A pickoff play from the Japan-Australia semifinal game at Sydney 2000.
Softball was initially conceived as an indoor game in 1887. A gentleman named George Hancock, an employee at the Chicago Board of Trade, wanted to play some baseball during the cold Windy City winter; he started a pick-up ballgame in a boat club with a boxing glove and a broom, and a sport was born.
That much excitement can't be kept inside, however. The safer alternative to the flying hardball game of American rounders caught on quickly, known as Big Ball, Diamond Ball or Kitten Ball depending on where you were from. Nearly a half-century after its inception, the game was organized as "softball" under an American Softball Association, and a first national tournament occurred at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair,. It drew over a quarter-million spectators, many of whom took the game back to their backyards and started playing themselves.
Thanks in part to the World's Fair, softball emerged as a sport in Australia six years later. Within a decade the fast-pitch variety was a popular sport with women in the land Down Under. The Aussies, very familiar with cricket at that time, were fascinated with defense-oriented ball sports, packing the stadium at Melbourne 1956 for a baseball demonstration. When the first women's softball world championships were organized, Australia beat the U.S. 1-0, and a rivalry was born.
Softball has a lot of similarities to its parent sport, baseball, in that there are nine players to a side and the field, while approximately one-third smaller, has the same layout.
Key differences abound, though. A softball is larger and lighter than a baseball, and is pitched underhand instead of overhand; baseball is played in nine innings, and softball has seven.
Softball was considered as a demonstration sport for Seoul 1988 and Barcelona 1992, but local sports were chosen instead. At Atlanta in 1996, in the game's country of origin, softball became an Olympic sport. The IOC added it to the program in 1991, joining baseball, which would make its debut the following year.
Almost as soon as it was added to the Olympics, forces within the IOC began pushing for its removal. Jacques Rogge, who joined the IOC in 1991 and became its president in 2001, repeatedly spoke out against baseball and softball, claiming the sports lacked "universal appeal." He held an unprecedented secret-ballot vote in 2005 in which every sport was up for elimination. When the results were revealed, baseball and softball had been eliminated as of the 2012 Games, the first sports cut since polo in 1936.
While many in the United States felt that the ousters were aimed specifically at them, the reasons for softball and baseball's exclusion are twofold. First, the game itself is not an intuitive one -- in the majority of the world's ball sports, the object is to propel the ball past the opposition to score points, while softball and baseball (and, by extension, cricket) amount to high speed games of defensive keep-away. The second (and related) reason is that only 10 of the current 114-person IOC membership hail from nations that have medalled in either sport -- that fact alone will likely keep both off the menu when the IOC votes on new additions to the lineup in 2009.
Indeed, Olympic exposure has not helped the sport develop and flourish around the world; the power structure is stagnant, with no new nations rising. At each of the three Olympic softball tournaments so far, the top four teams have been the United States, Japan, China and Australia. All other nations are a combined 21-63 at the Games, and none have had a positive scoring balance at the Olympics. And the gap seems to be widening: at Athens 2004, the bottom four teams scored 23 total runs against 76 allowed.
In its uphill efforts to get the sport back on the menu for 2016, the International Softball Federation has put together a website called Back Softball. The ISF has a 10-point blueprint for reinstatement (PDF).
Softball Fun Facts:
- In the 1996 gold medal game against China, U.S. shortstop Dot Richardson hit a two-run home run that appeared to have flown outside the right-field foul pole, and ended up being the winning shot in a 3-1 win. The Chinese team, and later the Chinese media, protested loudly, but TV replays clearly showed the ball was fair.
- The 2000 U.S. team won gold through the Page playoff system, in which the top two teams and Nos. 3 and 4 face off in the first playoff round. The winner of the 1-2 game makes the final, while the loser goes to a single semifinal to face the winner of the 3-4 game. The winner of the semi goes on to play for the championship, so it's possible for Nos. 1 and 2 to meet twice. The Americans came from the No. 4 seed to beat Nos. 3, 2 and 1 in succession.
- There's dominance, and there's dominance. The 1956 U.S. men's basketball team scored twice as many points as its opposition during the Games (something the 1992 "Dream Team" didn't manage), and the Indian hockey team scored 38 times without yielding a single goal the same year. That's the kind of italicized thumping that the 2004 U.S. team was involved in. In their nine games, the Americans scored 51 runs and yielded a single one, in the gold medal game against Australia.
- Women don't get to have all the softball fun! Men's softball is played around the world too. At the 2007 World Cup in Prague, Japan beat the U.S. in the championship game, 2-0.
In 2008:
Softball will take place from August 12-21 (Days 4-13) at Fengtai Softball Field. Eight teams will compete for softball gold. China, as the host nation, gets an automatic berth, while Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States qualified at the 2006 World Championships. Chinese Taipei won the Asia and Oceania qualifying tournament, and Venezuela got in through the Pan-American qualifier. The Netherlands won the 2007 Eurafrica regional tournament.
Six of the national teams from the 2004 Games will return. Greece, which went 2-5 in Athens as hosts, finished fourth in the Eurafrica qualifier last year. Italy lost a heartbreaker in the final of that event to a very happy team from the Netherlands.
The first seven days are preliminary matches, with every team playing each other once. The top four survive to the playoff rounds, which will once again use the Page system.
All-Time Medal Standings:
| Nation | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
(Image via 2000 Official Report)
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