2nd In A Series About Baseball
YARN BALL AND WIFFLE BALL
2nd in a series about baseball and little league
Kids in the 1950’s played baseball or some version of it all summer long. In Salkum we played on our Haslett field behind our house. We would play for hours and then head the short distance through Vic Talbots’s cow pasture to the “old swimming hole. “ We usually stopped by our garden to grab some peas off the vine or a carrot or two and then picked a few evergreen blackberries off their barbed bushes on the way.
At most we had maybe 4-8 kids to play ball at any one time because of work, being in trouble or doing some other activity. This meant we could not play with a regular hardball because there would not be enough players to field a well hit ball. Several kids did not have mitts, which was also a problem using a hardball.
Someone, somewhere, after WWII got the idea of making yarn balls for baseballs. I have Googled and researched this and it seems yarn ball may have unique to just our little southwest Washington area.
The yarn came from our fathers’ thick wool socks worn for logging. We would take an old sock and unravel it. Then we would begin to wind it carefully around some kind of round core object. If we wanted a ball that could be hit a long way, we would use a golf ball. To make a ball a little less lively, cork or a plastic fishing bobber worked well. We tried pretty much everything for our cores.
They key to making a good yarn ball was being very careful that each wind was very tight and placed so that the ball maintained its roundness. Then the crucial part was taking a large sturdy darning needle to thread thick fishing liter into the ball, even using a hammer to get the needle through the center. This last process, with several kids looking over the shoulders of the two kids carefully finishing the ball, looked like scene from the operating room of General Hospital.
Several passes through the ball at different angles with the needle and liter and the ball was ready for play.
Once ready we had a ball that was the size of a regular baseball and nearly as hard, but only about half the weight. It would still hurt when hit by a line drive or errant pitch, but it was not dangerous and could even be caught with bare hands, stinging just a bit. A batter could make good contact and the ball would still travel less than 100 feet. Once it loosened up a bit – we had to re needle often – the ball would travel even less. A good ball would last only a week, so we were in a constant state of repair and production.
The kids in the neighborhood played yarn ball from the end of WWII to around 1954. I played some with the older kids when I was really little, but mostly watched and shagged foul balls.
Things changed around 1954. In the eastern cities kids played broom ball on the streets and from watching old videos, it looks to me like their ball was some derivation of the yarn ball with maybe an old sock wrapped up with tape. The city kids had plenty of players, but no room so broom ball was their solution. Sometime in late 1953 a guy named Mullaney in the state of Connecticut invented a plastic ball with holes in it. His son named it wiffle ball after the word “wiff” which, in baseball, meant a strike out. By 1954 the Wiffle ball had hit the markets in the west and for 39 cents we could have the most perfect small field/few players ball possible.
A good wiffle ball pitcher could throw every kind of pitch – fastball, slider, curves, drops, knucklers – and those breaking pitches did not break just a few inches. A good curve might start out behind the batters head and end up outside and low. On the other hand, a batter could “hang in there” on curves because he knew the ball would really not hurt that much. Even getting hit square in the face would only cause watery eyes, maybe a nose bleed if the ball made perfect contact, and lots of laughter.
So, now we had major league skilled pitchers, fearless batters, fielders who did not need mitts to make great plays and kids who loved to play ball. All we needed was a special field to make this all work.
NEXT: The Haslett Field