Pinball world champion is a Florida TV meteorologist
Tampa’s WFLA News Channel 8 meteorologist Eric Stone spends his days finding patterns and paying attention to nitty-gritty details as he forecasts the weather.
Turns out those skills have another application. Stone is also a two-time world champion pinball player.
Over Memorial Day weekend, he won the 17th annual International Flipper Pinball Association World Pinball Championship. Stone traveled to the Pinball Asylum in Fort
Myers to beat out 64 other top players from 14 different countries. The prize: $1,000, plus a new pinball machine valued at $7,000.
Stone has been practicing for most of his life. He was born three weeks premature, and doctors told his parents that he likely wouldn’t develop good hand-eye coordination. When he turned 4, his mom bought him a pinball machine to improve his skills. His love of the game continued through his childhood, as his dad would bring him to 7-Eleven to practice on their machines.
“I stood up on a little step ladder to play,” said Stone, now 46.
After Stone moved to Fort Myers to work at WINK-TV, he started frequenting the Pinball Asylum. For the past
six and a half years, Stone has been playing competitively. He’s traveled throughout the U.S., plus abroad to Denmark and Canada, for tournaments and events.
“The coolest was in 2017 when I went to Phoenix and I played in a place called Alice Cooperstown,” Stone remembered. After securing a victory, he was congratulated by Alice Cooper himself.
“He didn’t have the make up on or anything like that, but he ended up signing the machine,” Stone remembered. “He didn’t have much to say, but what he did say was nice.”
In January 2020, Stone won an open world championship in California.
“Pinball was big in the ‘80s and ‘90s and it seemed to die out in the early 2000s, but it’s making a comeback,” he said.
WFLA has been supportive of Stone’s pinball journey since he started at the station in October 2021.
“I think about it every once in a while when we’re talking about pinball at work,” said Channel 8 chief meteorologist Jeff Berardelli. “Like, ‘wait a minute, this is the best guy in the world, and he’s sitting right in front of me.’”
“You obviously have to be detail-oriented to win at something like pinball, because the rules change a lot,” he continued. “He’s the same way with forecasting.”