The Leader · Brookhaven, Mississippi · 1904

Indoor Base Ball. Ladies Night.

Front page of the Brookhaven Leader, September 1904: Thursday night at 8:15 the two leading teams in the Indoor Base Ball League play for the Price Cup, McCormick against Gammon, and the ladies of the city are cordially invited to witness the game.

Baseball played indoors, at night, in September, in Mississippi, in 1904. The Brookhaven Leader put it on the front page: “Indoor Base Ball. Ladies Night. Thursday night at 8:15 the two leading teams in the Indoor Base Ball League playing for the Price Cup, McCormick and Gammon, will play.”

Indoor base ball had been invented seventeen years earlier in a Chicago boat club gymnasium, on a Thanksgiving afternoon in 1887, when a crowd waiting on telegraphed football scores tied a boxing glove into a ball, swatted it with a stick and chalked a diamond on the floor. The game that grew out of that afternoon used a big soft ball and a skinny bat on basepaths short enough to fit an armory, and it spread everywhere the outdoor game could not follow: indoors, after dark, through the winter. By the time Brookhaven’s league was chasing the Price Cup, there were indoor leagues coast to coast and Spalding had just started printing an official Indoor Base Ball Guide to keep up with them.

Brookhaven clearly had the fever in full: standings worth caring about, a trophy with a name, and a management that dressed the evening up accordingly. “Special arrangement has been made, and the ladies of the city are cordially invited to be present to witness the game.”

McCormick, Gammon and the Price Cup have one more distinction coming to them. Indoor base ball outgrew the gymnasiums, moved outdoors and kept its big soft ball, and in 1926 the game finally got the name it carries today: softball. Which means the two best teams in Brookhaven were playing softball for a cup twenty-two years before anybody had the word for it.