Welcome to Wiffle ball in Delco, where the pitchers throw 100 mph and a league bonds friends

His right arm was throbbing, his shoulder was stiff, and it seemed like the entire side of his body — all the way down to his legs — was sore.

“It’s rough,” said 26-year-old Colin Pollag.

In Delaware County, the aches and pains meant Wiffle ball season was underway. What started 15 years ago with buddies in a backyard has blossomed into a nationally recognized Wiffle ball league with a yearly draft, team uniforms, schedules, live-streamed games, a championship trophy, and even a radar gun that says some pitchers can touch 100 mph.

The Ridley Park Wiffleball League is pure Delco, with nine teams and 36 players, almost all of them having grown up in the borough. The players — most of whom are in their mid-20s — start in the spring, play through the summer, and crown a champion just before fall begins. The muscle aches are only temporary. But the statistics on the league’s website last forever.

“I had a dent in my biceps, but that went away,” said Pollag, whose 481 career innings pitched are the most in league history. “It hurts every now and then. I just deal with it.”

Dylan Harshaw, then an engineering student at Lehigh University, was searching for an internship before he graduated in 2020 when a friend made a suggestion to make his resumé stand out from the crowd. The Wiffle ball league Harshaw ran back home in Delco had nothing to do with engineering, but Harshaw’s buddy thought it would be an attention grabber.

So Harshaw added the title — Commissioner of the Ridley Park Wiffleball League — to his resumé and fired off his application.

“In the interview they were like, ‘What does this mean?’” said Harshaw, 26. “What do you mean you run a nationally recognized Wiffle ball league?’”

The Wiffle ball was invented in 1953 in a suburban Connecticut backyard and hit the market a year later, making this the 70th summer of Wiffle.

The ball — first intended as a way for the inventor’s sons to easily throw curveballs — was an instant success. The Wiffle company is still family owned and has sold more than 60 million balls, which have become a staple of Americana.

In Delco, the Wiffle ball is what keeps a group of friends together.

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“We have an iMessage group chat that’s been maxed at 32 people for like the last seven, eight years,” Harshaw said. “That thing is running all offseason with everyone talking crap to each other. It’s really for pride.”

The league started when they were in sixth grade as a way to pass time before another school year began. They played in Wayne Shambo’s backyard, using a lawn chair for a strike zone.

“How everyone thinks of Wiffle ball, that’s exactly how we started,” Harshaw said. “Backyard, lobbing it over, yellow bat. That was it.”

Summer after summer, guys from Ridley started showing up, waiting to jump into the next game. They eventually thought they had enough for a league and Harshaw drafted a schedule in the summer of 2016. The boys had a league and Harshaw became commissioner.

“I guess I just put the most effort in early on,” said Harshaw, whose tenure has yet to be opposed.

Each ball in Major League Baseball is rubbed before games with mysterious mud found in a body of water in a secret South Jersey location. Every ball in the Ridley Park Wiffleball League is cut with an 89-cent kitchen knife from Walmart.

“If I ever need another one, that’s where I’d go and look for that one knife like a lunatic,” said Sean Bingnear, 26. “They’ll be like, ‘Why do you need that?’ ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

A standard Wiffle ball moves mostly in two predictable ways: slider and curveball. But a few incisions by Bingnear allow the ball to move almost limitlessly.

He carves the top of every ball in a uniform sequence, altering each one the same. The process takes about 10 minutes — “When I first started, I would slip sometimes and cut my finger,” Bingnear said — and he starts each season with a box of balls in his bedroom.

“After getting 280 Wiffle balls delivered to your house, you have to get good at it somehow,” Bingnear said.

The pitchers can make the Wiffle balls dance to home plate, creating challenges for the hitters. The mound is just 48 feet away, so the pitches — which often hit triple digits on the radar gun — get there fast. The challenge makes each hit a reward.

“There’s no better feeling than barreling an 85, 90 mph pitch,” Harshaw said. “It keeps you coming back. The way all the pitchers are throwing, you keep coming back for that one hit.”

The Ridley Park Wiffleball League moved a few years ago from a youth softball field near the Ridley Park fire station to Catania Park, playing on a patch of grass just shy of I-95. They rent the field, which has lights, a home run fence, and bases. Every team is named after a big-league team and wears custom uniforms.

“I really like the Mets jerseys,” Harshaw said. “But it stinks because we hate the Mets.”

The guys from Ridley often travel away from Catania Park, leaving Delco to play in tournaments across the country. They played in Indiana and Pittsburgh and won a tournament this spring in York. The other leagues wear cool uniforms and cut their Wiffle balls, too. But the Delco guys have yet to find a league built like theirs.

“At all the tournaments, we’ll see teams where they’re like, ‘We’re going to stack this guy from New York and this guy from New Jersey and this guy from Pa.’ They put together these super teams,” Harshaw said. “One of the things we’ve always done is, ‘Hey, we’re in this for fun. We’re playing with our friends.’ We’ve always stuck true to ‘We’re playing with our guys from Ridley.’ There’s no other league around that does what we do and has as many homegrown players in their league.”

The teams play without an umpire, leaving it up to the players to decide on close calls.

“There’s no chance he caught that,” a batter shouted after the right fielder made a diving catch.

“That was 100 percent a catch,” they fired back.

“He caught it like this,” the hitter said.

“Oh my God. I swear,” said the guy who may or may not have made the catch.

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Harshaw was watching near the bleachers.

“Dylan, step in,” Bingnear said. “You’re the commissioner.”

Harshaw spoke up. It was a catch. The commissioner made his ruling and the game continued.

“You get some arguments,” Bingnear said. “It doesn’t happen a lot, but we’re competitive.”

Harshaw landed that internship after explaining in the interview what it meant to be the commissioner of a Wiffle ball league. He now works at that civil engineering firm in King of Prussia and was recently showing his boss videos of the league.

“A lot of people are like, ‘That’s crazy. You run a Wiffle ball league,’” Harshaw said.

The league’s first season finished just before everyone went off to college. They feared that it would fade away. Instead, it became bigger. The schedule was perfect: The season started in May when everyone came home and finished in August before they returned to school. They survived college.

Then they had to find a way to fit the league around their careers. The guys are engineers, plumbers, deli workers, elevator repairmen, and medical technicians. They scheduled all the games on two days: Sunday afternoons and Wednesday nights. The league kept churning and word kept spreading as new players jumped in. They meet every winter for a draft, hoping not to be the last player picked.

“A lot of these guys, we’ve grown up together, but some of these other guys are younger and without this, we wouldn’t even talk,” Bingnear said. “It’s a beautiful thing. Every year, we get together for it and it keeps us together. ‘Hey, let’s do that again.’ Now I have a radar gun and I’m cutting Wiffle balls. You have to see it to believe it.”

Pollag, who pitched as a teenager with the Ridley High baseball team, might not be as limber as he was when he was hurling in Shambo’s backyard. But the league’s all-time arm is holding up. He has an ice pack waiting in his freezer after each game. And the league that started with a couple of buddies and a lawn chair is going strong.

“We have our own group of friends here,” Pollag said. “After the season, I don’t see a lot of the guys. But when it’s Wiffle ball season, I think half of these people are people I wouldn’t have met or kept in contact with if we didn’t have this league. It’s really cool. Like I’ll see somebody out at the bar in the winter and I’ll go up and say hi to him. If we didn’t have this league, it probably wouldn’t happen.

“We keep finding ways to keep it going. I don’t know what would stop us. Maybe we’ll have to eventually go to a medium pitch league because we’ll get too old where we can’t throw fast. But right now, we’re in good shape.”

The World Wiffle Ball Championship is played under rules that differ greatly from familiar baseball rules. Here are a few of them:

Umpiring: Teams will umpire their own games. Captains will settle all disputes over calls.

Rosters: Teams will have four or five players, including a designated hitter. Teams must have four players in the field.

Length of game: Games are six innings, with extra innings as needed.

At-bats: There are no called balls or strikes. There are no hit-by-pitches. There are no unintentional walks. Batters may strike out swinging. Batters may choose not to swing at any pitch.

Making outs: Fielders may throw the ball at runners. Runners not on a base when struck with the ball below the neck will be ruled out. Runners not on a base who are hit with a batted ball are out.