Game two of the World Series, and the Red Sox were at bat. Jim Galvan dug in, warmed up with a few right-handed swings, waited for the pitch. Galvan was a veteran player and the league home run leader, and his team had won the first game of the series.
Galvan, 30, is the archivist, custodian, and patriarch of the 25-year-old Windy City Wiffle Ball League, an association of friends scattered across the south suburbs and northeast Indiana who compete seriously in a game that most people regard as a surrogate version of baseball for friendless children. Hernandez, 29, has been playing since 1981, the year Galvan started keeping records. Membership fluctuates annually, depending on the availability of the participants: the WCWBL began the 2002 season with eight teams, ended with seven, and have five confirmed so far for 2003.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Hernandez’s next pitch, a waist-high floater, looked fat most of the way, then dropped sharply in front of the batter. Galvan, a free swinger, took a large cut and missed. Inning over, three Red Sox stranded. Galvan huffed, then walked into the two-car garage, where he bent over a spiral notebook to record the stats.
But in their parallel Wiffle universe, the Cubs won a World Series in 1999.
When players from Galvan’s league band together to compete in tournaments, as they did on four occasions this summer, they call themselves the Windy City Thunder. The Thunder has won a two-on-two Wiffle tournament in Sycamore, Illinois, and a five-on-five tournament in Crown Point, Indiana, and plans to host a tournament of its own in Sauk Village next year.
The familiar white Wiffle ball, hollow plastic with eight oblong holes around one hemisphere, was invented in 1952 by David Nelson Mullany of Fairfield, Connecticut, for his 12-year-old son, who had neither the space for baseball nor the arm to throw curveballs. When tossed lightly the perforated ball did inexplicable things–curving eight or ten feet in any direction–controllable only by those who studied its mechanics. The Mullanys formed The Wiffle Ball, Inc., in Shelton, Connecticut, the next year and began marketing their product.
After the game, Galvan sat at his dining room table with the archives of the WCWBL spread before him. A frayed orange folder contained a record of the first decade of the league–game recaps and caricatures drawn in felt-tip marker, with cutout images from baseball cards glued above the excited handwritten narrative. Recent years, 2000-2002, are kept in a white three-ring binder. The written history is replaced by numerical authority: precise season statistics, all-time records, things sequenced and ordered. Galvan’s game transcends the flimsy mass-produced bat and ball–it exchanges the cheap, transitory power of Wiffle ball for history, structure, and permanence. You can’t just take your ball and go home when there’s a schedule to play and you’ve named your driveway.
