All our foes from year's past

Hey, I know what'll shut 'em up!

When we debuted the site in 1998, we figured we needed to be brash and offensive to become noticed. After all, we noticed there were far more sites out there devoted to this sport than we had previously expected, so in order to be considered more than "another one of them" (cause most of them sucked), we needed to be different. So we talked ourselves up BIGTIME. We would tell you over and over again how we were better than you and how your argument meant nothing to us. We followed the idea that "bad press is better than no press" and gave no one other than ourselves any respect.

It worked. Soon, we found ourselves deluged with e-mails and posts in our guestbook about how we actually sucked and that if we played "the right way" we'd find out for ourselves. The right way consisted of playing with the "official" ball, playing by the "official" rules, and playing people not located in our backyard. Our response to this was to defend ourselves (of course) and an end result was something we called the Carmichael Challenge. To all our enemies, the prevailing idea was that the ball we used was "easy to hit" because you couldn't make it curve a ridiculous amount. We tried to argue that this fact proved that our game was more like baseball, the sport most people playing this game love but are too untalented to play at a high level. So they get this ball with holes in it and make it curve a lot and call themselves "athletes" again. When they wouldn't listen to our responses, we issued the Challenge.

Basically, if you thought your ball and your game was so superior to ours, and you felt SO strongly that we should hop on a plane so you could prove it to us with some vague challenge, we one-upped you. We gave you a direct challenge. Come to our field and bat against one of our pitchers, using one of our balls. Put your money where your mouth is, and prove to us that our ball is easier to hit. For one buck, you got one AB against Scott Carmichael. The most you could lose in the game was two bucks. The most you could win was twenty. The percentages were TOTALLY in your favor, weren't they? Whether or not it was related, our enemies soon shut up. It's not that our challenge was any different than a challenge they could have made, but we made it first. One guy even felt so strongly that he gave us a damn date when he was going to be in Chico to take the challenge. Judging by the grammatical problems with his e-mails, we figured the guy was no older than 18, or a complete retard. We saved his e-mail anyway, and when it hit a week before his announced date, we put it up on the page and reminded him about his promise. He never replied and he never showed. Pretty consistent with our enemies: Speak loudly and carry a soft stick. Another site had the audacity to criticize Terry Creighton's inspired (at the time) design of the site. We didn't find their site particularly awesome, so we asked what they found wrong with our site.

The following reply was a joke if we ever heard one. In order to improve our site, they had such classic suggestions as registering for a web site name, cutting out the cursing, and adding a "History" page, which we already had on the site. That was in mid-1999. Today, in 2003, that same site that critiqued us looks EXACTLY THE SAME.

We hate to sound like we're bragging over website matters, especially websites that have to do with wiffleball, but we will anyway. We love our little site, and screw you if you don't "get it."

You see guys, with us, it's not just about the game. Sure, the game's fun and we'll kill you if you ever show up here, blah blah blah, but our league is about the experience. And no, I'm not just talking about the experience of pitching in pressure situations or some shit like that (although those are fun on their own terms). It's more than that. This is our WORLD, this little space of bandwidth. A world where WE rule everyone and everyone sucks and we rule and we always win. It fucking RULES in our world. In our world, some loser named Seth Yoder can talk trash to another loser named Scott Carmichael and have people actually read about it. And yer ass is just jealous that you can't maintain a world like this for more than a week before pulling your hair out, let alone 5 DAMN YEARS. Betcha didn't think we'd make it, huh?

Yeah well, neither did we.