I bought a wiffle ball and bat for $3.99 at Sport Authority on Labor Day. I brought it home and decided to play some wiffle ball with my sister, Mo. We went to the backyard and took turns pitching to each other. I did pretty well in establishing a strike zone and hitting it consistently. Mo wasn't too bad either. Once she got her form down, she was hitting balls left and right. While we played, we reminisced to the last time we played a pitch and bat game.
It was in middle school when my family lived in a townhouse. I had a nice big wooden bat and a hard, white baseball. I convinced my sister to go out to the backyard and to pitch me some balls for some batting practice. I wasn't much of a baseball player, but after watching enough SportsCenter highlights, I wanted to feel the satisfaction of a hard-hit ball.
Mo wound up and pitched to me a nice fastball. For a girl, Mo had a pretty strong arm, and she knew how to throw balls like a boy. I used my Mark McGwire crouching stance and swung hard at the ball. The ball made contact with the bat and reversed its path, flying at full speed the other way. It was a high hit ball and it kept going and going... until it hit a window and created some extra breaking noises.
My glory was short-lived as I faced a critical moment. I had just broken someone's window, and my baseball was inside their house. Immediately, I ruled out the possibility of getting away with the incident. I did the next best thing. I took sixty dollars from my piggy bank, wrote a small note with my phone number and a brief apology, and left it on their front doorstep.
This attempt to silence any problems backfired when the people called our house. They told me that the repair fee was about $200 and that $60 would not cover anything. I could no longer hope to keep this from getting to my parents, so I let it all out. I told them how I had accidentally broken someone's window with a baseball and how I had tried to resolve the problem on my own. My parents reacted very well, even laughing and mocking me for my anxiousness. They supplied the fee and told me to deliver it.
I got to see the damage I had done, and I must say - it was pretty powerful. I had not only broken the window, but I had knocked down a plant and spilled soil all over their fax machine. It was as if someone had robbed the place. I apologized once more to the people and vowed to never play hardball in my backyard again. Five years later, I chuckle at the risk I took to replicate the feel of a homerun, and I find solace in whacking the wiffle ball as hard as I can.
