The Wiffle Ball: The Patent Ran Out in 1974. The Trademark Never Did.

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

David Mullany's 1954 patent application named two inventors, not one, and it describes a hole pattern no Wiffle ball sold today actually has. The company's own trademark filings can't agree on whether the brand was born in 1954 or 1959. And from a 1992 opposition over a mark called BAT COMPANY to one in 2025 over THE WOOFLE, The Wiffle Ball, Inc. has spent more than three decades proving it still minds the difference between its name and everyone else's.

Who invented the Wiffle ball, and who vanished from the story

David N. Mullany, a onetime semipro pitcher living in Fairfield, Connecticut, built the first Wiffle ball in his backyard in 1953 after watching his twelve-year-old son and a friend struggle to throw curveballs with a perforated plastic golf ball. Mullany got hold of plastic spheres from a local packaging plant — accounts differ on whether they were meant for perfume or for Coty cosmetics containers — and cut holes into them by hand until he found a pattern that curved reliably without straining a young arm. His son and the neighborhood kids called a strikeout a "whiff"; the family named the new ball Wiffle, dropping the H, and by most accounts did it partly so the name would read better on a sign and partly with an eye toward trademarking it later.

That much is the story every popular account repeats — the company's own materials, the Smithsonian, the National Toy Hall of Fame, Wikipedia, NPR. The patent record adds a name none of them carry. U.S. Patent 2,776,139, titled simply "Game Ball," lists two inventors: David N. Mullany, and a second man, William F. Blamey, Jr. No source checked for this guide explains who Blamey was, how he came to share the application with Mullany, or what became of his interest in it. The patent carries no corporate assignee — it issued to the two men personally — which means Blamey held an equal legal claim to the invention at the moment it was granted. He is not named on a single popular retelling of the Wiffle ball's origin found in this research.

What the 1954 patent actually describes

Mullany and Blamey filed their application on February 18, 1954; it was granted January 1, 1957. The patent's claim is specific about why the ball curves: all of the perforations sit on one hemisphere, so the ball's wind resistance is unsymmetrical, and a ball spinning with unsymmetrical drag follows a curved path in flight — no wrist snap required, which was the entire point for a twelve-year-old pitcher.

The hole pattern the patent actually draws is more elaborate than the ball most people have held. For a ball roughly 2⅝ inches in diameter, one full hemisphere is left completely solid. The other carries three staggered rows of small rectangular openings: eight apertures in the row nearest the equator, six in the middle row, three in the outer row — seventeen rectangular slots in total, each ½ inch by ¼ inch — plus one separate round hole, ⅝ inch across, at the pole. A ball sold under the Wiffle name today has eight long oval holes cut into one hemisphere and nothing else. Nothing found in this research dates exactly when or why the design moved from the patent's seventeen-slot pattern to the simpler eight-oval version now standard; it is treated here as an open question, not a resolved one.

Two trademarks, two birth years for the same brand

The Wiffle Ball, Inc. holds two separate federal word-mark registrations for WIFFLE, filed more than a decade apart, and they swear to two different first-use dates.

The earlier-filed registration, covering bats and the ball together as "a device for tossing a ball," swears first use only back to 1959 — six years after Mullany's own backyard prototype. The later-filed registration, covering the ball on its own, swears first use to February 5, 1954, a date that falls thirteen days before Mullany and Blamey even filed their patent application. Both are the company's own sworn federal filings, a decade apart, for what the public has only ever known as a single continuous brand. This guide does not resolve which date better reflects when "Wiffle" actually went on sale — it names the disagreement, because the company's own paperwork contains it.

The patent expired in 1974. The trademark never did

Utility patents granted under the law in effect when Mullany and Blamey filed ran for seventeen years from the grant date. A patent granted January 1, 1957 therefore expired on or around January 1, 1974. From that date forward, the exact hole pattern the patent once protected — whichever version was actually in production by then — became legally free for any manufacturer to copy. Nothing in federal law has stopped a toy company from molding an identical perforated plastic ball since the Ford administration.

The trademark is a different instrument with a different clock. A federal word mark survives as long as its owner keeps using it and keeps filing the required renewal paperwork, and The Wiffle Ball, Inc. has done exactly that: USPTO records show both WIFFLE registrations in "registered and renewed" status, most recently renewed in 2016 and 2021. So the shape of the object has been public property for half a century, and the single word printed on it has not been public property for one day since it was first registered. A generic perforated ball is not an infringement. A box that calls itself a Wiffle ball without the company's permission is.

Three decades of opposing every mark that sounds close

That distinction is not theoretical. USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board records show The Wiffle Ball, Inc. filing formal oppositions against other parties' trademark applications across more than three decades. A sampling found in this search: an opposition in 1992 against Jerome T. Coyle, Jr., who was attempting to register the mark BAT COMPANY; one in 1995 against an application for WIFFLE WAFFLE; one in 2012 against MR.WIFFLE; one in 2020 against a second, unrelated applicant's WHIFFLE; one in 2024 against Whiffle Holding B.V.'s WHIFFLE; and one as recently as January 2025 against an application for THE WOOFLE. This guide did not verify the outcome of every listed proceeding, only that the company filed the opposition — the pattern itself, of a continuously defended word mark spanning from before most of today's collectors were buying vintage balls to a filing made this past year, is the point.

One of those names connects to an object in this guide's own figure. A design patent, D335,314, titled "Wiffle ball bat," was filed July 3, 1990 and granted May 4, 1993 — to the same Jerome T. Coyle, Jr. of Granite City, Illinois, whom the company opposed at the trademark office in 1992 over the BAT COMPANY application. Whether Coyle was ever a licensed bat supplier to The Wiffle Ball, Inc., a separate company selling a similarly shaped bat under his own name, or something else entirely is not established by the record checked here, and this guide does not guess.

The boxes and discs collectors actually chase

Vintage packaging is where most of this category's collecting actually happens, since a loose ball or bat on its own rarely carries much of a story. Box variants turn up across several eras in dealer and marketplace listings: red-and-white boxes reading "The Original and Only" over green baseball graphics; an all-black box with white lettering and red "Regulation" text; an earlier or alternate box naming the product "The New Fun Ball" rather than leading with the Wiffle name; and, from the 1960s, boxes tied to a television advertising campaign fronted by Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford.

By the later 1970s and into the 1980s, per the National Baseball Hall of Fame's own account, the company licensed real players' photographs for its packaging — Hall of Famers including Lou Brock, Carlton Fisk, Tony Pérez, Jim Rice, Tom Seaver, Mike Schmidt, Willie Stargell and Ted Williams all appeared on period boxes. Separately, a specialist sports-collectibles disc program from the same general period is remembered two different ways by two different sources, detailed in the disagreements section below.

How to tell a real one, and date it

• The word WIFFLE molded or printed on the ball or bat is the trademark at work, not a styling choice. A generic perforated ball with no brand name anywhere on it is not a counterfeit — it's a legal, post-1974 copy of a shape that is no longer anyone's patent.
• A box reading "The Original and Only" in red and white with green baseball graphics is a long-running general-era design; on its own it narrows a box to a broad span of decades rather than a specific one.
• A box naming the product "The New Fun Ball" rather than leading with "Wiffle" is a dealer-identified alternate or earlier box style; this guide found no primary company catalog confirming exactly where it sits in the sequence, so treat the attribution as seller-reported.
• A box or advertisement built around Whitey Ford places it in the 1960s endorsement campaign specifically, not the general run of Wiffle history.
• A box carrying a real Major League Hall of Famer's photograph (Brock, Fisk, Pérez, Rice, Seaver, Schmidt, Stargell, Williams) dates to the licensed-photo era of the later 1970s into the 1980s, per the Hall of Fame's own account — this guide did not independently verify that dating against a primary company catalog.
• A plastic bat dealers describe as "Gen 3," commonly dated 1983 to 1991 in marketplace listings, reflects a collector-and-dealer generation numbering for the bat's design changes over time. No official company chart for the full generation sequence was found in this research, so treat generation numbers as a trade convention rather than a verified company standard.
• A ball with eight long oval holes in one plain hemisphere matches the pattern sold today. The original 1954 patent instead draws three rows of small rectangular slots plus a round pole hole — seventeen openings in all — so a ball matching the patent drawing exactly, rather than the modern eight-oval pattern, would be worth a second look as either an early or an unusual production run.

The look-alikes: a shape anyone can legally copy

Because the 1957 patent expired around 1974, the perforated-ball shape itself was never trademarked or copyrighted and has been free to copy for decades — and large retailers' own house-brand "practice balls" and "curve balls" fill that space today without infringing on anything, because they do not borrow the WIFFLE name. The trademark, not the shape, is what separates an authentic Wiffle product from everything that looks like one. A ball or bat carrying no brand name at all, a store's private label, or a name the company has not opposed is not a fake Wiffle ball — it is a different, entirely legal product that happens to share a now-public-domain design.

What vintage Wiffle memorabilia actually sells for

No auction-house sale — nothing from RR Auction, Hake's or a comparable house — turned up for any Wiffle product in this research. The figures that do exist are eBay marketplace prices, labeled here by exactly what they are.

One completed sale was found: a used, original Wiffle ball with its original box sold on eBay for $11.69, reduced from a $12.99 starting price — a genuine completed transaction, though a marketplace sale rather than an auction-house hammer price. Separately, an active listing offers a mixed lot of several vintage box variants together — including a black "Regulation" box, a "New Fun Ball" box and a Whitey Ford box, with both lids on at least one box no longer intact — asking $2.99 for the group. A specialist vintage sporting-goods dealer separately catalogs a single 1950s box, attributed in that listing to a manufacturer named "Cohn Inc., Brooklyn, NY," at a $45 asking price; that attribution is addressed in the disagreements section below. No price data of any kind was found for the MSA or Wiffle Ball player discs described above — that category is collected mainly through sports-card specialist channels this research did not reach.

Where the records disagree

Five separate disagreements turned up in this research, and none of them is resolved here on purpose.

First, the hole pattern. The 1954 patent draws seventeen small rectangular slots in three rows plus a round pole hole; the ball sold under the Wiffle name today has eight long oval holes and nothing else. No source checked for this guide dates the change.

Second, the birth year. One federal trademark registration swears WIFFLE's first use to 1959; a second, covering the ball itself, swears first use to February 5, 1954 — before the patent application existed. Both are the company's own sworn filings.

Third, who made the player discs packaged with Wiffle products in the late 1970s. One trade account, citing sales documents supplied by the inventor's own son, credits Wiffle Ball, Inc. itself with an 80-player disc set in 1978 and a different 1979 program. A long-running collector checklist instead credits a specialist sports-premium producer, Michael Schechter Associates (MSA), with an 81-player set in 1977 and an 88-player set in 1978. The maker, the years and the player counts all disagree between the two accounts.

Fourth, a dealer catalogs a 1950s Wiffle box under the manufacturer name "Cohn Inc., Brooklyn, NY" — a name that appears nowhere else in the company's documented Fairfield-to-Manhattan-to-Shelton history and is not explained by any other source checked for this guide.

Fifth, and simplest to state: William F. Blamey, Jr. is a named, equal inventor on the Wiffle ball's own patent, and he is absent by name from the company's own account of its history, from the Smithsonian, from the National Toy Hall of Fame's curatorial record, from Wikipedia, and from NPR's retrospectives. Every popular telling credits David Mullany alone.

For more backyard Americana from this drawer, see this shop's guide to the pink flamingo lawn ornament and its guide to the Thermos trademark's own genericide fight. The Simon electronic game guide covers a similar patent-and-trademark structure from a different decade and drawer entirely. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.