The rules were bizarre, the pace was ludicrous, but in the end, it was a good day.
NHTI hosted the Play Ball for Seth Wiffle Ball Tournament over the weekend as a fundraiser for Seth Peake, 10, who was diagnosed with hemophilia before he was born. The Monitor/Insider entered a team into the tourney, and Jon is already second-guessing his enthusiastic decision to join, as his quads have just quit working.
This was no ordinary Wiffle Ball tournament. This was Wiffle Ball after downing a gallon of espresso with a shot of pure adrenaline. It was the kind of tournament made for accomplished marathon runners and pro ballplayers, not weekend warriors and middle school gym class heroes like us.
But we fought hard through two intense games that featured more than 160 total runs, too many home runs to keep track of and many, many sore muscles and bruised bones.
The rules dictated a break-neck pace out there. You pitched to your own team, with the goal being to lob it right down the middle to get launched. Each team had three 5-minute batting sessions in which outs were really just a formality – there was no limit to outs per batting session, you just tried to send as many batters up as you could within 5 minutes to rack up as many runs as possible.
That means you sprint around the bases even when you take one deep. It means you never leave your feet the entire time. It means you waste not a second between pitches. Basically, you’re constantly running, hitting, catching, diving and throwing.
And as hectic as it was and as unprepared as we were, we found ourselves in a nail-biter near the end of our first of two games.
After going back and forth for the whole game, we pulled ahead by 11 heading into the other team’s final at-bat. With the pitch-to-your-own-team rule, there was little we could do but stand ready to field every ball hit into the field of play and pray for a lot of clumsy running by the batters to follow.
But of course, that didn’t happen. They ended up hitting almost nothing but homers that final inning and walked off with the victory with a minute to spare.
It was a respectable game though, and all members of the Monitor/Insider team gave it 110 percent.
The second game didn’t go quite as well.
The guys who called themselves The Goonies were just an absolute powerhouse. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance they were actually the Toronto Blue Jays, so we never really had a chance.
The Goonies didn’t just dominate the games, but they cleaned up in the fundraising department as well, leading all teams in that category.
But they mostly dominated the game against the Monitor/Insider. A typical inning for most teams was about 14 to 18 runs. The Goonies dropped 25 on us in the first inning, and it only got uglier from there. When it was all said and done, we found ourselves 62-26 losers. If only that blown call in the third were reversed! If only that mile-long single were actually a homer!
But the pain of losing was overshadowed both by the physical pain inflicted by the unforgiving gym floor (which Jon still has battle scars from) and the joy on Seth’s face as he was presented a check for more than $7,100, the most money raised at an NHTI Wiffle Ball fundraiser yet.
The money will go toward his medical costs – he needs to receive home protein infusions every other day, among other things. And he was grateful for the gift and appreciative of the tournament and the effort put in by all involved.
When asked what the whole thing meant to him, Seth simply responded: “Awesome.”
