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Vermont's newest
Wiffleball field has Chicago fans feeling at home
By Matt Ryan
Free Press Staff Writer
August 12, 2007
ESSEX -- Youppie's Groupies could not score a run.
The Wiffleball team of Essex natives and their friends were being routed, 15-0,
Saturday by a team with Bill "The Spaceman" Lee on the mound. The former pitcher
for the Boston Red Sox was an inning away from recording a shutout.
Luke Riegert, 25, of Essex, came to the plate. Like his teammates, Riegert wore
an orange shirt, blue shorts and white knee-high socks -- a tribute to the
similarly colored Youppi, the Montreal Expos mascot who lost his job when the
baseball franchise moved to Washington, D.C., in 2005.
Lee misfired and Riegert blasted a solo shot over the left field wall -- over
red bricks stenciled on plywood and vines that had yet to grow -- and out of the
newly opened Little Wrigley Park.
"We're going to play the spoilers," Riegert said of his team, which, with the
15-1 loss, was 0-3 in the sixth annual Vermont Wiffleball Tournament, a
three-day event that started Friday.
Wiffleball is a sport similar to baseball played with a plastic bat and ball.
Holes in the ball allow it to curve more easily than a baseball.
Youppie's Groupies waited years for a chance to play the game in Pat O'Connor's
back yard on Sawmill Road. The tournament is played on two fields that O'Connor
modeled after major league ballparks. O'Connor and his friends built Little
Fenway, a small replica of the Boston ballpark, in 2000. He added Little
Wrigley, based on the Chicago ballpark, this summer to allow more teams to enter
the tournament.
Twenty-four teams entered this year, up from 16 last year. Children and adults
can play, though most teams are dominated by men in their 20s. The teams hail
mostly from New England and New York, though they travel from as far away as
Indiana.
Former baseball players like Lee and other celebrities attend the tournaments,
which raise money for the Travis Roy Foundation, an organization that helps
quadriplegics. Last year's tournament raised $63,000.
The rules are a hybrid of official baseball and Wiffleball rules, where players
run the bases and can be called out if hit with a ball on the base paths. Teams
play nine players in the field and games last seven innings.
"I'm a big baseball nut," O'Connor said, swinging one of the yellow plastic
bats. "I was a military brat, so I got to go to different fields all over the
country."
O'Connor said Fenway and Wrigley are his favorite fields. His replicas, though
small in scale, share many of the major league ballpark's features. Little
Fenway has its own Green Monster, a cardboard Coke bottle and a Citgo sign on a
pole behind the wall. The distance down the left field line is 94.5 feet, a
third of the 310 feet at Fenway. Little Wrigley has vines O'Connor said would
grow over the wall in three years and a working clock above the scoreboard.
"We contemplated setting it to Central Time, but we thought players might look
up and get confused," said Marge Oppold of Richmond, who helped organize the
event.
The first tournament was held in 2001. O'Connor decided his tournaments should
raise money for the Travis Roy Foundation after reading Roy's book, "Eleven
Seconds," an autobiography of the former Boston University hockey player who was
paralyzed from the waist down during a game in 1995.
O'Connor keeps track of records set in the parks, like the longest home run hit
out of Little Fenway -- 152 feet -- and the most strikeouts thrown -- 17.
The strikeout record belongs to Boston's 23-year-old Billy Doyle, a Boston
College graduate with a degree in English and communications who has played in
the tournaments since they began. A junk pitcher, Doyle's arsenal includes a
slider, screwball, sinker and riser. He plays for Boston Beef, the defending
champions, who assume meat-related nicknames including "Tenderloins" and "The
Butcher."
In the Wiffleball circuit, Doyle is known as "The Freezer," and by some as the
greatest Wiffleball pitcher in the world.
"It's how the legend goes," Doyle said of his 17-strikeout performance. "The
other team was a little tipsy, though."
Contact Matt Ryan at 651-4849 or
mryan@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
Appeared in the
Burlington Free Press August
12, 2007
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