SOFTBALL History of Softball and the ASA
SOFTBALL History of Softball and the ASA
Softball was invented inside the Farragut Boat Club on a blustery, winter day in November, eighteen eighty-seven, in Chicago, Illinois. 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, seventeen to eight, 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.
George Hancock used 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 forty-one to forty. The ball, being soft, was fielded barehanded, 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 forty million people enjoy playing it each summer, making softball the number one team participant sport in the United States. George Hancock is credited as the game's inventor for his development of ball and an undersized bat in the next week. The Farragut Club soon set rules for the game, which spread quickly to outsiders. Envisioned as a way for baseball players to maintain their skills during the winter, the sport was called "Indoor Baseball". Under the name of "Indoor-Outdoor", the game moved outside in the next year, and the first rules were published in eighteen eighty-nine.
In eighteen ninety-five Lewis Rober, Sr. of Minneapolis organized outdoor games as exercise for fire-fighters; this game was known as kitten ball (after the first team to play it, "The Kittens"), lemon ball, "mush ball", and "pumpkin ball" or diamond ball. Rober's version of the game used a ball twelve inches in circumference, rather than the sixteen-inch ball used by the Farragut club, and eventually the Minneapolis ball prevailed. The name softball had spread across the United States by nineteen thirty. By the nineteen thirties, similar sports with different rules and names were being played all over the United States and Canada. The formation of the Joint Rules Committee on Softball in nineteen thirty-four standardized the rules and naming throughout the United States. 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 eighteen ninety-five, Rober transferred to another fire company and organized a team he called the Kittens.
George Kehoe, captain of Truck Company Number One, named Rober's version of softball "Kitten League Ball" in the summer of nineteen hundred. It was later shortened to "Kitten Ball."
The name softball didn't come about until nineteen twenty-six when Walter Hakanson, a Denver YMCA official and a former ASA president and commissioner, suggested it to the International Joint Rules Committee. Hakanson had come up with the name in nineteen twenty-six, but the committee didn't include the Amateur Softball Association until nineteen thirty-four. Efforts to organize softball on a national basis didn't materialize until nineteen thirty-three, 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 nineteen thirty-three World's Fair in Chicago. With the backing of the Chicago American newspaper, Pauley and Fischer invited fifty-five teams to participate in the tournament. Teams were divided into three classes - fastballers, slow pitch and women. A fourteen-inch ball was used during the single-elimination event. During the nineteen thirty-four National Recreation Congress, membership on the Joint Rules Committee was expanded to add the Amateur Softball Association. 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.
Development of Softball
Development of Softball
Nineteen thirty-three - Slow pitching was present in the World's Fair; the main course of action taken was to lengthen the pitching distance. Slow pitch achieved formal recognition in nineteen fifty-three when it was added to the program of the Amateur Softball Association, and within a decade had surpassed fast pitch in popularity.
Nineteen thirty-four - Amateur Softball Association was formed and gave stability to the name and rules of softball.
Nineteen forty - Fast pitching started to dominate the game.
Nineteen fifty-two - The first British women's softball league was established.
Nineteen fifty-two - The International Softball Federation held its first meeting, taking control of International Softball competition.
Nineteen ninety-one - Women's fast-pitch softball was selected to debut at the nineteen ninety-six Summer Olympics.
Two thousand two - Sixteen-inch slow pitch was written out of the ISF official rules, although it is still played extensively in the United States under The Amateur Softball Association of America, or ASA rules.
July two thousand five - Voted to drop softball and baseball as Olympic sports for the twenty twelve Summer Olympic Games.