 | Your Junk my Happy Zone | |
| by Brandon Corbett |
Everybody trains in the off-season. Okay, that is not true. Many of us probably have joined hippie colonies in order to avoid touching plastic since September. I did not touch a bat or ball until the couple days of pick-up games we have played. The off-season, for me, is the time to have the real fun with this game: make ridiculous side-project websites, do increasingly ridiculous podcasts, and let the crazy fly! The Wiffle community is crazy! Learn to love that! Still, some do take the down time to enhance their skills in the game: batting practice, pitching the snow pitching in a garage (it did not snow this year), running stairs, math and science. Then there are people who take training to a whole new level; techniques so advanced that you know they are poised to take over the league. The following are a few of those wonderful men.
Mike Merlo (P, Flying Squirrels) has the honored status of "old guy sturdy veteran" in WSEM. Fittingly, in accordance with the age-appropriate tendency to say things like, "in my day we used to walk up-hill both ways to and from school," Mike actually went through the expense and filed all the zoning paperwork to bring "his day" back today! What Merlo did was engineer a system that adjusts the altitude of both his home and workplace, changing the plane between them so that it can always be set to an incline. Genius! Nobody has told him, however, that since he drives to work he is not actually doing more work himself.
Josh Nagorski (OF, Thunder Ducks) wants to become a defensive star and perennial winner of one of the Diamond Digit awards. Nagorski also knew of the phrase "hot hand", so he devised a way to always ensure himself of having that hot hand: use ice cream to practice throwing. On one hand (no pun intended), digging into the bulk-size container of the frozen stuff and balling it up quickly improved his dexterity and "ball" control. He realized almost instantly, though, that even with the grip on the cold mass it was still too easy to hit a stationary target; he would need to find moving targets to simulate a game situation. It was on his next trip to the freezer section of the grocery store that he realized the perfect solution: train right there in the frozen foods aisle! With plenty of ice cream at hand and a steady stream of people passing by, Josh had an efficient means to hone his skills. Later, after being questioned by police - most likely to learn how to improve their softball squads - when the handcuffs were removed Josh realized the success of his training: his hands had never felt so hot!
New to the game of Wiffleball, Rich Hurd (C, King Friday) has been avidly watching as much tape on the sport as he can. His real irregular training began during his seventh watch-through of "The Bird: Give it to 'Em", WSEM's video highlighting pitchers, though. While trying to incorporate the styles he saw in the video into his beer pong game, Rich realized that not only was it getting him nowhere with Wiffle, but it was also negatively affecting his beer pong form. After finishing off the eighth, ninth and tenth cups, he took a break and scrolled through other "suggested videos" that might be of help. It was by accident that a Bars of Gold video was selected initially, being the band featured in "The Bird". However, that happy accident led Hurd down a trail of ever-more enticing videos about real bars of gold. Time-skip two months forward: Rich along with a cheeky local trail-guide and a Saigon whore are Indiana Jones-ing it up, trekking through jungles in search of the lost bars. Hurd's goal: well... nobody really knows how it relates to Wiffleball. But who cares?! He is going to be filthy rich! (No pun intended.) Besides, tangling with snakes, jungle cats, aborigines, and ancient booby traps is sure to hone skills relating to everything.
You may have seen this one on late night television alongside other famous infomercials, as it has become a championed training exercise. Joe Spagnuolo (OF, Donkeys) had an epiphany one night while looking forward to the 2012 Wiffle season: "if I can hit a brick, I can hit Dennis Pearson!"; the sort of advice that a bizarro Rip Torn might give. Taking heed to the sage advice, Joe promptly set a brick on a tee and started taking swing after increasingly aggressive swing with the plastic bat. Eventually, after a mere seventy-four hopelessly misshapen bats, Joe began to move the brick impressive distances away from the tee: eight, maybe nine feet! Spags knew he was onto something, but was it enough? Better to be safe than sorry, he evolved the setup: hit a swinging brick. Eighty-six snapped-in-half bats later he was connecting with enough force to break the string suspending the weight and flip it a few feet forward. He had done it. Joe knew he could now handle an 85 mph plastic ball, no problem. With that came the Spags Power Smash Swing, and infomercial stardom!
Mike Merlo (P, Flying Squirrels) has the honored status of "
Josh Nagorski (OF, Thunder Ducks) wants to become a defensive star and perennial winner of one of the Diamond Digit awards. Nagorski also knew of the phrase "hot hand", so he devised a way to always ensure himself of having that hot hand: use ice cream to practice throwing. On one hand (no pun intended), digging into the bulk-size container of the frozen stuff and balling it up quickly improved his dexterity and "ball" control. He realized almost instantly, though, that even with the grip on the cold mass it was still too easy to hit a stationary target; he would need to find moving targets to simulate a game situation. It was on his next trip to the freezer section of the grocery store that he realized the perfect solution: train right there in the frozen foods aisle! With plenty of ice cream at hand and a steady stream of people passing by, Josh had an efficient means to hone his skills. Later, after being questioned by police - most likely to learn how to improve their softball squads - when the handcuffs were removed Josh realized the success of his training: his hands had never felt so hot!New to the game of Wiffleball, Rich Hurd (C, King Friday) has been avidly watching as much tape on the sport as he can. His real irregular training began during his seventh watch-through of "The Bird: Give it to 'Em", WSEM's video highlighting pitchers, though. While trying to incorporate the styles he saw in the video into his beer pong game, Rich realized that not only was it getting him nowhere with Wiffle, but it was also negatively affecting his beer pong form. After finishing off the eighth, ninth and tenth cups, he took a break and scrolled through other "suggested videos" that might be of help. It was by accident that a Bars of Gold video was selected initially, being the band featured in "The Bird". However, that happy accident led Hurd down a trail of ever-more enticing videos about real bars of gold. Time-skip two months forward: Rich along with a cheeky local trail-guide and a Saigon whore are Indiana Jones-ing it up, trekking through jungles in search of the lost bars. Hurd's goal: well... nobody really knows how it relates to Wiffleball. But who cares?! He is going to be filthy rich! (No pun intended.) Besides, tangling with snakes, jungle cats, aborigines, and ancient booby traps is sure to hone skills relating to everything.You may have seen this one on late night television alongside other famous infomercials, as it has become a championed training exercise. Joe Spagnuolo (OF, Donkeys) had an epiphany one night while looking forward to the 2012 Wiffle season: "if I can hit a brick, I can hit Dennis Pearson!"; the sort of advice that a bizarro Rip Torn might give. Taking heed to the sage advice, Joe promptly set a brick on a tee and started taking swing after increasingly aggressive swing with the plastic bat. Eventually, after a mere seventy-four hopelessly misshapen bats, Joe began to move the brick impressive distances away from the tee: eight, maybe nine feet! Spags knew he was onto something, but was it enough? Better to be safe than sorry, he evolved the setup: hit a swinging brick. Eighty-six snapped-in-half bats later he was connecting with enough force to break the string suspending the weight and flip it a few feet forward. He had done it. Joe knew he could now handle an 85 mph plastic ball, no problem. With that came the Spags Power Smash Swing, and infomercial stardom!
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