CHICAGO — Grant Park was born with the rather dull name of Lake Park and is informally called Chicago’s “front yard.” But by any name, there’s not a finer urban park around and it has been the site of many joys, triumphs and troubles.
On the dark side, I can see the massive mess and violent melee that took place there during the 1968 Democratic convention.
On the sunny side, I give you 16-inch softball, which is played with bats and Clincher softballs and has been a summer joy for so many players and fans in the park for nearly a century.
In the dark depths of late February, Don DeBat read a disturbing and well-reported story by Melody Mercado in Block Club Chicago. It began, “Softball leagues are being ousted from Grant Park this summer due to the city’s NASCAR deal and other big-ticket festivals like Lollapalooza, frustrating longtime players.”
DeBat is the definition of a “longtime player” and he has the injuries to prove it, among them “four broken fingers and a broken thumb, a torn medial collateral ligament in my left knee.” Though those troubles and recent knee replacement operations (yes, both knees) have effectively ended his playing days, this article enraged him. Once a softball player …
And so he responded the best way he knew how: He wrote about it, using his platform as the regular weekly columnist for Inside Publications/North Loop News. Usually devoted to real estate matters, his column was about softball, starting with, “NASCAR, the redneck racing sport, apparently has driven Chicago’s beloved game — 16-inch softball — out of Grant Park.”
In the column, DeBat detailed his frustration trying to get answers from the Chicago Park District — “I was put on hold, then switched to various extensions for 33 minutes while listening to cheerful Muzak” — and how he and others from the softball world (media, league organizers, players) started to apply pressure.
This evoked an earlier skirmish from 1977, when the Park District announced that it was allowing players to use gloves in the Grant Park League.
Mike Royko, then a columnist for the Chicago Daily News and a passionate 16-inch player and team captain, was so enraged that he sued the city, arguing that this rule change had taken place after he had paid the $240 membership fee for his team to play in the league, and that it would be impossible to withdraw and find a league “in which men played like men.”
He wrote that this new rule “runs contrary to the spirit of 16-inch softball and unfairly penalizes those with talent and hands with calluses and gives an unfair advantage to those with tender and well-manicured hands.”
As DeBat relates, Royko was aided by “Bernie Neistein, an old West Side ward boss and 16-inch player, who told the judge, ‘Gloves? The only time anybody on our team ever wore any kind of gloves was when they didn’t want to leave fingerprints.’”
The judge ruled in favor of Royko.
DeBat and his fellow activists were successful too.
In a recent post, DeBat announced the 2023 softball season had been “rescued” and, though with some sorry restrictions, Clinchers will again fly.
“Mike would have enjoyed this tussle and he would have loved that after he died, the Park District created the Mike Royko Softball Tournament, part of the Grant Park scene for more than a decade,” said DeBat. “He was a softball nut but he was also a very good player and he put together very good teams.”
DeBat, formerly an editor for the Daily News and Sun-Times, was on Royko’s Daily News/Sun-Times teams. He and that team have been inducted into the 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame. Royko’s in too.
“Mike was a big part of my life and will be will be a big part of my book,” said DeBat, who is working on a history for the sport, tentatively titled “Chicago’s Game.”
The sport was born here on Thanksgiving Day in 1887. Twenty men were at the Farragut Boat Club on the South Side, receiving telegraphed reports of the football game between Harvard and Yale. After the game, they started banging around a boxing glove with a broomstick. The sport of softball was, after a few tweaks, created.
The game caught on and games were held in many indoor spaces. By the 1920s, it moved outdoors, proving perfect to be played in alleys, compact gravel schoolyards and parks across the city and suburbs. Some heretics played 12-inch softball but by the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of paying customers turned out each year to watch 16-inch games played by the teams of the Windy City League.
There are some who will tell you that the game has lost its popularity, but travel around this spring and summer and you will be convinced that the game remains healthy. DeBat estimates that 100,000 people regularly play, and many more watch.
You will see some of the reasons why, see the ad exec playing on the same team as a baggage handler; a cop playing on the same team as a lawyer, an actor on the same team as a dentist. You will see games played by all genders, races, ages, professions, religions, incomes … 16-inch levels life’s playing field.
DeBat has been understandably emboldened by this “victory,” and devoted his next column to detailing his plan for “the upgrading and transforming” of the park’s diamonds. Among his ideas is to rescue a monument that once sat near the site of the boat club where the game was born. “It’s now in storage at the Chicago Monuments Project warehouse,” he says. “It deserves to be outdoors.”
Another of his proposals is to have the transformed softball diamonds be formally named “Mike Royko Field.”
Works for me, as it does for Royko’s wife Judy, who told me, “Out of all the ideas I have heard over the years from people about ways they think Mike should be honored, this is the best. Softball brought him such joy, made him so happy. This idea of Don’s brings me joy too.”
Royko died in April 1997. That’s a long time ago but he is very much “alive” in a stunning 10-minute video shot by the late Scott Jacobs. It shows Royko at the Billy Goat Tavern (long the sponsor of his teams) following a game and charmingly explaining his love of the sport.
Seeing that always reminds me of the 1975 WTTW-Ch. 11 broadcasts of a series of 16-inch softball games at Soldier Field. Royko was in the booth along with sportscaster Tim Weigel (another Royko team member) and announcer Marty Robinson.
As a player stepped to the plate, Robinson said, “In real life, he’s a fireman.”
Royko turned to him and said, “This is real life.”
