WE NEED TO START A PRO KICK-THE-CAN LEAGUE...:

Brett Bevelacqua, who calls himself "the most hated man in Wiffle ball," is forty-nine and sells residential real estate in Westchester and Rockland Counties, in New York. When he was thirty-seven, and heavily into motorcycle stunts, he had an accident while attempting an endo, or a nose wheelie, and shaved some skin off his shoulder blades and ass. Feeling like a professional athlete who had aged out of his prime, he began selling off his bikes and assorted gear; at the back of his newly spacious garage he saw a yellow bat and a plastic ball, and got the idea to organize a game, in his yard, that better reflected the competitive level he figured he was settling into. Four friends showed up. "By the end of the day, there was so much trash talking, we agreed to do it again the next weekend," he recalls. By the next spring he had begun work on a documentary about the sport, called "Yard Work," and had made himself the commissioner of the Palisades Wiffle Ball League, which he now describes, on its Web site, as "the most recognized Wiffle league on the planet."

Bevelacqua estimates that there are ten to twenty thousand "active" Wiffle-ball players, meaning people who compete, and keep stats, in semi-structured environments, not just at back-yard barbecues. Of those, he said recently, "about a thousand, or maybe five hundred" are of a calibre to play--on the grass abutting an elementary school in Blauvelt, New York, where the P.W.B.L. convenes on fourteen Sundays between late April and the end of September. "The rest look like me," Bevelacqua, who is sturdily built, with a certain middle-aged heft, said. "Except they're twenty-five, and fat kids." 

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