The World Indoor Baseball League (W.I.B.L., or simply WIBL – rhymes with dribble, also known as Ping Pong Baseball) of the late-1980s pitted me against my brother Tim in a baseball-like game played exclusively in the unfinished basement of our family’s suburban St. Louis home, converting table tennis equipment into a competitive, pseudo-wiffle-ball-type of contest. We played generally during the baseball season with concentrated periods over the summer (evenings after the sun went down or during the middle of the day when the summer temps were just too hot for outside athletics).
WIBL was one-on-one baseball with bases, walks, K’s, homers, etc., but the baseball was a ping pong ball, the bat was a ping pong paddle, the backstop was the folded up ping pong table. A laundry basket was placed on a folding chair and set on its side to serve as the strike zone (see below). The basement was fairly large and generally uncluttered so our field of play was a decent size.
A modern-day imitation of the laundry basket on a chair we used to create a strike zone. Home plate would be centered in front of it.
The beauty of the game was really in the pitching. A ping pong ball can be thrown at high velocity with less than typical exertion and most notably can be made to curve and tail in ways far more extreme than a wiffle ball. Throwing the ball like a knuckle ball would create a ceiling scraping trajectory that would then rapidly descend by several feet to cross the plate as a strike. The laundry basket also made for a generous strike zone. This didn’t mean there wasn’t offense, because the paddles provided a wide area to make contact with the ball. It just meant that it was more of a balanced game than others.
First timers usually swung the paddle one handed, but soon found it to be more comfortable to actually mimic swinging a bat with two hands. We used our little league, too-small-for-real-baseball gloves on defense to catch line drives headed for the home run wall. A home run was a line drive that traveled the length of the basement and hit the back wall at a certain height above a line masking-taped onto the wall. As this was indoors, a line drive could ricochet off a side wall, hit the back wall and still be a home run. A line drive that hit the back wall, but was caught on the rebound before hitting the ground was an out.
Between video games, junk food and actual outdoor activities, WIBL kept us entertained for hours on end. Occasionally we played two-on-two with friends.
Some classic memories: the loud smack of the ping pong ball hit against the furnace (an automatic foul ball even though the furnace was in fair territory), hitting a ball towards or under the downstairs steps (usually meant extra bases), ping pong balls cracking (they wore down under the abuse just like wiffle balls), elbow pain from playing/throwing so much, taping paddle handles that cracked from dropping the paddles to run the bases, never actually playing ping pong.
As with any historic ballpark, there were some quirks that defined the field of play:
A small trashcan served as first base. To get an out at first, a fielded ball was thrown at the trashcan and must hit it anywhere, on a fly or bounce, or hit the runner before he touched/kicked/slide into the trashcan. Once safely on first, or any other base, ghost runners were implemented.
Second and third base, home plate and pitching rubbers were simply tape marks on the floor. Pictured: duct tape remnants from a rectangular third base, photographed in 2012.
HVAC duct that ran along the basement ceiling was taped to indicate how far a fly ball that hit the ceiling/duct needed to travel to be considered fair.
More tape marks on the HVAC duct served as a creative extension to the foul pole (the electrical line to the left of the fridge). The wall behind the fridge is the home run wall. The wall wasn’t white until 2012.
As I was involved, there of course had to be stats. We taped a piece of graph paper to the ping pong table backstop and would fill in K’s and Homers after each inning:
If there were stats, then there just had to be a compilation, which resulted in the WIBL statbook that covered Ping Pong Baseball in its prime (the 1988 and 1989 seasons). My penchant for branding was alive even as a kid as everything seemed to have some sort of logo:
The WIBL statbook was your basic college-ruled notebook paper containing a wealth of hand-summarized stats, charts and other minutia.
Loved graph paper and angular letterforms. Still do. So used it for a StartUp Series logo (nice ping pong guy!). We made up several special contests like the Startup Series throughout the year.
The Survivor Series was our all-star break contest – too complicated to describe here, but worthy of its own post in the future. It was classic Bachmann.
A page break in the WIBL statbook indicating the ’89 section. More angular letters.
Sportcraft ping pong balls lasted longer than generics. Made them the corporate sponsor of our World Series event. Hysterical!
Homering off the Jackpot sign earned you money. Nerds!
So much good stuff in the WIBL statbook. As I was the older brother, I tended to win a majority of the games. So we came up with a point system that acknowledged successes other than just wins. This helped even the playing field, although Tim did just fine as indicated by the Updated WIBL Records after the ’89 season:
And so, if that wasn’t enough, I’ll leave you with the pitches each player had in his arsenal for the ’89 season as documented on page 22 of the WIBL statbook.
Matt: Fastball, Curveball, Change, Knuckleball, Twist-a-knuckle
Tim: Fastball, 2 Curves, Change, Reuschelball (ode to Rick Reuschel?), Knuckleball