July 17, 2021 - Game Recap

Pace vs. Paul vs. Des
Score: 29-23-15
Location: Lambert Original (Paradise Valley, AZ)

In support of our Phoenix Suns, Des and I flew into Phoenix to catch game 5 of the NBA Finals (😢).  And in support of his mother, Paul drove into Phoenix; coming with his family by way of an unofficial, partial Lambert reunion in Denver.  (Let it be remembered that Paul was the 2004 recipient of the Purple Heart Award for his dedication to his aging family members.)

By some tremendous stroke of luck, our timing all synced up such that Paul unexpectedly called me on Saturday morning, and before you could say "R.C. Willey" a wiffle game was underway.  (Crato wanted to make it known that he was eligible for the game (i.e., off the DL from his foot injury), but he had a pre-arranged boating trip.)

The weather was a very manageable, if a bit balmy, high 80's / low 90's.  The summer cicadas hummed a steady droning buzz as a background track to the day's proceedings.  

The format would be 1 on 1 on 1 with each batter facing both opposing pitchers twice for a total of 4 innings.  I started off batting against Paul with Des in the field.  

Des throwing strikes in warm-ups

I hit a first-pitch homer over the left-field wall, then got a lot of ducks on the pond but had some weak pop-ups to end the inning with only 1 run.  Paul then faced Des.  I let a few get by me in the field, and Paul ended up with 2.  Des then came out swinging hard against my pitching, and ended up with 3 runs.  (When subsequently asked about how the game went, Des was very eager to emphasize that he won the 1st inning.)

In the 2nd inning the bats started to heat up.  I added 10 or so to my score, and Paul knocked in several as well.  For Des's turn at the plate he had a couple quick strikeouts by Paul, but then recovered and rallied for 5 or 6 runs.  

It was at this point that we took an unprecedented mid-game break for some of Jane's waffles.  The meal was scrumptious; adorned with fresh berries, topped with cream and jams and syrup, and chased with a backyard concoction of tangelos and blood oranges.  We all partook heartily, including Joelle, who was there as an emissary of the WWC (Wiffle Wives Club).  

This mid-game brunch turned out to have more of an effect than anticipated.  When we resumed play, and as the cloud cover started to give way to the hot sun, Paul started sweating syrup, and Des, overcome with the heat and discomfort, violently shed his shirt and tossed it aside on the exposed concrete.  

I once again mustered only a few runs off of Paul, who followed with 5 or 6 of his own off of Des to bring his tally within 1 run of mine.  

When Des was in the outfield, whenever one of the balls would get stuck in the oleander bushes (which is quite common), he would sort of make a few glances at the ball and pretend to make an attempt at retrieving it.  I figured that in his now-topless form he was worried about the chafe he would get from crawling around in there.  

Digging out a ball from the oleander

In the final inning, Des, hatless and without glasses, was too worn down to consistently attack the strike zone as a pitcher, thus surrendering a bevy of homeruns to me.  I brought my total score to 29.  

In Paul's middle part of the frame, he put up a good effort and looked like he might go on a surge.  But then I got him to hit a pop-up and a ground-out to secure my lead over him.

Des gave it a good effort in his bottom of the frame, but the gap was too wide, and he ended with 15.    

Game Highlights

• Instead of hitting for teams, we shot hoops for the honor to bat first.  
• Des's fitness tracker indicated that he had doubled his daily calorie-burn goal through the course of play, thus disproving the slanderous myth that wiffle is for lazy people.  
• When we were changing into our swimsuits after the game, I took the opportunity to pelt Des with a wiffleball in the right butt cheek.    

Wally in training.  Roping one to deep right and making it look easy.

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

September 15, 2018 - Game Recap

Pace & Chris vs. Paul & Verlan
Score: 18-19
Location: PARADIS3 Field (Fall City, WA)

As part of our raucous weekend of old college roommates getting together to enjoy some male bonding we made sure to dedicate a morning to a friendly game of wiffle.  The house we were staying at had a lot of acreage in the back, though with some grading challenges, but we were able to scout out a big patch and come up with an orientation that ended up making for some nice confines.

Once we were able to rouse Verlan from his deep slumber in his pitch-black guestroom, and he had appropriately layered himself, we made our way out to the maiden field to get things started.  We were a little late on start time but nobody was more than 15 minutes late so no lap-running punishments were enforced.

After hitting for teams Paul took to the mound to start off the contest.  He gave up a couple walks and a couple singles, plus a 2-run double which went over Verlan's head by quite a ways in the vast outfield which gave us all a chance to witness his interesting running form which I would describe as being very rigid and earnest, with short lunges, involving well-defined elbow thrusts (made all the more interesting by the swishing sounds of his plastic-y overcoat).  In the end of that half inning we put up 3 runs.

Then when it was our turn to take the field Chris took the mound to test out his pitching form.  Having not pitched in over 10 years, and dealing with fresh balls that hadn't yet been scuffed by time and bat contact, he struggled with his command, giving up 11 runs on only 3 hits (including one grand salami by Paul).

In the 2nd Chris and I put up just 1 or 2 more runs as we couldn't find much of a rhythm at the plate.  Paul and Verlan also put up just a couple runs as Chris settled a bit on the mound and as their plate disciple waned a bit.

In the 3rd Chris and I finally broke out for a 10-run inning with a steady string of solid hits all over the field, including a deep blast to the right-center, down-sloping homerun territory that sent Verlan running for an extra 50 feet or so in his pursuit of the ball down the wet grass and soil.  I took the mound in the bottom of the 3rd with a 15-13 lead and threw their hitting off with my rapid-fire delivery and some different arm angles.

Paul countered in the following inning with some erratic pitching that lulled us into taking some bad hacks for some easy outs.  Then they put up a run or two in their half of the frame which took us to the 5th and final inning with a score of 18-16, our lead.

With time running short we switched to a 2-out inning for that final inning.  Chris and I got the bases loaded but hit a couple grounders into the high grass that cut short our rally without tacking on any insurance runs.

In the bottom of the 5th I gave up a quick double to Paul, then got a strikeout on Verlan, then had Paul down in an 0-2 count, one strike away from victory.  I threw a good fast one in on his hands that he was able to inside-out for an opposite field single.  Then Verlan came up with 2 men on and heroically cranked an overhand curve up into the tree above the imaginary homerun line for a walk-off 3-run badonkadonk, earning himself MVP honors for the day.

Game Highlights

• Verlan successfully chased down a deep popup and caught it around his shins while still staying on his feet.
• Paul unsuccessfully chased down a short foul popup, diving into the wet grass with some interesting arm contortions.  This left him a bit rattled when he came back to the mound. 
• Paul set a record by multitasking during a wiffle game, coordinating funeral details on the phone with various church bigwigs back in Arlington.
• For postgame grub we went to McD's for breakfast.  Paul declared (sacrilegiously, in my opinion) that he wouldn't mind if the McMuffin or the McGriddle ceased to exist. 

Church guy 

Game report by Pace Barker

December 29, 2017 - Game Recap

Paul & Crato vs. Des, Pace, and Michael Funk
Score: 40-20
Location: Lambert Original (Paradise Valley, AZ)

Introduction

On a brisk winter morning in the desert valley, a silver van traversed the calderas under the first rays of sun, making its way through parched riverbeds and eventually arriving at Bar-Z Lane where it turned the corner and came careening round the driveway and onto the back dirt lot where it was put into park in the SW corner at a near 90-degree angle with the driver side windows down and the sunroof cracked. Preceding it in time but not location was a black coupe with glinting wheels; driver-side windows also down. 

Then, all in a moment, the 2 passengers from the van emerged, flanked by the man in the coupe—a slick, mustached gentleman in a black and gray jumpsuit—while a 4th man with both his arms held high above his head as if to signal a victory stepped out from the garage as the articulated door curled up and settled into its musty confines. The 4 men all walked towards each other, converging at a point where dirt meets with concrete; a site which had an aura about it as if it were some primordial altar of sacrifice, where dreams are fulfilled or crushed, labors are rewarded or rejected, and sweat and blood are shed equally.  

The men began conversing in pleasant tones, and exchanging handshakes and other forms of greeting.  A fifth, younger man with ruddy cheeks soon emerged from inside the Spanish-style home with its sun-bleached orange brick, and joined their assemblage.  A ritual then transpired in which the men, in turn, softly tossed a white plastic ball into the air with one hand while the other held a black plastic bat; the two hands then joining on the handle of the bat in an effort to make contact with the ball and hit it as far as they could.  As the ritual concluded, the men split into 2 sides and it became apparent that they were about to engage in a great battle -- a wiffle battle.  

--

With the rare occurrence of somewhere between 4 and 8 Gil Tyrees being in Phoenix roughly around the same time, the email and SMS channels were fluttering with coordination efforts to see if a game (or two) at Lambert Original might be possible.  We settled on the morning of Dec. 29th and were fortunate to get 4 of the greats there in attendance.  (We tried to do some last-minute rearranging to see if we could get Mark there but, when asked about his projected whereabouts on Jan 1, he could only sagely respond with a metaphor about predicting where farts travel after they're laid.  So I took that as a cue to not reschedule the game.)

We were almost joined by a non Gil Tyree, Scott Briggs, who was so desperate to join the elite club that when he was told he couldn't bring his 12-year-old and therefore needed to make new car arrangements, was about to take an Uber from Gilbert, but eventually thought better of it.

The matchup saw me on the mound for my side vs. Crato for his.

In the early going, I managed to keep the ball somewhat in check, getting out of a bases-loaded jam to give up only 2 runs in the first half of the inning.  After that, the Des-Pace-Michael team got 2 early outs but then employed some serious Moneyball strategy to work the pitchcount, foul off a bunch of 2-strike pitches, and hit line-drive singles in all directions to get a lot of runs on the board.  We were up 8-2 when I cleared the bases with a grand salami to go up 12-2.  Crato claimed he was relieved to have a clean slate, and then soon got the 3rd out.

In the 2nd inning their bats started to heat up and they notched it up 12-12 in the top half.  We put up 2 runs in our half of the inning, and as I took the mound I tried to tell myself that if I could stay focused we could maintain the small lead and end up on top.  It was at that point that things started to really unravel.

I gave up homer after homer after homer for the next 3 innings.  They would go on to get to 40 runs, almost all of them via the long ball.  We chipped a bit here and there, but were no match for their hitting prowess.

Crato had just a few dry spells at the plate, but for a long stretch there he was walking up to the plate and coming out swinging for the fences on the first pitch, and he did so successfully 4 or 5 times in a row.

And when Paul was at the plate he would either crank it into or over the oleander bushes, or in the cases where I got to a 2-strike count on him, he would usually reach out to get the bat on the ball and it would infuriatingly float towards one of the cars and dink it somewhere for an automatic homer.  To throw some salt in the wound, his youngster, Wally, watched most of the game leaning up against the triple wall in left-field foul territory where he would yell out, "Go Dad! Go Dad!" and repeatedly ask who was winning.  To get some outs I ended up having to throw my absolute hardest (which caused some real soreness for a few days), and when I ended the 5th with a strikeout on Paul I gave Wally a prolonged staredown.  But Oleander Lambert and his boy got the better of me that day.

One minor consolation was found in the new Jane Lambert Tree, whose namesake had had it installed without consulting anyone from any of the various wiffle chapters.  The tree sits right by the triple wall just beyond the concrete, in fair territory.  It was ruled that any ball hitting the tree would be an automatic single.  It was further proposed and ratified (3-1) that a ball that hits a leaf of the tree would not be playable for an out on the fall, but would be an automatic single.  This ruling (though I was the lone dissenter) turned out to help me when Paul twice cranked a ball to left field over the fence that would have clearly been a homer but was ruled a single when it grazed a leaf on the tree.  Des and I giggled at our luck both times, but both times Crato immediately followed the single with a homer, rendering our luck hollow.

Game Highlights

• The Lambert gardner, Gaylen, showed up in about the 3rd inning and caught up with Paul while he was on deck.  
• In the wiffle waffle battle Patty went toe to toe with Jane and came out on top.  Jane had planned on Belgian waffles for the boys following the game, but due to some earlier waffling, Patty pounced and ended up hosting a breakfast of her own, which the Barker boys were obliged to attend.
• Michael got a bloody finger from a Crato pitch but downplayed it as just dryness, and then called time to put a band-aid on it.  
• During the band-aid timeout, while Paul scaled the house to fetch a ball from the roof, Crato pitched a ball to Des and declared that the pitch was "all or nothing".  Des then cranked the pitch for a homer, giving his team the technical victory on the day.   

Left: "Pitch it inside on his dry fingers." | Right: Des cranking an all-or-nothing homer (note Paul on the roof)

Game report by Pace Barker

December 26, 2016 - Game Recap

Pace & A-Man vs. Paul & Bluth
Score: 7-4
Location: Founding Fathers Jr. Field (Arlington, VA)

Due to the continued suckiness of Butler Holmes Park - Field 2 we decided to try to make peace with the trailers that had once colonized our beloved Founding Fathers Field.  The result was a harmonious integration of the trailers as homerun markers into a beautiful new Founding Fathers Jr. Field.

What looked to be a hitter-friendly park turned out (on this day at least) to be very offense minimizing.  Any time you felt like you got a hold of one it would seemingly catch some dense air in left field and float around, giving the outfielder plenty of time to track it down for a flyout.

To start the game off in the top of the 1st I hit one such deadened line drive to shallow left that Paul made an old-man lumbering run at but couldn't quite get to before it dropped in for a single.  Then A-Man followed up with a high pop-up that landed just a few feet behind Bluth -- we all watched (including Bluth) as Paul hustled in from deep left to try to make a play at it but it was apparent it would drop in for a single.  [Bluth seemed to have forgotten his footwork fundamentals from his Chaparral days, and any time a pop-up went behind him (no matter how close) his legs and feet seemed to resist the impulse to turn around or back-pedal to try to make a play on the ball.]  After that fortunate start, A-Man and I managed to put 3 runs up on the board.

When it was Paul's and Bluth's turn to bat they strung together some walks and singles to manage 1 run in their half of the frame.

Both pitchers (Bluth and myself) settled in for the next few innings and adapted to allow the field to help us out on defense.  The Bluth approach was to toss in a bunch of lob-balls that were generally not over the meat of the plate -- either intentionally or not.  These tantalizers induced a good amount of deadened left-field flyouts, jam-shots, and bad-footwork grounders.  Over the next 3 innings A-Man and I managed 1 run to Paul and Bluth's 0.

By the top of the 5th however A-Man and I had seemingly cracked the code, and we rode a rhythm of intentional alternating left-field grounders (Pace) and opposite field dinkers (A-Man) to tack on 3 more runs, putting us up 7-1 going into the bottom half of the final inning.

Paul and Bluth however would not go down easy as they came out roaring to start the bottom of the 5th.  With a runner on 1st Paul hit an absolute laser to left which went right to A-Man but ate him up for an assisted triple off the deflection off the hands -- this was the first extra-base hit of the day.  Immediately following, Bluth hit a deep high one to centerfield.  A-Man attempted to track it down but was flustered as he tried to negotiate through the obstacle course of Lambert kids.  He was able to get there in time but only managed to do a sort of arm-scooping motion at the ball and inadvertently batted it backwards into the wall of the garden box for a 2-run dinger.  Thankfully, I had a big enough cushion of runs to work with that even though I labored on the mound and gave up a few more walks and singles I was generally able to keep the ball in the zone and eventually get Bluth to fly out to left on a full-count 12-6 curveball for the final out.

We then all convened at the mound to recap the game.  Paul and Bluth took some comfort in the fact that at least they were winners off the field.  When I pressed for some details on this Paul chided me for asking unnecessary follow-up questions.  After some good discussion, we all made our way to District Taco for the RC-Willey Postgame Celebration.

Game Highlights

• Bluth warned Paul (accurately) at the beginning of the game that his team hasn't won a wiffle game in 15 years.
• For the first time, a folding stool was used as a sitting place for the catcher.  This decision was universally and enthusiastically lauded; though it also occasioned some regret for the many wasted years of squatting.  

Wishing you a merry Christmas

Training the next generation

Game report by Pace Barker