Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity

6. Chicago's Game

6. Chicago’s Game ChriStopher laMberti Some of my earliest memories are of my father playing softball. He manned third base, the hot corner, for a local team in a sixteen-inch ball, no-gloves league. The son of Italian immigrants, my father grew up in a working-class suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. When I was a boy, my grandfather’s hands were hardened and calloused from working as a carpenter and maintenance man. My father, a college graduate, sold paper binding and laminate machines . His hands were gnarled from softball; a few of his fingers meandered off at awkward angles past their last joints. Along with hundreds of thousands of others in and around Chicago, my father played softball in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the popularity of sixteen-inch, no-gloves reached new heights. At the time, playing softball in Chicago was explicitly about recreation and friendship. Softball strengthened players’ and fans’ bonds to communities they imagined themselves part of, even if the game failed to bring racially segregated communities together. Softball, some players said, reinforced a “Chicago feeling.”1 But implicitly, Chicago’s game was also about class and gender. Although entire communities rallied around their teams, softball in Chicago was a sport dominated by men. Playing and celebrating the sport helped men retain a macho, urban, blue-collar identity in the midst of a dynamically changing city. Some players say that the sport harkened back to a time when men could not afford gloves; twisted fingers reminded middle-class professionals of their family ties to a working-class and immigrant past. Chicagoans still play sixteen-inch softball, but the sport’s heyday was the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, years when, for better or worse, “the City that Works” increasingly did so in white collars rather than blue ones. 94 ChriStopher laMberti Virtually unknown outside the city’s greater metropolitan area, Chicago -style softball is played with a larger, softer ball called the “Clincher” fielded by ten position players (the tenth usually stationed behind second base) with their bare hands. Fielding the batted softball is difficult and sometimes painful, and hitting requires an emphasis on placement over power. Chicagoans originally played softball on a smaller field, with the bases forty-five feet apart. Baselines eventually expanded to sixty feet, but outfields remain confined in comparison to softball parks outside the city. Over the years, Chicago softball officials have taken measures to contain the game in smaller fields, including limiting the weight of bats and injecting softballs with water. Pitchers rely on angles, rotation, and trajectory to prevent hitters from getting the good part of the bat on the ball. They move several paces off the mound, often hesitate with a pump of the pitching arm before delivering slow, high-arcing tosses to the batter at home plate. At first glance, Chicago softball might be misconstrued as absurd; a group of large men on a miniature baseball field knocking around a ball the size of a melon. But this game is extremely difficult to master, and when played at a high level, it requires technique, cunning, and courage. At all levels, Chicago-style softball is enjoyable, demanding, competitive, and, above all, an important part of the city’s heritage.2 Softball’s past is part history, part folklore. One of the game’s creation myths begins in a gymnasium at Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club on Thanksgiving Day 1887, when a group of Ivy League alumni gathered around the tickertape machine awaiting the results of the Harvard-Yale football game. At one point, a member of the crowd hurled a boxing glove toward another, who returned the piece of equipment with a swat of a broomstick. The men wrapped the glove in tape and made a game of it. “Indoors baseball” was born. Some softball historians credit Chicago football greats George Halas and Paddy Driscoll with popularizing the game outdoors. Fast pitch and slow pitch softball contests, both played with a fourteen-inch ball, were featured with great fanfare at the city’s Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933. The exhibition was such a success that teams were invited back to play a tournament the following year at Soldier Field. The event was held there annually until 1939, by which time softball had caught on and became one of the most popular sports in Chicago to watch and play.3 But most stories about the game’s origins do not mention tricked...