When I played wiffle ball more than 60 years ago, the idea of a professional wiffle ball league was beyond belief. On this week’s edition of the Fridays With Larry podcast, I talk with an 18-year-old from Fishers who is living that once-unimaginable life.
Connor Smith plays professionally for the Atlanta Ballers, a team whose owners include former NFL wide receiver Julio Jones and the musician Nelly. Smith was drafted 10th overall, along with his best friend and longtime teammate, after the two won a major tournament in Texas that caught the league’s attention.
Smith’s road to the pros began during the COVID pandemic, when boredom sent him down a YouTube rabbit hole of wiffle ball videos and his father ordered two yellow bat-and-ball sets for backyard games with neighborhood friends. One of those bats broke. The other is the same bat Smith has been swinging in Atlanta this season.
After 12 years of organized baseball that came with mounting pressure and anxiety, Smith calls wiffle ball his “happy place.”
“When I walk on a wiffle ball field, I’m truly there, I’m truly in the moment,” Smith told me.
The two compare notes on how the backyard game has changed. Pitchers now cut patterns into the ball to create eye-popping breaking pitches, and Smith’s league enforces a 75-mile-per-hour speed limit on pitches to encourage offense. Games are available on ESPN+, and the league’s World Series will air on ESPN2 from the Disney Wide World of Sports complex.
Smith isn’t banking his future on wiffle ball, though. He is preparing to become an elementary school teacher and hopes the summer wiffle ball season will provide a second income alongside the classroom.
Larry uses the conversation as a jumping-off point to look at the decline of unstructured, kid-organized play. Children today spend about 35% less time in outdoor free play than their parents did, only about 6% of kids ages 9-13 ever play outside unsupervised, and teens now average roughly eight and a half hours of daily screen time. Youth sports participation is at record levels, Larry notes, but nearly all of it is scheduled, supervised and paid for — with costs up 46% just since 2019.
Also in this episode: Larry digs into an overlooked economic headline — American worker productivity is growing at its fastest pace in more than 20 years, and AI isn’t the reason — and closes with the story of more than 600 trombonists in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia, who broke a Guinness World Record by playing “76 Trombones” together.
Fridays With Larry is sponsored by Citizens State Bank.
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