Down a dirt road off of Knights Griffin there’s a small baseball diamond, with an outfield fence that barely stretches 200 feet away from home plate as wiffle balls go whistling over it and into the manicured and mowed field beyond it.
What started as an idea by Plant City native Ben Pues, a high school student at Strawberry Crest when the dream was first born, the field has steadily grown into a home for annual wiffle ball tournaments and the Plant City Wiffle League. As a sophomore in 2017, Pues saw a story on SportsCenter focused on a team in Essex, Vermont that had built their own replica Fenway Park – known as Little Fenway – and held a wiffle ball tournament each year to raise money for charity, beginning in 2001. Inspired, Pues went to work building his own miniature version of Fenway Park in his grandmother’s back yard. With a “green monster” made of plywood towering over left field, Pues and his friends began playing their first tournaments that summer and their first season began in the fall.
The league began with four teams, all of which remain intact today, and has grown to around eight committed teams for their winter season, now heading into their fifth year.
“We’re starting to see a lot more commitment along with the growth,” Pues said. “People are buying into it. It just wasn’t as big back when we first started, but now guys are getting where it’s like, this is something that we’re going to do every year and we have a lot of fun doing. It’s just starting to become more established.”
The league now keeps stats throughout the season and has worked on adding highlights, interviews and even live-streamed games to their Instagram and YouTube pages. Each year Pues looks to make slight improvements to the field, making the field a little better and a little more unique with each addition. The walls of his replica Fenway Park began to wither away with the weather after two years and he decided to make another whole-scale change, thinking of another iconic stadium that he could emulate, thus “Mini Wrigley” was born. With cattle panels used for the outfield fences, woven by confederate jasmine that grows up through the fence to represent Wrigley Field’s classic ivy walls, a replica of Wrigley’s scoreboard was added in center field along with the Cubs’ marquee red “Wrigley Field” sign that stands outside of their stadium entrance in left field.
“Each year I just try to add a few more features every year to make it a bit cooler, I just try to improve it a little bit every year,” Pues said. “With the league, I’d say we’re comfortable at eight teams because after that it’s just a lot of games to play on each weekend. Between eight and 10 teams is where we’re at and I’m happy with that going forward every year. Instead of having as many teams as possible, we just want as many teams that are going to be fully committed to playing each weekend. It’s just quality over quantity at that point.”
The league’s season begins in mid-November, starting the week before Thanksgiving, and ends with their World Series in January on the weekend of Gasparilla with a handful of tournaments in between, generally on Memorial Day, the 4th of July and one in late July as the summer begins to wind down. During the season, team’s play three inning games with one three-game series against a rotating schedule of teams each weekend. At the end, their playoffs mimic that of Major League Baseball, with Wild Card, Divisional and Championship rounds, culminating in their annual World Series.
The field’s biggest turnout came in 2020 alongside the cancellation of Hillsborough County’s annual Saladino Tournament – a yearly week-long, round-robin baseball tournament composed of 28 high school teams throughout Hillsborough County. In May of that year, Pues reached out to Strawberry Crest head coach Eric Beattie about running his own version. With the help of local coaches, local businesses and coverage from 813 Preps, 16 high schools throughout Hillsborough and Pinellas counties came together and held their own tournament.
“It was a blast,” Pues said. “Teams played every single day, Monday through Friday, we had a big, big turn out for the games. We had a second field going, we had people park on our neighbor’s property and there were probably 40 cars with people just sitting on their tailgate watching us play. We were interviewing the kids like a Saladino game and it was treated just like the Saladino Tournament so it was pretty neat to see and kind of funny that we were taking wiffle ball just as seriously as baseball. That gained us a lot of followers, I got to meet a bunch of kids and it gave them something to look forward to that Summer, especially for those that had their senior season taken away. That was pretty neat to see and that was my biggest accomplishment, just getting a bunch of people together that were mostly strangers and building some good memories in a summer that really wasn’t full of anything.”
This past weekend Pues hosted their annual 4th of July tournament, with a fireworks display on Sunday evening after the championship game and a debut of his latest edition, a series of lights that illuminates the field and allows the game to go on even after the sun sets over the horizon.
“We’ve done it every summer for the past five years now,” Pues said. “You just can’t get much more American than this, playing some backyard wiffle ball on the 4th of July weekend, we’ve got some fireworks going off Sunday night, it’s just straight out of the Sandlot. That’s kind of what I imagined when I first started this, trying to get all of my friends back together and do stuff that we used to do as kids and don’t do as much anymore. And this is one of the biggest parts of our childhood, playing wiffle ball in the back yard. I wanted to incorporate that and that’s exactly what it’s been.”