 by Richard Hurd |
No one on the King Friday team has ever played a game of Wiffleball, nor would anyone with any prior experience be allowed to be. My sole purpose of joining the league is to dominate it with rookies. Everyone on the team is a fierce competitor and will only be happy with a playoff berth. A little about myself: Richard A. Hurd, captain of King Friday. I played eight years of organized baseball and softball, and made the all-star team all eight years. I also played three years of high school football and played varsity all three years. Taking a look at me you may find that hard to believe; I am a big guy and way out of shape, but I love to win and almost always find a way to do so. Beer pong has been my game for the last 3 years, as well as the game of most of the players on my team. I have won a large amount of money playing organized pong and have beaten some of the best players in the country. Playing pong is how I came to know Carl Coffee and in turn how I came to learn about this Wiffle league. It is hard to make predictions not having seen any of the teams in the league play, but myself and most of the players on the team have dominated every activity we have ever tried. So, if near the end of the season we do not at least still have a chance to make the playoffs, I would see the season as a complete failure. I would expect King Friday to have two or three players make the All-Star team. I do not know what the home run record is,1 but whatever it is it will not be the same after I am done. We are old-school ballers, we played ball when most of this league was still watching Teletubbies. We win no matter what it is. Wiffle Ball will be no different; King Friday will have 14-20 wins, depending on how quickly we get acclimated to the league. I would guess it will be to the higher end of that scale. I know only a few members of the league: Carl Coffee, Ryan Bullard, John Hill and Jason Matt. Having played beer pong against all of them, I can honestly say I am not at all worried about making the playoffs if they are any measure of the talent in WSEM! 1 The HR record is 17, set by Joey DeLano. |
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Showing posts with label Richard Hurd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Hurd. Show all posts
Team Tuesdays: King Friday
Off-season Training Regimens
 | 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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