THE RULES AND SHORT HISTORY OF SOFTBALL

Softball was created inside the Farragut Boat Club on a wintry, blustery day in November, 1887, in Chicago, IL. A group of Harvard and Yale alumni anxiously awaited the results of the Yale-Harvard football game, and when the news came through that Yale had defeated Harvard, 17-8, one Yale supporter, overcome with emotion, picked up an discarded 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. Using what was available, he tied together the laces of the boxing glove for a ball. Hancock marked off a home plate, bases and a pitcher's box inside the Farragut Boat Club gymnasium and then divided the 2 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 forty million people play it each summer, making softball the No. one team participant sport in the USA. Hancock's game eventually caught on in Chicago with the Farragut team challenging other gymnasiums to matches. 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 devised nineteen special rules to adapt the outdoor game to the indoor format, 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 ingenuity and efforts of Lewis Rober, a Minneapolis Fire Department lieutenant, who wanted a game to keep his firemen fit during their idle time.