[United Wiffle®Ball] 2020 NCT Defined By Firsts

Sunday’s slate of games at the 2020 United Wiffle®Ball Championship Tournament began with eight games to cut the remaining field in half from sixteen teams down to eight. Of the eight early morning match ups, two in particular caught my eye.

They were not necessarily the flashiest games or the ones with the top on-paper teams. These were games that I did not know I wanted to see – games that, frankly, would not have seemed possible just several months earlier – until they happened. These games stood out because they matched very good but unlike teams – teams from different eras, different parts of the country, and different Wiffle®Ball backgrounds – in unique, first-time pairings. Like DC vs. Marvel, but with Wiffle®Ball teams.

On Field #6, the eventual champions, the Usual Suspects, were the away squad against the WSEM Dream Team. Both groups have national tournament success. The Suspects won the 2010 Golden Stick fast pitch national championship and narrowly missed out on repeating the following year. WSEM’s NWLA Tournament team is the most celebrated in that tournament’s history, having won the event a record three times (2014, 2016, 2017).

Aside from their mutually shared national successes, the two teams have little else in common. Their paths had never crossed before. Their prime years did not line up, they are geographically distant (WSEM are from Michigan and the Usual Suspects play out of New York), and prior to that weekend the teams – nor any of the individual players – had ever competed in the same event. It was a true first-time encounter between a pair of teams that during the prior decade, were among the most prolific in their respective Wiffle®Ball universes.

Adding to the intrigue was that the Suspects and Dream Team brought separate Wiffle®Ball skills and experience to the Sunday morning clash.  A big reason these teams’ paths did not previously cross was because historically, they did not play the same style of game. As a league, WSEM utilizes base running, clean balls, and smaller bats. Their main tournament experience prior to United Wiffle®Ball was in the NWLA Tournament, which utilizes a similar set of gameplay rules. The Usual Suspects – both together and individually – almost exclusively competed in the non-base running, legal ball alteration, big barrel bat style tournaments when playing fast pitch. That made this Sunday morning match up a potential clash of styles, in addition to a first-time face off.

The WSEM Dream Team handed the ball to their big right-hander Nicco Lollio. With a hard, uncut slider that breaks down and away from right-handed batters as his go-to pitch, Lollio’s arsenal was foreign to most of the Suspects’ hitters. Their roster is filled with veteran hitters with decades of cut knowledge on how cut balls move, but who have very little prior experience against clean ball offerings. It was a potential disadvantage that Suspects’ captain Danny Lanigan was aware of. Lanigan sat himself and moved Johnny Costa – the only player on the team with significant experience against clean ball pitching – up in the order.

On the other side, the Dream Team had just three games of tournament experience – all of which came the day prior – swinging bigger bats and facing cut balls. While they fared well in those games, it was still a very new experience. Compounding matters was that the Suspects sent lefty Joe Evanish to the carpet. Joe was the first left-hander the Dream Team faced during the tournament, giving them an almost completely different look at cut ball pitches than what they had seen from right-handers on Saturday.

As it turned out, the game played out almost perfectly along the lines of that pre-game story.

Lollio’s clean ball pitches moved just differently enough to keep veteran hitters like Ryan Wood and Scott Alford from barreling up, which lead to a lot of soft contact. Evanish’s left-handed screwball had the same effect on the Dream Team offense. The lone run in the 5-inning game came on a double from – you guessed it – the one member of the Suspects’ lineup with significant clean ball experience, Costa. For diehard Wiffle®Ball fans, this game was nirvana – two successful teams with rich histories facing off for the first time in a game where the stylistic differences played directly into the in-game strategies and ultimate outcome.

Two fields down from that game, the 6th seeded Midwest Monstars hosted the 603 All-Stars. Coming into the tournament, each of these teams were saddled with symbolic roles.

The Monstars quickly became the embodiment of not just Midwest Wiffle®Ball, but of the type of talented and experienced players from a part of the Wiffle®Ball world that had been missing from this version of the national championship for many years. The Monstars were the pre-tournament poster boys for what people hoped would be a broader, more inclusive national tournament that welcomed players from all corners. On the other side of the coin, the 603 All-Stars are not just veterans of this national championship tournament lineage, but arguably the most prolific franchise of all time in that realm. With championship game appearances in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2016, the New Hampshire squad has a national championship tournament pedigree unlike any other team. It was hard not to view the game as a symbolic battle between the establishment and a group that represented a potential new day at the national championship tournament.

The Monstars arrived the final 16 with a 2-1 record and the sixth seed overall, while 603 had to fight back from a 1-2 start with three straight wins under the lights on Saturday night. Nonetheless, the more established and experienced team is often viewed as the favorite in these types of situations. It certainly felt like 603 – with their history of success in similar environments – was the odds-on favorite before a pitch was thrown, despite the much longer road they took to reach that point. The odds of a 603 All-Stars win grew quickly and exponentially when they jumped out to an early 1-0 lead.

The game reached the 5th inning with that 1st inning run still holding up. The Monstars’ Caleb Jonkman got himself to first and with two outs, Cam Smith - who shut down 603 after the first inning run - represented his team’s final chance at advancing. Smith fell behind in the count early, but then let a pair of pitches from Rob Donahue sail high. Cam’s calm takes in a pressure filled situation made it clear that he was not likely to chase. So naturally, Dons came right at him with the next pitch - a riser right over the heart of the plate. Smith unleased with a powerful, but controlled swing. The ball was gone before it left the bat.

Smith floated around the bases, received his obligatory shoves and body checks from his jubilant teammates, and crossed the plate to complete the remarkable comeback. The 603 players looked on in disbelief - but just for a moment - before gathering themselves and congratulating the Monstars with all the grace of a team that has won and lost its fair share of big games.

To call that game a “changing of the guard” moment or bestow other such lofty historical stakes on it would be overly aggressive and definitely premature. What it certainly was, however, was an additional sign during this tournament that the competitive Wiffle®Ball world is a little larger and a little more talented than perhaps many of us previously realized. The games and moments that revealed those things to be true were the defining moments of the inaugural United Wiffle®Ball National Championship.

A common refrain echoed by veteran players – particularly those from the northeast – is a desire to compete against players and teams they have not played before. Play long enough in the same general area and the fresh match ups and secrets quickly narrow, if not dry up completely. That is not to say that there isn’t excitement in a rivalry playing out over the course of five seasons or a pitcher and a hitter – both intimately familiar with one another – playing a game of chess over the course of an extended at bat. Those are great moments too, but the appeal of large, national tournaments lies in those first-time, unique meetings. It’s about the collision of eras and styles, just as much as it is a battle for state or regional pride.

For students of the game, there were plenty of cool little, “first time” moments to take in.

Around noon time on Saturday, a former national champion tournament franchise (2009 Fast Plastic national champions, the Phenoms) faced a former NWLA Tournament champion (2018 winners, the WILL Waves) for the first time in a national championship tournament.* If you are a fan of longtime Wiffle®Ball franchises (in name, if nothing else) then the York Yaks and K-9’s showdown in the second round of the Rocky Bracket was for you. The Yaks (2001) and the K-9 (2003) have existed in some shape or form for a combined 36 years, which is surely a new record in the long history of the national championship tournament.

* This happened a second time on Sunday in the aforementioned Usual Suspects (2010 Golden Stick national champions) and WSEM (2014, 2016, 2017 NWLA Tournament champions) game.

Universe and era crossing pitching match ups were everywhere you looked the weekend of Octoebr 24th and 25th, be it Teddy Drecher vs. Elliot Knower, Kyle VonSchleusigen vs. Dan Foster, Nick Lea vs. Brendan Black, Mike Touhy vs. Zane Johnston, Mike Stiles vs. Chandler Phillips, Ray Lutick vs. Pat Leahy, Derek Radek vs. Jarod Bull, and Gino Joseph vs. Randy Dalbey, to name more than a few. There were first time meetings of players who – prior to that weekend – occupied very different parts of the Wiffle®Ball universe or represented different eras.

It was a weekend of firsts, perhaps even more so than we can fully ascertain. Was the Las Vegas Wifflers and WSEM Dream Team game the first meeting of all-Nevada and all-Michigan teams? Did two teams with the “Wiffle® Club” moniker as part of their name ever play before Old Line WC and Whippets WC met in the 32nd game of the weekend? Has a team and player – like Black Dog Country Club and Dan Whitener – ever eliminated - in back-to-back games - teams with the pedigree and national championship tournament accomplishments of the Phenoms and C-4? There is an entire rabbit hole of potentially obscure and not-so-obscure firsts to be dug through.

If the success of the first United Wiffle®Ball National Championship Tournament is measured entirely on its ability to bring together far reaches of the Wiffle®Ball world – and to be fair, there is more that goes into a successful tournament than just that – then it was a clear success. The appeal of a national tournament lies in the fact that Wiffle®Ball is and likely always will be a local sport first-and-foremost. A national tournament is special when it serves as a melting pot of local players, styles, and personalities, rather than simply being a national gathering of otherwise homogenous players and teams.

If nothing else, the 2020 United Wiffle®Ball National Championship Tournament will be remembered as an event defined by its universe-crossing meetings.  The national championship tournament will almost certainly develop and change over time, starting with the 2021 edition. It must if it wishes to stay relevant. If the tournament is successful over a significant period, the appeal of dream match ups and crossover games will lessen with each year. Just as DC and Marvel characters squaring off is no longer the novel occurrence that it was a quarter of a century ago, so too will these Wiffle®Ball match ups go from being groundbreaking to being the norm. If that is the case, we may also look back at this tournament as the first step towards what became a more fully integrated and inclusive fast pitch Wiffle®Ball world.