History Of
Softball
Softball was
invented inside the Farragut Boat Club on a blustery,
winter day in November, 1887, in Chicago, IL. A bunch of
Yale and Harvard alumni anxiously awaited the results of
the Harvard-Yale football game, and when the news came
that Yale had defeated Harvard, 17-8, one Yale
supporter, overcome with enthusiasm, picked up an old
boxing glove and threw it at a nearby Harvard alumni,
who promptly tried to hit it back with a stick. This
gave George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of
Trade, an idea. He suggested a game of indoor baseball.
Naturally, Hancock's friends thought he was talking
about playing a game outdoors, not indoors.
Hancock wasn't kidding,
however. Using what was available, he tied together the
laces of the boxing glove for a ball. Using a piece of
chalk, Hancock marked off a home plate, bases and a
pitcher's box inside the Farragut Boat Club gym, with
the two groups divided into teams. The final score of
the game was 41-40, but what was significant was that
Hancock and his friends had invented a sport that would
continue to grow in popularity to where today more than
40 million people enjoy playing it each summer, making
softball the No. 1 team participant sport in the United
States. Hancock's invention eventually caught on in
Chicago with the Farragut team challenging other gyms to
games. In the spring, Hancock took his game outdoors and
played it on fields not large enough for baseball. It
was called indoor-outdoor and Hancock emerged as the
recognized authority in the 19th century.
Hancock appended 19
special rules to adapt the outdoor game to the indoor
game, and the rules were officially adopted by the Mid
Winter Indoor Baseball League of Chicago in 1889.
Hancock's game gradually spread throughout the country
and ultimately flourished in Minneapolis, thanks to the
efforts and ingenuity of Lewis Rober, a Minneapolis Fire
Department lieutenant, who wanted a game to keep his
firemen fit during their idle time. Using a vacant lot
adjacent to the firehouse, Rober laid out bases with a
pitching distance of 35 feet. His ball was a small sized
medicine ball with the bat two inches in diameter. The
game became popular overnight and other fire companies
began to play. In 1895, Rober transferred to another
fire company and organized a team he called the Kittens.
George Kehoe, captain of Truck Company No. 1, named
Rober's version of softball "Kitten League Ball" in the
summer of 1900. It was later shortened to "Kitten Ball."
Rober's game was known
as Kitten Ball until 1925, when the Minneapolis Park
Board changed it to Diamond Ball, one of a half dozen
names used during this time for softball. The name
softball didn't come about until 1926 when Walter
Hakanson, a Denver YMCA official suggested it to the
International Joint Rules Committee. Hakanson had come
up with the name in 1926. Efforts to organize softball
on a national basis didn't materialize until 1933, when
Leo Fischer and Michael J. Pauley, a Chicago Sporting
goods salesman, conceived the idea of organizing
thousands of local softball teams in America into
cohesive state organizations, and state organizations
into a national organization.
To bring the teams
together, Fischer and Pauley invited them to participate
in a tournament in conjunction with the 1933 World's
Fair in Chicago. With the backing of the Chicago
American newspaper, Pauley and Fischer invited 55 teams
to participate in the tournament. Teams were divided
into three classes - fastballers, slow pitch and women.
A 14-inch ball was used during the single-elimination
event.
During the 1934
National Recreation Congress, membership on the Joint
Rules Committee was expanded to add the Amateur Softball
Association (ASA). Until the formation of the ASA,
softball was in a state of confusion, especially in the
rules area where the length of the bases and pitcher's
box were constantly being changed.
The formation of the
ASA gave softball the solidarity and foundation it
needed to grow and develop throughout the U.S. under the
network of associations proposed by Fischer and Pauley.
Pauley and Fischer visited many of the states, inviting
teams to participate in the tournament. Fischer and his
sports promotion director, Harry Wilson, sold the
Century of Progress Exposition on the idea of sponsoring
the tournament and providing a field inside the Fair
Grounds. The American's sports pages promoted the
tournament daily and Chicago businessmen raised $500 to
finance the event.
On the opening day of
the 1933 tournament, the Chicago American said, "it is
the largest and most comprehensive tournament ever held
in the sport which has swept the country like wildfire."
With admission free, 70,000 people saw the first round
of play. Chicago teams won the three divisions of play
with Softball Hall of Famer Harry (Coon) Rosen leading
the J.L. Friedman Boosters to the men's title,
one-hitting Briggs Beautyware of Detroit, MI, in the
finals. It was the first loss of the season for Briggs
after 41 consecutive wins.
It was evident that
softball finally had a foundation from which to grow,
and, in 1935, the Playground Association Softball Guide,
wrote: "the years of persistent effort, constant
promotion and unchanging faith of believers in softball
proved to have not been in vain, for in 1934 softball
came into its own.
The
International Softball World Championships in 1965
developed women's softball by making it an international
game, a step towards the Pan-American Games and the
Olympics. Eleven years later, women softball players
were given the closest equivalent to Major League
Baseball with the 1976 formation of the International
Women's Professional Softball League. Player contracts
ranged from $1,000 to $3,000 per year, but the league
disbanded in 1980 because of financial ruin.
The
popularity of women's fastpitch softball has grown
steadily since the professional league's end in 1980. In
fact, once again, there is another professional
fastpitch league called the NPF (National Pro Fastpitch
League). The Amateur Softball Association reports that
it "annually registers over 260,000 teams combining to
form a membership of more than 4.5 million" (About the
ASA). These numbers do not all apply to fastpitch, yet
it is consistently growing along with slowpitch.
All over America hundreds of leagues and thousands of
players enthusiastically accepted this major team game
and Softball became one of America's favorite sports.
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