The Laredo Times · New York, New York · 1939

Diamond Aces Aid Softball Cause

November 1939: at a hotel ballroom cocktail hour, Gabby Street, Tris Speaker and Bill Wambsganss launch the National Professional Indoor Baseball League. Indoor baseball, it was insisted, not softball, which the AP man rates like disguising pants by calling them trousers.

Whitney Martin of the Associated Press walked into a Manhattan hotel ballroom in November 1939 and found the old guard glowing: “It was a little disconcerting to listen to such hard-boiled old baseball men bubbling and singing like happy tea kettles over the merits of softball.”

The occasion: “the coming out party for the National Indoor Baseball League. Indoor baseball, it was insisted, not softball, although it seems like trying to disguise pants by calling them trousers.” The branding committee insisted for good reason, since the game had been called indoor base ball since armory days, but Martin was not wrong about the ball.

The guest list is the story. “There was Gabby Street, the old sarge whose face is wrinkled like a washboard and charred to a nut brown from years under a merciless sun of many a ball field. There was Tris Speaker, stocky, alert, and gray as dawn.” Harry Davis of Connie Mack’s $100,000 infield. Brick Owens “who has a hitch-hiker’s thumb from calling ‘em safe or out for years.” And Bill Wambsganss, “whom we remember as a loose-jointed, angular kid breaking in at Cedar Rapids, Ia., and who later turned in the only unassisted triple in a world series.”

The cocktail chatter, as Martin transcribed it: “Eight clubs… . Eastern and Western divisions… Profit not the immediate motive… . Every club backed soundly enough to carry through for at least two years… . Pay some players as high as $80 a week… . 40-foot pitching distance, must have more hitting … Assemble teams from best available material.” Speaker signed on as league president, a 17-week schedule was arranged, and the division winners would “meet in a world series.” Gabby Street, fresh from Joplin, gave the game its scouting report: “I tried to hit the ball. The catcher was throwing it back to the pitcher before I could get the bat around.”

This is a wire column that happened to land in Laredo, Texas, seventeen hundred miles from the ballroom, which is its own kind of testament. More on this league soon. It does not go the way the cocktail party promised.