Softballs' big Safety appeal

Monday, 27 September 2010 00:00

September 26, 1929. Few professional sports result in as many injured players as baseball. Thus the Fort William [Thunder Bay] Times Journal predicts a big future for softball, with its bigger, softer ball—and more people playing, instead of just watching in the stands.

Those who have seen the present bicycle develop recall how scornful those who rode the high wheels were of the cowards who refused to take the chance of pitching over the handlebars, but preferred to ride what was ignominiously termed a "safety" bicycle. They hardly guessed that a few years would make the high machine as dead as the extinct dodo.

Softball may not kill the other kind of baseball, but it has had the same effect as the safety bicycle, in that it has made everyone do it. Softball has had the merit of putting thousands right on to the diamond instead of having the same thousands sit on the bleachers or in the grandstand watch nine men go through the motions.

But the real graduation of softball has only taken place this year, when it became a sport, like all other sports, in which the old controversy about amateurism and professionalism raged. No one would have thought when the first softball games were played on corner lots, that the day would so soon arrive when softball leagues would really have to take under serious consideration the question of whether a softball player were an amateur or a professional. One would as soon have accused a sportsman of being a professional tiddlewinker as a professional at softball.