By Brendan Murray
Chicago in the dead of winter can feel like lockdown during a global pandemic: a mass of humanity trapped indoors and venturing out only for work and life’s essentials. All the uncertainty about the future in these coronavirus days dredges up the question that gnawed at me during that bitter Midwestern cold: Is it ever going to end?
Years back I lived near Lake Michigan, close enough to Wrigley Field to hear the crowd roar in summertime when the Cubs managed to score. That proximity was a bonus for my group of friends even if it was enemy territory. We hailed from St. Louis Cardinal country a five-hour drive south. Rivalry aside, Chicago’s north side was as good a place as any to settle after college. Each year when the days finally warmed and baseball returned to the intersection of Clark and West Addison, we knew what we had to do.
Play ball ourselves. Wiffle ball.
Why Wiffle ball, I don’t know exactly. Might’ve had something to do with DNA. In the old days, St. Louis kids grew up playing corkball with a broom handle for a bat and a ball the size of a Titleist. Corkball was baseball sans bases — just pitching, hitting and fielding. Legend has it that brewery workers invented the game a century ago making the balls from corks yanked from beer barrels. Corkball required a vacant lot or a park to play lest windows get broken. Wiffle ball shared corkball’s simplicity but needed less space. Designed so a kid could throw a curve like a big leaguer, the game with the iconic plastic yellow bat and ball with eight holes to a side worked without baserunning and fit Wrigleyville’s density nicely.
One of Chicago’s most underrated civic assets is its network of alleys, some 1,900 miles of corridors that help hide the eye sores of dumpsters and utility poles. The ideal alley for a summer day of Wiffle ball was just out the back door of a friend’s apartment on West Addison.
The field of play—a T-shaped intersection of two alleys—dictated the rules. A called strike had to hit the top half of the lawn chair behind home plate. A carom off a garage door or a pole was a catchable out. A ball launched over the telephone wire in the outfield was an automatic home run. A ball lost to an inaccessible yard or gutter was an automatic out. Solid shots up the middle were the goal. Passing cars meant a timeout, offering plenty of opportunities to fetch another beer.
Victory was sweet, for sure. But knocking over an opposing player’s can of Busch with a line drive or a looping pitch was, for obvious reasons, a particularly well-savored feat.
I wasn’t the first one to see playing in the alley in our late 20s as a metaphor for something. A friend of a friend made an independent film called “Alleyball” released in 2006 with characters based loosely on the games he played. In the movie, the plot revolves around an ultimatum the lead character’s girlfriend gives him: your Wiffle ball buddies or me. In real life, luckily, there were no such pressures. But most of us eventually moved on, to neighborhoods where spacious backyards were preferred over alleys.
In 2010 the alley ball era seemed to end as abruptly as our 30s did. I took a day off work to fly from Washington D.C. to Chicago for what was billed as the final game in the alley. The friend on Addison was moving in with his girlfriend across town. I don’t remember exactly how that game ended. The handful of us who showed up proved that our old jokes were aging better than our 40-year-old reflexes.
Another decade has slipped by and now Covid-19 has many of us still stuck in a winter-like siege. A curve ball like no other, it’s already deprived us of some of the best parts of summer. We should be settling in right about now for the All-Star Game, but our baseball teams are still dormant. Festivals, fairs and concerts are postponed or scaled back, camp is canceled and much of the fun that fuses society through the middle months of the year is best avoided.
But there’s another way to look at the current state of the world, one that might even value the silly games of youth. Games of horseshoes, Wiffle ball or badminton that can be played with a beer in one hand and a racket or horseshoe in the other. Maybe a trampoline or a telescope for the backyard astronomer. They’re all pastimes that pull us off the couch, away from the video games and the podcasts, until life returns to normal. All you really need is an alley and an ageless will to play.
–Brendan Murray is a journalist who lives in London. The illustration is by St. Louis native Matthew Siorek, one of the finer alley ballers of his day.