Indoor Baseball

In the early 1900's many a U. S. citizen played baseball on a gymnasium floor during the shut-in winter months. The game they played was like outdoor baseball except that the diamond was smaller, the pitcher pitched underhand, the ball was bigger and softer.

Around 1910--when basketball began to bounce baseball out of the gymnasium--the Playground Society of America hauled indoor baseball outdoors as a good game for kids, added a tenth player (a rover). During the Depression, the U. S. army of unemployed, invading the nation's public parks, played playground ball (or kitten-ball, mushball, diamond ball--depending on the locality). As they dribbled back to work, they took their new pastime with them. Commercially sponsored teams popped up everywhere. Playground ball, renamed softball, became the No. 1 after-work diversion (as player or spectator) for U. S. office and factory workers. Last summer more than 300,000 clubs and 4,000,000 players were organized in the Amateur Softball Association of America.

Last week softball (minus its rover) was brought back indoors, stripped of its aliases and launched as a big-time winter sport. Patterned after major-league baseball's setup, the National Professional Indoor Baseball League sold franchises to New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis. Each club, locally financed, is to play a 102-game schedule from mid-November to mid-March, with a World Series at season's end between Eastern and Western champions.

Though big names are notably absent from the roster of players (most of whom are drawn from the 10,000,000 sandlot baseballers and softballers in the U. S.), many a onetime star has turned promoter of indoor baseball. President of the league (at $7,500 a year) is 51-year-old Tris Speaker, Cleveland's baseball Immortal who has spent the past nine years as a radio sportcaster, Hollywood actor, minor-league club owner, wholesale liquor dealer and steel salesman. Managing the Cleveland club is another onetime Indian, baldpate Bill Wambsganss, only baseballer ever to make an unassisted triple play in a World Series (against the Dodgers in 1920).*

To manage its team, Philadelphia dug up Harry Davis, onetime captain of the Philadelphia Athletics. Cincinnati got Bubbles Hargrave, National League batting champion in 1926. New York has Moose McCormick, old Giant pinch hitter, and Chicago has Brick Owens, longtime American League umpire. Most famed of the circuit's managers is St. Louis' peppery Gabby Street, the Old Sarge who won two pennants and a World Series for the St. Louis Cardinals

* There were men on first and second. Second-Baseman Wambsganss caught a line drive, stepped on second base for his second out, then tagged the runner racing from first.

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