Every summer they band together and take over the city with a vengeance.
Proudly bearing their ”colors” and names like the Warriors, the Enforcers, the Bombers and El Dwarfs, they chase little kids from parks, terrorize the freeways and try to slaughter anyone who invades their home turf. The casualties also include broken marriages, lost jobs and neglected children, because, once hooked, the victim`s only obsession is ”to score.”
We`re talking about softball players–those who play the game Chicago-style with a 16-inch ball and a passion inbred and indigenous only to this city.
Although it`s been through a few changes over the years, the game remains the city`s favorite participatory sport, with hundreds of teams, thousands of players and a corner on the 16-inch Clincher softball market.
The rest of the world may think a softball is a 12-inch sphere, but Chicago knows better. The city and suburbs account for 85 percent of nationwide sales of the oversized balls, says Bob Campbell of DeBeer & Sons of Albany, N.Y., manufacturer of Clincher softballs. And that`s ”thousands and thousands of balls.”
The Clincher–with its inside stitches that won`t split on asphalt or cinder playgrounds–and the game were both developed for life in a crowded, blue-collar city.
The rituals have evolved during almost a century–including getting together at a sponsoring pub, or merely the nearest one, after just about every softball game. ”It`s not the softball, it`s the drinking afterwards that causes all the divorces,” said one uniformed softball player in the Billy Goat tavern after a recent Grant Park game.
Kitten ball
Though there are many stories of how the sport got its start, the most popular tale dates back to an 1887 Thanksgiving Day ruckus between Harvard and Yale fans at Chicago`s Farragut Boat Club. While awaiting results from their schools` afternoon game in New York, someone threw a boxing glove at someone else, who hit the glove with a broom. Chicago Board of Trade reporter George Hancock turned the incident into a sporting contest by lacing up the glove, drawing out a base path and overseeing the first game of what went on to be called (among other things) indoor ball, diamond ball, kitten ball, pumpkin ball and finally softball.
The game was standardized in 1933 by the Amateur Softball Association
(ASA), which evolved out of a committee that officiated a national softball tournament that drew 70,000 people during the city`s Century of Progress Exposition. The tournament was so popular that it was held every year at Soldier Field until it was wiped out by World War II.
The ASA, headquartered in Oklahoma City, remains softball`s largest national sanctioning body, but it has splintered into administering the several types of softball, including fast-pitch 12-inch. Five years ago the U.S. Slow-pitch Softball Association (the USSSA, pronounced ”U-triple-S-A”) was formed to promote a strictly slow-pitch ball game.
As there are several types of games, there also are several types of Chicago players. There are the men and women who show up once or twice a week to play ball in a Park District or ”industrial” league–the largest being Grant Park`s. The Grant Park battle lines are drawn by 205 teams, from the Wednesday night lawyers` league (infamous for filing ”briefs” with the umpires over disputes) to the Chicago Police and Fire Department leagues that take to the diamonds in the early-morning hours.
And then there are the picnic players, the spontaneous sandlot scruffers and the serious competitive players, like John West, who require the energy of a 12-year-old, the devotion of a monk and a car that could run at Indy.
On Thursday nights it`s not unusual for West to drive from his teaching job at the Hyde Park Career Academy to a game in Evanston. Then it`s all the way south again to Blue Island for a game with the Hard Core, a team that plays tournament-level 16-inch. On other weeknights you can catch him in Lincoln Park, playing with a neighborhood tavern league. Sundays? West heads for the South Side`s Avalon Park to play with the Hard Cores in the all-black South Side Cocktail League.
There on a recent Sunday the pitcher on West`s opposing team played the entire game with two broken fingers. ”This is how you`re supposed to play softball,” said Sherman Nelson, holding up his taped hands. At 50, Nelson still plays for the Hard Cores and the First National Bank of Chicago`s Grant Park team.
A fever pitch
Broken fingers and jammed knuckles, considered de rigueur in Chicago softball, are only part of the game`s fever pitch.
Just ask Tim Weigel, sportscaster for WLS-TV/Ch. 7.
”I used to do my newscasts with my uniform on under my suit,” says Weigel. ”Then I would race out of the newsroom to the game. I even started doing broadcasts from the softball field, and that`s when it really started getting crazy, because I would have to justify getting a crew out there. After a while it became a question of softball or my career.”
So Weigel quit the league and now fits in games when he can. But for others, the choice between a job and the game is no contest.
A few of the really top-flight competitive players can even support themselves playing the game, thanks to discreet but generous sponsors.
But that`s nothing compared with the flush days of the Windy City League. Sixty-eight-year-old Chicago softball pitching legend Lewa Yacilla is full of stories about those Depression-era games that, besides providing entertainment for thousands of fans, also supplied jobs for players on company teams. Word was that bookies saw plenty of action in those days, too, and team side bets were said to run up to $10,000.
The Windy City League was disbanded in 1949, but the ”George Steinbrenner-like” tactics of its managers inspired insurance salesman Eddie Zolna to form the legendary Bobcats in 1951, when the best teams were found at Kelly Park on the South Side and Clarendon Park on the North. The Bobcats dominated the sport for nearly two decades, winning its first national ASA tournament in 1964 and then taking 11 of the next 15.
Also legendary during the Bobcats` era was the very vocal Media League, which had some of the city`s best newsmen toughing it out on the softball field as well as contributing to the game`s monthly magazine–”The Windy City Softball.”
Tom Bonen, one of the magazine`s editors, became so enthusiastic about Chicago softball that in 1976 he began construction of a new softball complex in Blue Island so there would be ”a centralized stadium where all the best teams could play.”
It seemed as if softball was on a roll.
And then came the gloves.
Putting the mitts on
No one had really paid much attention when the ASA made them optional for tournament play in 1971. But when out-of-state teams showed up with their huge mitts, the Chicago teams just shrugged–and still came up the barehanded victors.
No one also seemed to notice that the base paths had been lengthened or that the bats had become regulated to resemble hardball bats.
But when the oversized gloves began showing up on Chicago diamonds, that unleashed a battle that still rages today.
Tribune columnist Mike Royko, then laboring in a different vineyard, even went so far as to file a suit trying to ban the gloves.
But the legal fight was short-lived, Bonen`s stadium plans fell through, Zolna tried unsuccessfully to organize the Bobcats into a professional 12-inch team and the city`s best players starting traveling to the suburbs to play 16- inch softball with gloves.
On Monday and Wednesday nights you can find them north in Mt. Prospect, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays they head south for Blue Island.
There are a few purists left.
They still play a mean game of barehanded 16-inch at the Northwest Side`s Portage Park. And ”Big Guy” Tim Maher, host of WBEE`s softball-filled ”Big Guy Radio Show,” which airs from 5 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday (1570 AM), has begun a campaign to keep the city game alive on the South Side by putting together a sixth team that was needed to revive Kelly Park`s ”A” League.
Among the players Maher recruited was former Bobcats pitcher Mike Tallo, 41, who is still considered the game`s best man on the rubber and in other places plays barehanded for the Hilton team in Grant Park and with a glove for the Stompers in Mt. Prospect.
But Tallo also remains a purist at heart.
”This,” he says, waving a glove in disgust after coming off the mound from a game in Mt. Prospect. ”This is not Chicago softball. If they want to have tournaments and let outsiders in, well, fine. But let them come and play our game–our way. But they`re not using the gloves just because of the tournaments–players today just can`t catch the ball. Softball is supposed to be some big, macho game, but do you see all these guys with these gloves? And now look at that.” Tallo points to the next field over, where two women`s teams in makeshift uniforms were battling it out–barehanded.
”That`s Chicago softball.” —
