In my opinion, Wifflerock’s attendance has dropped recently because they just don’t care as much as they used to. This was the tourney that started it all in NE, and they used to do it right. Now, I’m not quite as convinced. But, give credit where credit is due. Without Wifflerock, the sport would not be where it is now.

We have played you guys 3 times and I have never seen anything to suggest that you are anything but honorable players. That said, one of the biggest problems with these tournaments is that there are certain teams that are constantly throwing over the limit whenever they feel like they can get away with it. NEWA tournaments are (in)famous for becoming fast pitch torurnaments.

The real solution is for everyone to take responsibility and never throw over the limit regardless of game situation. Until that happens, we are going to have unfairness on both sides. Obviously, it was really harsh to lose your only pitcher for one 38 MPH pitch, but it is equally unfair when guys with no class throw heaters by teams too intimidated to stand up for themselves.

It isn’t as if I have a problem with fast pitch WIFFLE. I play it on Sundays and hope to play more of it in the future. However, when we sign up, we agree to the rules of the tournament, and I would never want to win a game because we violated the rules.

I think that there should be automatic speed checks throughout a tournament by someone whose only task is to roam the fields with a gun. If the speed were being consistently checked, it would make it easier for us to make sure we aren’t accidentally throwing too fast, and it would eliminate the need for the Wifflerock rule, which most (including me) think is too harsh.

Most people are schocked by how slow 35-38 MPH actually is. A good rule of thumb is that if the pitch doesn’t look slow, it is probably over the limit.

This is yet another example of things being done the wrong way. Hard to argue that a team that paid money to play shouldn’t be given at least 1 warning and a chance to conform to the speed limit.

And we welcome all comments here, even when they disagree with me. So feel free to express yourself. However, this space is moderated to encourage intelligent conversation and prevent the useless attacks, insults, and anonymous posting that have cluttered traditional WIFFLE message boards. So let’s make sure to keep things contructive and intelligent. Something like, “You are wrong. I didn’t read your post.” doesn’t really cut it.

I let it through this time because I didn’t want to give the impression that I was censoring things, but in the future I encourage you to disagree with me, but if you want to do so please make an effort to follow the argument and respond to the issues on the table.

And as a case in point, one need only look at their elimination draw on sunday. Teams fight all day on saturday to go 4-0 and get a bye only to be matched up 1st round against another 4-0 bye team. Hours of delays, confusing seeding, complaints about speed enforcement, etc., are just some of the myriad of complaints flying around the wiffle world this weekend.

This is not a personal complaint (congrats to Aggrocrag for playing a great game and knocking us out on Sunday 7-5, they are a fantastic team). I spoke with dozens of participants and cruised the message boards as well. People, I think, are getting fed up with the format and I think it is starting to show. After all, the wifflerock website boasts turnouts of just short of 200 teams only a few short years ago. There were certainly fewer than 100 teams there this weekend. That is a massive drop.

I personally like the organizers of Wifflerock and I do not doubt for a second that they do their best to run a first-rate tournament. However, perhaps they have lost touch with what the players are looking for as a result of running only one tournament a year and not keeping up with the direction of the sport. Certainly there was more frustration from top teams this weekend than I have heard all year.

So I stand by the experience comment. Do you think that if Benas or Trotta were running the tournament that there would be numerous top teams with top seeds battling each other in the opening round? Would there be 2.5 hour waits between games? Would the Dongs be run out of an entire city?