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.” He wore a bandanna over his closely cropped hair and sucked on cigarettes to settle his nerves amid sporadic efforts to tamp down stakes in the spray-painted carpet remnants that he uses for pitchers’ mounds and batters’ boxes. Earlier, a pair of S.U.V.s had entered the school parking lot and paraded around in tandem, with windows down and music bumping, while a passenger in the lead vehicle brandished a paddle. These were “minor leaguers,” part of the Palisades farm system, ten teams deep, for which Bevelacqua has recruited promising athletes from local flag-football leagues. “They call themselves ‘Boyz with Feelings,’ ” Bevelacqua said of the showboats, who turned out to be pretty good players. “They’re not on drugs, but—well, they might be on drugs. They’re from the weird, cousin-loving part of Jersey.”

Brett Bevelacqua. Photograph by Timothy O'Connell for The New Yorker

By now the major leaguers were arriving, some from considerably farther away. “We have a couple guys from Boston,” Bevelacqua said. “A guy from Connecticut. Five or six from Long Island. Two from Pennsylvania. A kid from Delaware, but he doesn’t come that often, so I don’t really count him.” Collectively, the big leaguers make up eleven teams, of five or six players apiece, with names like the Royals, the Dodgers, the Pirates, and the Expos. Some players, not yet in uniform, wore T-shirts with printed messages such as “A backyard game taken way too far” and “The 8th Annual Greenwich Wiffle Ball Tournament.” A couple of others, I gathered, responded not to their given names but to Wiffman and Johnny Wiffs, respectively. Bevelacqua mentioned that his fields used to be stalked by “con artists” who would promise big cash payouts for their upcoming regional and national tournaments, only to stiff the eventual winners—Palisades players, often—with mere fractions of the touted rewards. “I’ve never handed out money,” he said. “It’s all pride here.”

Nearby, a lean twenty-three-year-old named Daniel Whitener was dressed in a vintage White Sox jersey and stretching his right arm with a rubber exercise band. A sidearm relief pitcher for the Chowan University baseball team, in North Carolina, he said that he prefers Wiffle ball because it allows him to deploy a more varied repertoire. “I would say I usually hit the zone consistently with nine or ten pitches,” he said. These, apparently, include a screwball, a riser, a slider, a super curve, and a change-up drop, among others, thrown from various arm angles. “Depending on the wind, I can probably get it up to sixteen.” He learned his techniques by watching YouTube videos and practicing in his parents’ back yard, in Chesapeake, Virginia—a seven-hour drive from Blauvelt. “Got to the point where I had people in the neighborhood saying I took it too seriously,” he said. “I wanted to do this.” He nodded toward Bevelacqua, who was busy adjusting a mounted iPad that would soon broadcast the “game of the week,” between the Brewers and the Giants, on Facebook Live. The previous game of the week had attracted seventeen thousand views, more attention than most college baseball games receive. “You don’t get this in Virginia,” Whitener said.

Games in the Palisades league are five innings (four for the minors) and last about an hour. The teams typically play doubleheaders. Instead of using a beach towel draped over a scrap of spare deck lattice to represent the strike zone, as my friends and I did twenty-five years ago, Bevelacqua makes (and sells) his own stand-alone strike zones, which consist of Plexiglas targets bolted to frames of polycarbonate piping. Any pitch that hits the target, which is twenty-four inches wide by twenty-eight inches tall and starts thirteen inches off the ground, is a strike. Three strikes and you’re out, naturally, but a walk requires five balls. Take your base, too, if a pitch hits you in the face, but not below it. Take an imaginary base, that is: there is no running, aside from home-run trots, which are purely ceremonial. (Bat flips welcome.)

The pitcher’s carpet is forty-five feet from the plate and forty-eight feet from the strike zone—a distinction that matters more than you might think in Wiffle ball, where the pitches break as sharply as an R. A. Dickey knuckler. Lineups can have up to five batters, and no fewer than three, while only two players are allowed to help the pitcher defensively. Ground balls must be fielded cleanly before they cross a painted line that marks the extent of the infield, and then thrown into a net, eight feet by eight feet, which serves as a backstop behind the strike zone. Any hit that’s bobbled, or that touches the ground beyond the painted line, counts as a single—unless it rolls or bounces all the way to the chain-link fence, in which case it’s a double, or hits the fence on the fly, for a triple. The fence is about ninety feet from the plate in the left- and right-field corners, and about a hundred and fifteen feet in center. The flat, grassy area next to the school is large enough for four such fields, so multiple games can be played simultaneously. Five years ago, with favorable easterly gusts, a Dodgers batter hit a ball over the house behind the fence on what players call Field No. 2. Bevelacqua estimated the distance travelled at two hundred and thirty-five feet.