Introducing: The Vibe Check

No, I'm not talking about Epstein and the boys, I'm referring to the vibes surrounding our wonderful wiffle ball league. Are they off? This is a difficult question for me to answer this year. After spending more than half a decade on the Bears, I am for the first time on a squad with not only a winning record, but that seems to be a significant playoff threat, ostensibly coming in out of nowhere since the Space Cowboys started the year at number 16 on Nightmare's power rankings (how do you like us NOW, huh Nightmare?!). Now, it would be easy to say that these guys are basically winning despite me but I've had a couple moments this year where I've earned my roster spot and I won't rest until I perfect Two Bat's prototype of being the ultimate coattail-rider. All that is to say, this has been one of the most exciting, fun, stressful, and exhausting seasons I've ever played. After seeing the raw talent of DaVinci, Meow and Pollock develop into real-deal players this year, and securing two amazing off-season signings in Shandy and Gamble, this has been an absolute wild ride of a season that has, at least for me, taken the focus away from a league that seems to have some dusty vibes a-brewing. Or like, maybe some bored vibes? It's hard to say. This is season number 21 of the nation's largest and, dare I say, greatest wiffle ball league with a historically high 196 players (if the website's player tracker can be trusted), and the online chatter and content creation is at an all time low. Look, the days of the message board are dead and gone and never coming back. I believe the message board was an integral and necessary part of the foundation of this league; at a time where almost all members were strangers to each other it clearly provided an area for people to get to know each other and form the culture that would become the HRL today. HRL twitter was also popping for a while though never truly as active as the message board, and spawned many great moments such as the Ponies/Ducks beef. This year, it's a ghost town, the only posts really just amounting to the handful of teams still trying to do the pre and post game updates. The discord at first seemed to be the logical next step for our league without a message board but even that is mostly now just Twins chatter in the non-wiffle channel and piling on the Bears in the main chat for not showing up to games (more on that later). Apart from Nightmare's power rankings, we don't have many articles coming through nowadays, a website feature that used to be a mainstay of the HRL culture. Mippey continues to be the only consistent creator of video content with his game recaps, which are consistently great, but I'm always excited to see when Nightmare and the Ponies upload as well. For my part, I really enjoyed making the few videos I have but have found that the time and labor required to put together my modest recaps to be a bit much, especially since I'm essentially learning how to edit as I make each video. Excuses, excuses, I know.

There are many facets to consider here. Part of this could be in comparing this season to the resurgence of content and enthusiasm from season 20 last year. Morale was up last year in a big way it seemed as we were all, very rightly, proud of the league we all love marking its 20^th season and also coinciding with maybe the largest Polar Plunge jump in league history as well. It seemed like we were drowning in podcasts, videos, and general love for the game in 2023. Maybe that level of energy is hard to maintain year-to-year. Also, it's hard to gauge how much of this is an online thing vs. real life thing. The rink vibes, at least by my estimation, have been great this year, even with the controversial new schedule change where we play fewer teams from the opposite city.

Speaking of controversy, let's not ignore the elephant in the room and in a lot of ways the catalyst which got me thinking about this in the first place. The Bears forfeited their early season games to the Reds with no offer for a reschedule¹, a move that has drawn a lot of ire from the Reds and more outspoken members of the league. Since then, they have signed on about two dozen rookies and have made every subsequent game, to my knowledge. Not everyone may know that Truck and Professor are my brothers so this is, to put it one way, a complicated subject for me to navigate and I'm not necessarily looking to relitigate this situation, but what I am interested in doing is diving into the conditions that got us here in the first place.

I theorize that perhaps one cause of this restlessness, let's call it, of the league is an internal contradiction in a search for identity. Let's dive into that and hopefully come off a little less pretentious. The boilerplate pitch for the league that I have heard given to potential newcomers, and have given many times myself, is that the HRL is a medium-pitch, adult wiffle ball league that plays outdoors in the summer using the classic yellow bats and white balls; you get to stand around with your buddies drinking beer and play in a league that has a healthy balance of competitiveness and fun. That ultimate point has always been one of great emphasis when I hear people introduce the idea of the league to others, that no matter what kind of player you are you can get what you want out of this league. If you want to show up on Thursdays and just enjoy the sunshine (or torrential downpours this year), take your swings with no regard to your batting average, and just live for the Wifflepalooza party, then by golly, this here is the league for you; on the other hand, if you want to chase the cup, hum the ball in at 63.4 MPH, and pop-off like it's game 7 of the world series every time you hit a tank, then you also have a home here. However, it is not a stretch to say that these diametrically opposed attitudes towards this game can have a similarly opposed idea as to what they define as “fun.” Not to erase the many teams who can and do turn the competitive edge on and off when appropriate², and not to say you can't be goofy and good at the game at the same time, but teams who fall into one “extreme” are going to have a very different vision for what they want out of a Thursday night at the rink.

At the heart of this contradiction, is the demonstrable lack of parity between our two cities, which I think deserves examination. It's no secret Hopkins has been cleaning house for years, in terms of intercity record and amount of championships. It's not like there's something in the water, the teams there just have been better for a while now. That's top to bottom too, the lowest placing teams in Hopkins usually wipe the floor with their Eagan counterparts. I haven't been here long enough to be able to tell you why there is such a concentration of good teams in Hopkins, but I can attest to the truth of it. If we go one layer deeper in Eagan, we find that the two lowest performing teams, the Bears and Lugnuts, are remarkable in their performance this year, even compared to past versions of themselves. Both squads were winless before meeting this year³, which to be fair is not the first time that it has happened, but it is highly unlikely that either squad will take a game from anyone else. When looked at statistically, they are outliers, but they are also people, and really good ones at that. I think it's safe to say that they, and some of the other “fun” teams have been wondering about their particular place in this league as of late, and I think it's a fair question. Of course, they deserve to be here; this is, at the end of the day, a league where we play a children's game with plastic toys, I think it would be farcical to suggest that you can't be in this league unless you have a certain level of skill at the game, nor do I think anyone is advocating for contracting a team for being bad at wiffle ball. However, if the median level of skill of the league moves to a certain point and the culture itself shifts to have a certain expectations about how competitive we should be, then where does that leave the “fun” teams? By that logic, is it “fun” for the top-tier teams to play down to the fun teams? Is it “fun” for Eagan teams to be constantly in the shadow of Hopkins? Are we having fun yet?

But that's just one theory to try and get at what I perceive as a decline in enthusiasm, at least in terms of online presence and content creation. I think there's a lot more at play here; while we are growing and get new rookies every year, the vast majority of us have been here for a while, we already know and talk to each other outside of curated, public posting, and I know most of us are just as excited as ever to get to the fields every week to do this crazy thing we do all summer. I think the important thing to figure out is what we all want from this league, which is in no way going to be a uniform answer among the nearly 200(!) of us, and reconcile the best we can, the way I think we have always tried to do. At the end of the day, I could be dead wrong about this perceived shift in vibes. The league is the biggest it has ever been, we have 24 teams playing wiffle ball every week, and I haven't seen any evidence that is going to change next season. Call this prophylactic curiosity. What I thought would be revealing is to ask a broad cross section of the league, from OGs to newbies, from All Stars to Fun Stars, about what they think of this league and where they'd like to see it go. This will ultimately be a set of interviews where I ask each interviewee essentially the same set of questions, with a few unique off-the-cuff follow ups, to gauge how different demographics within the league view the same questions. Pretty basic stuff, I know, but I hope we all learn something about each other and I hope both teams have fun.

This perhaps came off a bit more grim than I wanted and, to clarify, I think that that we are in a good place, overall. We are in a wonderful, if a bit absurd, league where we get to play wiffle ball and stay up until 2am writing an article that maybe 20 people will read, at best, and we do it because we like it, dammit.