Usually, there are three outfielders holding the positions of right fielder, left fielder, and center fielder. However, slow pitch softball allows for a fourth person in the outfield.
Similar to baseball, the team with the most runs at the end of the seventh inning is named the winner. However, if the teams are tied at the end of the seventh inning, the game can go into extra innings, until the tie is broken. Today, softball is one of the most popular sports in the country, and an estimated 40 million Americans engage in at least one softball game each year. Because it can be played on either a field or an indoor arena, softball games are played year round and involve teams with players as young as 8 years old and some players over 60 years in age.
Softball is sometimes played by corecreational leagues, where both women and men play on the same teams, but the rules are generally modified to reduce physical inequalities between the sexes. Often, companies and organizations form amateur coed teams to play for benefits and charity fund-raiser events. The history of softball is still unfolding, and the game has undergone numerous modifications since its creation in , but it is still one of the most preferred sports games in the country and has developed a following in several countries throughout the world, especially in Australia, China, and Japan.
Athletic Scholarships. In the spring, Hancock introduced the game to the outdoors, calling it "Indoor-Outdoor", and the sport was played on a smaller diamond than the traditional baseball fields. The new sport of "Indoor-Outdoor Baseball" had begun to spread and catch the attention of more Americans at the end of the 19th century, but it really took off when the Minneapolis Fire Department got ahold of the game.
Lewis Rober, a Minneapolis Fire Department lieutenant, wanted a way to keep his firemen fit during their off time, and so he introduced the sport to them. Rober tweaked the game in a few ways, making a field next to the fire station with a pitcher's mound 35 feet from home plate and using a small sized medicine ball to play with. The game was an instant hit, and overnight you had fire departments from all over the state joining the sport and competing with each other.
Rober moved to a new fire station in , and had named his team the "Kittens". In , however, a man named Walter Hankanson, a YMCA official in Denver, coined the term Softball and by that became the officially recognized name of the sport. Forming a nationwide union of teams proved difficult until the early s.
Efforts in the past to create an association struggled, but in a pair of men from Chicago, Leo Fischer and Michael J. Pauley, decided to host a massive softball tournament at the World's Fair in Chicago.
The game then adopted the name Softball by the s. Softball then grew a reputation across the United States and as a result of its growth in popularity it became a well-recognised sport across the world. Softball spread slowly to the rest of the world with, perhaps, it biggest push coming from American servicemen playing and teaching the game on the far-flung fields of World War II.
The movie, "A Touch of Class", was filmed in London and featured a softball game, which began to be played in England as a result. Softball consists of several disciplines: fast pitch, slow pitch, and modified fast pitch. Fast pitch allows two main underhand pitching deliveries; one that involves an entire revolution and the other where the pitchers arm comes back and then forward. Slow pitch requires the pitcher to lob the ball underhanded with an arc that reaches a minimum height of 1.
A modified fast pitch allows underhand deliveries but the arm must not make a complete revolution around the shoulder socket. Internationally, fast pitch is the dominant game. In the United States, slow pitch is played by millions of people in recreational leagues. Adult softball bats are used in all disciplines of the game. World championships in fast pitch softball were first held in for women and for men. Slow-pitch world championships began in , and the competition resumed in Florida USA in June of The first world competition for junior men and women was held in and a World Cup for age under girls began in The ISF now counts national federations as members.
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