I didn’t end up writing a single chapter. It was a rough summer, starting with the unexpected passing of my father in law, followed by the untimely passing of our family cat. I was also struggling with a mid-life crisisy feeling of wanting to completely change my profession, and having no idea what I would do or even be qualified to do outside of the field of education. I spent much of the summer depressed, and not in a place where I could reflect on much of anything. I had energy for my family, my new sports card obsession, and my one wiffle night a week, and that was about it.
For most of my career, me dedicating one night a week to wiffleball affected nobody but me. I had the time, privilege, and energy to play every game night worry free, with enough left in the tank to edit weekly highlight videos, be Eagan President, help coordinate Wifflepalooza, play on the national team, and play in every single available tournament throughout the summer. With life changes, I gradually had to make some difficult decisions about what parts of my participation in this league to protect, and what I needed to let go. Some decisions were clear, like a pair of bum knees and an amazing crop of young league talent making my inclusion on the national team an obvious one to let go. We are also in a golden era of content in the HRL, with a weekly podcast (props to Stache and Sanchez), weekly power rankings (props to Nightmare), live streamed games, and a plethora of teams making weekly highlight videos (props to Nightmare, Stache, Miippey, et al.). meaning I didn’t feel as much pressure to create my own video content, as much as I know everyone misses my clutch walk highlight videos. What I wanted to protect were the game nights. Everything else I could let go of, but playing the game, and socializing with the many wonderful people in the league who I might see once, or twice, or ten times a year is what had to stay. So all summer, my parents would come over to my house once a week and help my wife in the evening so she could take care of dinner and bath time while still having some time to take care of herself, and so I could go play wiffleball.
Previously, I struggled to understand why so many players who loved the HRL stopped playing once children came into the picture. I get it now. It’s a huge ask of the other people in my life to make this happen. It’s also clear to me how much happier I am, and how important it is for my own mental health to get to go play this game we all love once a week. I know at some point this might not be sustainable, but for now it is and I am going to keep playing for as long as I can, and as long as it’s viable for my family to have me do so.
The actual game nights of this season have felt very different in a number of ways. Part of it is the shifting role wiffleball is playing in my life now. A significant part is the makeup of the 2022 Cakes, which really started in November of last year when Psych, Nightmare and Twizzler all decided to move on. That was hard. I fault none of them for leaving, but I miss each of them a lot. Psych’s passion for the game reminds me of my own love for the brightest lights of competition the game has to offer, especially when I was younger. Twizzler was as great and supportive of a teammate as I could imagine. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a wiffle soul mate, but if I have one it’s Nightmare. Those departures hurt. Then HOV unexpectedly decided to not only return to the league but also to the Cakes, which brought back some excitement, as was the eventual addition of Hondi. But for the first time in a while I went into an HRL season with zero championship hopes or expectations, and for the first time ever, I was ok with it. I was going to go out and play, have fun, and just see where the season would take us.
Then the Hopkins chatter started. Seemingly all anyone could talk about in the HRL offseason was how much better Hopkins was than Eagan, which bothered me because competitively, I knew we could hang with them, but also because it felt like it discounted the non-competitive but equally important league culture aspects many of the players and teams who don't win 30 games a season bring to the HRL, including the drive to not only have fun, but to also get better. That’s a beautiful part of the HRL. Two of the coolest moments of this entire year for me was seeing Twizzler hit her first HRL homerun (sorry Hondi), and watching Franklin strike out the first two Mets he faced in Palooza. Those things didn’t just happen randomly, they happened because Twizzler and Franklin are as dedicated to playing and improving as anyone in this league, and put in the effort to get better. It’s great, and should be celebrated as much as any other accomplishment in the HRL this season.
Throughout my wiffleball career, I have often been motivated by sleights, either real or perceived. You know that Michael Jordan Gif where he says “And I took that personally?” There are at least 100 times this year when I took something personally, whether it was real, perceived, or simply on behalf of Eagan. As the year went on, it became clear that my two competitive goals for the season were to make sure that Eagan won the All Star Game, and that the eventual Eagan champion would be an actual Eagan team. All Star night went better than I could have imagined. As goal driven as I was, I knew very well how stacked that Hopkins squad was. Our pregame Eagan All Star team huddle included discussion of whether or not Hopkins would walk all over us, and acknowledgement that if one were to do a fantasy draft of all the players in the All Star Game, Hopkins players would likely make up all of the top 5 picks. And then we beat them 7-0.
Then came the play-offs, and a first round World Series rematch with the defending champion Mets. A team that on paper should have walked all over us, given that they’d beaten us in the World Series the season before, and we’d lost Psych and Nightmare, the two most recent Eagan MVPs. What no one talked about was that we’d also added Hondi and gotten HOV back. HOV who had his own motivation to show that had he been there for the World Series in 2021, maybe the outcome would have been different, and Hondi who just seems to have a flair for hitting home runs when we need them most. And we had Pooh Bear, who was coming off his most disappointing postseason, and Palpatine who continues to defy all logic and expectations as his career continues on into his 70s. We also had me. I was on a mission to put everything I had into winning this series. At this point in my career, pitching often physically hurts, and the prospect of potentially doing so twice in one night against that Mets lineup felt incredibly daunting. I’ve always struggled to pitch twice in one night. The last time I won two HRL games on the same night was my rookie season in 2006. I also haven’t shared this widely, but I found out during the World Series in 2020 that I have full blown osteoarthritis in my right knee. Literally all of the cartilage under my kneecap was gone. You know those conversations where a doctor tells a patient “I’ve never seen a 37 year old with this much damage before”, that was the conversation the doctor had with me. It sucked. It destroyed my confidence in my ability to play for a long time. I spent that next offseason getting myself in the best shape I’d been in some time, and it made a difference, but my knee still hurt. New Dad life promptly saw me revert back to Dad Bod life this season though, and I’ve noticed it in how I felt when I played.
I’ve also had the luxury of playing with 3 or more pitchers for most of my career, so I was able to take it easy on my body in the regular season. Palp’s early season shoulder injury meant I’d be throwing almost every week, and by the end of the season, everything hurt. I rested up as much as I could before the Mets series, and it bought me 3 close to pain free innings before my knee started doing its thing again. After we won Game 1 behind two Pooh Bear redemption homers, and once the Mets got up in Game 2, I spent most of those innings stretching on the bench, trying to keep my limbs as loose as possible for a third game. It was humid enough that night that when I started warming up again, everything was working well enough. Then I made an errant pick-off throw, followed immediately by an errant throw at a runner going home, which allowed two runs to score in the top of the first. It felt like I’d thrown away our entire season. But this ‘Cakes team, every time it’s felt like our season was over, we’ve fought back. HOV and Hondi homered in the second and we were suddenly up 4-2. Then Taco Taco’d and hit two bombs to put the Mets back up 5-4, and again, it felt like I’d let our season slip away. Then I launched a solo homer and we were tied. The next few innings on the mound I was doing everything I could to keep the game tied. It was often ugly, and lucky, with HOV likely robbing Mippey of a homer, and Taco just missing another Taco bomb in the 7th. Then HOV launched that oppo bomb to right and relief and joy just poured out. One of the great things about the HRL is it gives us all an opportunity to do things we didn’t necessarily believe we could do, be it hitting your first career home run, or going from having the highest ERA in the league to striking out the first two batters of the defending champs in game 1 of Wifflepalooza, to winning two games in one night for the first time in a decade in a half on at least one bum knee, or a Bears team nearly beating the league’s all time strikeout king, or Groundskeeper Willie taking Eagan pregames from a punchline to a weekly highlight, or HOV having the toughest game of his pitching career in the Eagan Finals against the Vibes, only to come back 90 minutes later and throw an absolute gem to send us to the HRL World Series.
And now we find ourselves down 2 games to 0 against a team that no one expects us to beat in a 7 game series, let alone even once. My arm and legs are as sore as they’ve been all season, and I’m on a strict ice and Advil diet at night. But I can still walk and throw a ball, so I’m ready. And I want to be clear, I do not describe my various ailments as an excuse for any of the many homeruns I gave up in Game 1 or may give up in this Series. The Aces are good enough to put up a 7 spot on me when my body doesn’t hurt. But I am motivated to continue to see what I can do despite this pain, and to keep having fun playing ball for two more nights this season (Karen, I promise that’s really all that’s left now). And yes, I saw the livestream chat comments of “Aces in 4,” “Aces in 4,”, and yes, I took each one of them personally, and am ready to grit through whatever discomfort I feel for the rest of this season and try to shock the wiffle world. I believe in the ‘Cakes, in a way that it took me most of the season to feel. We’ve had highs, and we’ve had some rough team lows, but we’ve worked through all of them, and we’re better off and closer because of it. Why not pull off the unthinkable one more time this season? As Hondi likes to say, “why not us?” I am not “just happy to be playing in the World Series” as they say, but I am as proud of what this team has accomplished this season as I’ve been of any team I’ve played with in the HRL before. In an HRL season full of people accomplishing the seemingly impossible, why not add one more item to that list?