There are three imaginary men on base, the bottom of the fifth, two outs.

Weinberg freshman Mike Sidorov pitches the white plastic ball and the batter, Weinberg freshman Scott Klein, makes a clean hit towards the bushes. This could be a double. Sidorov bounds through the shrubbery, grabbing for the ball which narrowly slips off his fingertips. Klein wins.

Now Sidorov and Klein want to bring the excitement they’ve found in Wiffle ball to more students through an intramural league. They currently have seven interested members and hope to recruit more in the fall.

“I always played it at home so I just brought up my stuff and convinced my friends to start playing it,” Sidorov said. “Now we’re starting a league. Next year we’ll try to have a north and south division only we’ll call them east and west because it’s the thing to do.”

The league members regularly play in the Sorority Quad. The batter stands in front of a butterfly chair with an L-shaped piece of cardboard duct taped to it to mark the strike zone.

It’s the scoring system — based on the landscape — that makes their game unique. Hitting a ball into the bushes earns a single, over the bushes a double. If the ball hits Alpha Delta Pi it counts as a triple, if it zooms over the sorority house it’s a home run.

Klein said he tries to play at least once every day, rain or shine. The regular games

already have attracted some fans, Klein said.

“Sometimes we play in view from Willard and they watch out their rooms and heckle us,” Klein said. “One time we had seven

people watching us. It was really fun.”

Sidorov introduced Klein to Wiffle ball during Winter Break. Klein said he was

skeptical but has since become hooked.

“I have a really short attention span

personally and it’s something to do,” Klein said. “It’s athletic and easy. It’s something that’s sport-related that’s not going to make you just want to go to sleep and collapse.”

Although moving to a real field for official league play will require a new set of rules, Klein said the transition will be worthwhile.

“It’ll be good next year when we can play up north because I think the girls are getting annoyed that we keep hitting the house,” Klein said. “Sometimes if we’re unlucky it goes through a door and we have to wait for someone to say ‘It’s those Wiffle ball guys playing outside’ and throw it back out.”

— Samantha Nelson