Sport: Softball

Indoor baseball, according to legend, was invented by George Hancock who, one rainy afternoon at the old Farragut Boat Club in Chicago, started a game, using a broomstick for a bat, a boxing glove for a ball. That was in 1888. In the next 40 years, the game crept tentatively out of doors, developed a loose set of rules and modestly acquired a new name: "softball." Suddenly, in 1930, it became a U. S. mania.

There are now roughly 2,000,000 enthusiastic softball players in the U. S., more than 60,000 organized amateur teams, and...

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