- Lincoln and Clyde find themselves outmatched in the ultimate prank war, meanwhile Lisa takes on a new "sport" with some help from Lynn Jr.
- Lisa, who has won a blue ribbon at the science fair, anticipates the celebration of her victory against the other competitors as she discusses her success with her robot assistant, Todd, at home. Upon hearing the sound of cheering, they prepare to bask in the celebration; to their chagrin, when the door opens, they discover that the celebration is actually for Lynn's baseball team, as they have just won their seventeenth game in a row and are on the verge of advancing to the state championship. Frustrated that her peers refuse to celebrate her scientific success, Lisa leaves the pizza party the team is throwing and concludes that she has no choice but to think of a way to become noticed. Meanwhile, Lincoln, who is also attending the pizza party, leaves on short notice because he and his best friend, Clyde, are about to accomplish another milestone: successfully ding-dong ditching every house in their neighborhood. They have been working their unquestionable hardest to pull off this stunt for the past three and a half years, and the only dwelling left in their neighborhood that they still have yet to ding-dong ditch is that of Lincoln's next-door neighbor, Mr. Grouse. However, as they plot to ding-dong ditch Mr. Grouse's house, Lincoln's older sister, Luan, barges into his bedroom and warns the boys that there is more to Mr. Grouse than meets the eye. To provide an example, she tells them about how one of her very first prank attempts involved spraying shaving cream into Mr. Grouse's mailbox so he would get covered in it when he opened it up. Unfortunately, Mr. Grouse caught Luan red-handed while preparing the prank, changing her life permanently. However, Lincoln and Clyde are completely unfazed by this story and quickly brush it off. Later that day, Lisa watches Lynn as she practices baseball, having decided that the best way to become recognized and celebrated is not through conducting a scientific or technical investigation but through achievements earned from playing sports. While spectating Lynn's practice, Lisa jots down notes about how to play baseball since she has never tried it before, and every time a concept confuses her, she asks Lynn for clarification about the rules. Lisa's perpetual queries regarding the rules of playing baseball continue into the next day, and it does not take long before Lynn catches on to her studies. After asking about Lisa's motives for studying baseball, Lynn learns that Lisa has decided to join an after-school baseball competition and, having never played the sport before, requires extensive knowledge of the rules to understand the gameplay. Lisa then tells Lynn that her first game is the following day after school, so Lynn agrees to attend the game along with her other teammates. That night, Lincoln and Clyde commence their scheme to ding-dong ditch Mr. Grouse's house. After arriving at his residence, they ring the doorbell and quickly run off, but as they escape, they encounter Mr. Grouse, who has caught them red-handed in the act of ringing the doorbell as he appears out of nowhere. As the boys attempt to justify the reason why they rang the doorbell before running off, Mr. Grouse quickly catches on to their intention of ding-dong ditching his house and impromptu initiates a prank war against them, warning them to sleep with one eye open at night. The next morning, Lincoln searches his bedroom for any booby traps that Mr. Grouse may have planted overnight but fails to uncover any and thus assumes that Luan must have lied to him with her claim about there being more to Mr. Grouse than meets the eye. However, Lincoln soon discovers that Mr. Grouse had turned the tables with his threat about keeping an eye open at night by planting a colossal explosive bag filled to the brim with blue powder in the bathroom, effectively diverting Lincoln's expectations about where to expect a prank to appear. Clyde likewise falls for an identical trick, and Grouse's prank drives the boys to formulate a new plan to ding-dong ditch their neighbor. Their new plot involves mailing themselves to Mr. Grouse's house; by the time he opens the package, they will throw smoke bombs to make it difficult for him to see and throw a jar full of spiders onto his body, causing him to freak out due to his arachnophobia before cutting the power to the house and finally ringing his doorbell and running away, effectively ding-dong ditching Mr. Grouse's house and pranking him at the same time. However, Luan catches the boys plotting and warns them never to mess with Mr. Grouse, citing one of his most daring pranks of all time: a trick where he released one hundred greased pigs into the city hall as revenge for the mayor increasing his electric bill by $0.20 before wiping people's memories on mass to ensure they forgot about the incident (which went down in history as the Day of Pigs) as an example of what could happen if they were not careful. Just as they did before, the boys ignore Luan's warnings about Mr. Grouse, but before they can execute their plan, they find out that Mr. Grouse has glued their shoes to the floor as sabotage. That afternoon, Lynn and her baseball team search the baseball field for Lisa and her team, but after finding nobody on the field, they decide to head to Lisa's school. Upon arriving, they learn that Lisa's "baseball competition" is not a traditional game played on a grassy field but a spelling bee formatted like a baseball game held in the school cafeteria. Naturally, the baseball players view the game's design as peculiar and decide to leave for their practice after the game ends. The next day, Lisa and Todd confront Lynn, insulted by how Lynn's accomplices laughed in Lisa's face for the unusual format of the game. After Lynn apologizes for her behavior, Lisa announces that since her teammates do not play well under the pressure of organized athletics, their final practice has gotten canceled, making their defeat at the next game seemingly inevitable from there on out. Greatly shocked by the news, Lynn decides to side with Lisa and announces her plans to coach her team to prepare them for the game, knowing how to work efficiently as a team leader and prepare anybody for a competition. Meanwhile, Lincoln and Clyde, still hiding inside the package they mailed to Mr. Grouse's house, prepare to pop out of the box and execute their prank flawlessly. However, upon erupting out of the flaps, the boys find themselves not on Mr. Grouse's front porch but in the middle of the desert, courtesy of Mr. Grouse altering the shipping address on the package to divert the direction of the scheme. Having depleted their ideas of how to ding-dong ditch and prank Mr. Grouse altogether, they approach Luan for pranking advice. Upon hearing the boys admit their defeat, Luan begins coaching them on how to fight efficiently in a prank war. The three most important rules that she provides them include never trusting anybody, always considering the element of surprise, and always knowing the location of their opponent. Meanwhile, Lynn coaches Lisa's baseball team, giving forth her best efforts to prepare them for the game without having them worry about the possibility of their loss. Before long, Lincoln and Clyde reach the point where they receive the consent of their coach that they are finally ready to set foot on the field and face their opponents like professionals, and Lisa's baseball team likewise follows suit. That night, Lincoln and Clyde execute their biggest ding-dong ditch-linked prank yet; when they ring the doorbell, Mr. Grouse touches a vibrating door handle, which knocks him backward into a recliner with a massive spring loaded into it, which sends him flying to the ceiling (which they have coated with Velcro,) and the force of gravity will ultimately cause him to fall flat onto a lever that opens a gate, releasing numerous greased pigs into his house. The pigs running amok will retaliatingly trigger some motion sensors, setting off fireworks as a grand finale. However, once the fireworks go off, Clyde notices the sound of fire truck sirens blaring in the distance, an element the boys had not planned as part of the prank. The blaring of the sirens alarms Lincoln so much that he tells Clyde that they have no choice but to run indoors and hide, fearing that somebody may have called 911 after noticing the fireworks, trying to report the boys for committing arson. As the boys hide indoors, Lynn and Lisa leave the house to attend their games. When Lisa tells Lynn to save her good luck wishes for the cafeteria field, Lynn announces that she will not attend Lisa's game, as she and her teammates have another game that night. This statement causes Lisa to become skeptical because Lynn had promised to coach her team to the point where they could undoubtedly win; Lynn quickly brushes it off and explains that she expects Lisa's team to have the team-playing information integrated into their brains without support from their coach, selfishly desiring to evade skipping her own team's championship game in favor of attending Lisa's game. After Lynn walks out the door, Lincoln and Clyde watch as the fire trucks arrive at Mr. Grouse's house, worrying if they should count his house as ding-dong ditched. However, they soon notice a paramedic taking Mr. Grouse to an ambulance on a rolling bed, which alarms them so impactfully that they worry that they have caused an impending homicide. Not wanting to get arrested for murder or arson, the boys rush to the ambulance and begin apologizing to Mr. Grouse, only for him to reveal something that shocks them both beyond belief: they had witnessed a staged act, and he had faked his injuries the whole time. Even worse, he reveals to the boys that he was never inside his house; the "paramedic" loading him into the ambulance is not even a real paramedic, but Luan, who took all of the hits for Mr. Grouse without the boys' knowledge. With Lincoln and Clyde confused as to why they worked as a team, Luan explains that on the day Mr. Grouse caught her red-handed filling his mailbox with shaving cream, he shared his extensive pranking knowledge with her and since took her under his wing, adopting her as his partner-in-crime. Mr. Grouse then explains that every prank the boys fell victim to after he declared the prank war against them, from the blue explosive powder bombs to gluing their shoes to the floor to changing the mailing address for the package, was factually initiated by Luan, not by him. He then decides the only thing left to do is to call a truce with the boys to end the prank war where it is. Unfortunately for Lincoln and Clyde, having learned the whole truth from Luan and Mr. Grouse, they disregard the rule about never trusting anybody and consequently shake their hands with joy buzzers on them without intending to check for any potential prank devices. To the boys' credit, however, they earn the last laugh, as Luan and Mr. Grouse accidentally high-five each other with the same hands that had joy buzzers on them immediately afterward. Meanwhile, as Lynn's baseball team drives to the championship game, Lynn begins to regret the egotistical things she told Lisa before they left the house and begins hallucinating the player riding in the front seat of her father's van as Lisa, who refuses to stop complaining about Lynn breaking her promise to ensure her team wins the game and the potential effects it will have on her sportsmanship. Unable to cope with the bubbling pressure of her guilt, Lynn hastily orders her father to drive to Lisa's game instead, and they arrive soon after. By the time Lynn's baseball team arrives to watch Lisa's game, Lisa's team is falling far behind the opposing team and only has one more chance to rise to the top of the ranks. When Lisa steps up to the plate to bat, Lynn gives her her lucky baseball hat as a token of her empathetic acts, motivating Lisa to go for a home run. With that, Lisa takes the home run without a single flaw, scoring her team enough points to secure their victory. As a celebration, Lynn's team throws a pizza party to commemorate Lisa's team and their victory. During the pizza party, Lisa declares that she has enjoyed competing in a spelling bee styled like a baseball game so much that she has approached some of her other teachers with ideas for other UIL activities that, similarly, are intended to be structured like team sports. Proud of her sister for never chickening out even when it seemed like the only option that could work to the team's advantage, Lynn congratulates Lisa, and they begin eating pizza with their teammates.
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