History Of Softball
Softball has its origins in the game of baseball, the bat-and-ball sport which was first played in America with a codified set of rules in Hoboken, New Jersey on 19 June 1846. The game of softball appeared in the U.S. just over thirty years later in 1887. While the two sports are similar in many ways, they also contrast in a number of ways -- as does their history. This paper will examine the history of softball and show how and why it developed out of the game of baseball.
With the first known game of softball being played on Thanksgiving Day in Chicago between Yale and Harvard football fans. The game began quite by accident and quite spontaneously when, after the results of the football game between the two rivals were announced and winning parties were awarded their money, a graduate from Yale hurled a boxing mitt at a fan of the school of Harvard. The man at whom the boxing mitt was hurled did not hesitate but reacted as any sporting fan with a stick in his hands would have: he swung at it with a stick.
Just then a man named George Hancock cried out, "Play ball!" And a good-natured game of a make-shift baseball was immediately begun. The boxing mitt was wrapped up and knotted and used as a make-shift ball. A broom stick served as a bat. And Yale and Harvard supporters served as the players. Hancock used to chalk to outline the baseball field diamond (inside the boat club where the men proposed to play, no less), and the men fielded the "ball" with their bare hands. An hour later, when the game was over and the score stood 41-40, Hancock was determined to make softball a real sport. That very same week he set about making it one.
Taking his cue from the sport of baseball (but also from the fact that the game he had played had taken place indoors as opposed to outdoors), Hancock decided that players would use an undersized bat and keep the use of the "soft" ball. The boat club (named Farragut Boat Club) helped create the rules for what would eventually be known as softball but what for now would simply be known as "Indoor Baseball," since it continued to be played indoors and was so similar to the game of baseball. Soon, however, players of the game would want to play it outdoors as well, and the game took up a new title: "Indoor-Outdoor."
In 1889 the first set of official rules were set out and within the decade variations of Hancock's spur-of-the-moment game of softball were being played all over the country. In 1895 in Minneapolis, for example, a man named Lewis Rober went so far as to organize games of "kittenball," as it was called (so-named after one of the teams that played it) for local firemen. The game was also called "lemonball" and "diamond ball." Rather than the 16-inch "soft" ball developed by Hancock and the Farragut Club in Chicago, Rober called for a smaller version of the "soft" ball -- one that measured only 12 inches in circumference (a diminutive version of the Chicago ball, which was a little less than one half of the size of a modern day basketball).
Rober popularized the game, perhaps as inadvertently as Hancock invented the game, by using it to keep his firemen busy or to give them something to do in between calls. Beside the fire station, Rober plotted out the dimensions of the diamond (making it small, of course). Just as the first game played by the fans of Harvard and Yale lasted one hour, Rober's game for his firemen was limited to seven innings, which allowed the game to last roughly an hour -- like the first game played in the Farragut Boat Club in Chicago.
Rober's games of softball, in which the Minneapolis fire department took such pleasure, began to attract the attention of nearly all the locals. The games were quick, tight, offensively and defensively exciting,...
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