solid deep fly to center, and with that the teams were set.

I should pause here to note that some very unsanctioned activity proceeded from this point forward.  Since no one had any official wiffle gear on them I had to make a stop the day before at Big 5 to get a bat and balls.  They didn't have any Wiffle-brand balls, so I had to settle on getting a couple of "Junk Balls", which are similar in size, but have a ring of holes directly across the middle and have one side that is ridged and one side that is smooth.  I dare say that I actually like the pitching action you get off these balls.  Their big flaw, however, seems to be durability.  They started cracking within the first few AB's.  Granted, the Wiffle-brand balls also crack often in snowy conditions, but this seemed worse.

One other thing to mention is that this wiffle outing was going to need to be a very short one due to the snow shutting down some transit options that would have otherwise been available to one of our number.  One full two-out inning was the (comical) compromise.  Not that the cracking balls would have let us play longer anyways.

Mark took the bump for his squad.  John and I got a couple quick walks.  Then John hit a slow roller to Mark's follow-through side, which he was able to pounce on before it stopped spinning, and thereby hold the ghost runners on 1st and 2nd (despite making a pretend throwing motion to 1st).  Then I drew another walk, and then John hit a routine pop-up just backwards of Mark.  But--and maybe it was due to the snowy conditions or the fact that Des and Mark had failed to take some practice flyballs before the first pitch--the ball felt destined to drop, and drop it did, as Mark got spun around on the ball and couldn't get a hand on it.  One run in.

After that I smacked one into deep center past the basketball hoop, good for a 2-run double, runners on 2nd and 3rd with 1 out.  John then hit a nice poke-shot double into center-right for another 2 runs.  Then I struck out to end the inning.

For our bottom half of the inning I started out on the mound by first giving John a practice pop-up (which he handled cleanly).  The balls were cracking and crumbling pretty bad at this point but we kept resuscitating them and they seemed to still be working well enough.  Desi ran the count full on me and then drew a leadoff walk.  Then I got ahead of Mark in the count and induced him into a shallow popup for out #1.  Next I got Desi in a quick 1-2 hole and tried my luck on him with a knuckleball which actually worked for a strikeout.  Game over.

Mark then tried to get some built-up frustration out on the terminal balls by pelting them into the outfield.  We then scattered the junk-ball remnants in inconspicuous places around the grounds so that John's daughter, Janie, would be able to find them and be really popular among her friends.

Mark leaving behind wiffle ruins for unborn generations to wonder at

Due to the shortness of the game, those of us that didn't have to leave early (Des, John, and I) decided to make a Starbucks run out of it.  We caught up on bygone names (e.g. Rick Wilden), family dynamics, TV shows, and some of the deeper things of life, like the comparison between decades for a growing family and the joys and pains of seeing how your children express themselves in life.  One inning of ball and 45 minutes of conversing might not have appealed to the brasher, younger versions of ourselves; the ones wearing iconic red Adidas pullovers or blue & gold "jerk shirts".  But for the chic spandex generation of Gil Tyrees it was glorious.

Game Highlights

• Desi inexplicably played us in the Joe-Friend shift the whole game.  We never let on about it.  
• I technically pitched a no-hitter.  
• Pops generously treated at Starbucks.     

Bonus literary reference: "Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field with whiteness;... there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow."
-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Game report by Pace Barker