Just thinking, what is under the holes?
If they were, lets say a sky and cloud texture, like clouds moving across the sky. Well it might be possible to use the scissor command to draw the hole sprite as a round shape rather than square.
Like for each line on the Y axis, work out the width that is required to make it round, changing the scissor each time to only draw that particular line area.
You could even have a round sprite to act as a border - maybe with edge highlights to make the holes look like they are cut out. If you can change the UV coord exactly to suit the pixel location, ignoring scaling, then the hole sprites would overlap, but you'd see the clouds through them as if they were real holes.
So, instead of cutting holes in a sprite, you'd add a backdrop sprite on top and use a custom scissor-draw routine to make it round. The ball sprite would be drawn on top of everything, it could scale down and fade out to make it look like it's falling.
I'm not sure how fast the scissor command is, but I am sure it can handle this - maybe limit the number of holes you can have, like make them shrink and close after a while... otherwise it would just grind to a crawl when there's too many holes.
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