A Comment on the Game

LowBall stands for Lincoln Old-School Wiffle Ball, and was conceived through an unlikely melding of strangely like minded individuals who found themselves, through some unlikely turn of events, living in the same town and jonesing for some frivolous entertainment. According to Jody Stillwell, J-Mac, the first ever event in Lowball history came to be when Tommie Thompson invited Mike 'El Guapo' Moriarty up to what was to become the heart of Lowball, Gap Bridge Field. Little did they know as they pitched the plastic and reverted back to the playground days when you called the base hits by imaginary lines on the ground that they would be embarking on a fantasy league journey the likes of which would make the vulcan-eared attendees at a Star Trek convention look sane.
The thing that continues to bring all of us disparate grown men – Electrical Engineers, Carpenters, Product developers and salesmen, Energy Auditors, Teachers, Architects even a Nuclear Engineer – out of our homes to participate in a child's pass-time is the ridiculousness of it all. It is pure play. Using the context of baseball – the storylines, the stats, the narratives, even the characters – we model our fantasy world off the game we loved as kids and continue to love. Baseball, the mental chess match that takes place between pitchers and hitters, the physical prowess of a guy that can throw a ball 90 miles an hour, or hit it out of a ballpark with 400 foot fences, is a world that we can only dream about. Occasionally we can go pay an exorbitant sum of money to see a game in person, but for the most part we are resigned to watch it on TV or listen to Joe Castiglione paint word pictures on the radio. It is a world made up of supermen on gum scented cards, a fantasy world that we can participate in only tangentially, as spectators.
The Wiffle ball, however, allows us a doorway into this fleeting, magical world in a few special ways. The perforated plastic sphere is a hallmark of childhood. It is a nostalgic relic of a time when our worlds rotated around the argument 'fair or foul.' When we spent hours hitting, pitching and fighting over whether the ghost runner at second base would score on a double, or whether he needed to be forced home. The Wiffle ball also grants us entry into the mental battle between a pitcher and a hitter. Most people will never be able to throw a curve ball, or blast a pitch over the Monster in left. We can do this in Wiffle. And, more importantly, we can pretend that it means something. Which, in the end, if you don't count the millions of dollars professional ball players make, it means about the same.

So we play. We play.

The thing that we recognize now that we are grown, is that it is this characteristic of play that is what we lack in so many areas of our adult lives. We have all grown so serious, and no doubt life is serious, but the re-creation that we engage in on the field is that of a time when 'fair or foul' really was the most serious thing we could think of. And the passion we poured into those arguments... oh, the passion.
The ingredients of re-constituting these bygone times, and really the genius of LowBall, is that we recognize the importance of the ritual of the games for the sake of playing. Many of the elements that we used to think were annoyances – like the never ending arguments about whether he caught the ball or not – we now see as central elements to the game. The arguing, in LowBall, is part of the game; central to its drama and fun. We know we are being ridiculous. The ridiculousness is the point after all. We are pretending that it is serious, that we are serious. We are enveloping ourselves in a world of fantasy where we have nicknames and costumes and imaginary crowds that cheer for us. We drink beer and have a running commentary about stats and the players imaginary professional lives. We create a fantasy world where we do heroic things and battle in 'epic' confrontations and in the end acknowledge something of the folly of who we are and what we do. We are all, after all, really big, grown up versions of the kids we once were. We are acknowledging that, and by doing so, recapturing something of that innocence.
It is always a special thing when you are able to be a part of something that is bigger than what you could create on your own. The idea that ten or twelve other guys would be into creating and sustaining a fantasy world that continues to evolve; that has guys turning their backyards into miniature ball parks, I think has taken all of us by surprise. There is some giddy genius at work that wants this all to exist. “Don't say it,” I can hear my inner twelve year old saying, “You might jinx it.”

“Ah but it's so good... someone should know...”