For Chicago sports fans suffering through a pretty miserable January, baseball can’t come any sooner. But 120 years ago, this time of year was the height of the winter baseball season—indoor baseball, a game that once packed arenas across the city.
Indoor baseball spread throughout the country, but nowhere did it attract as passionate a following as it did in Chicago. A little more than four years after the first game played at the Farragut Club, a charity match at the Auditorium Theatre drew a crowd of 3,500. Athletic clubs, companies, military regiments, and semipro teams organized squads with names such as the Englewood Wheelmen, the Saint Patricks, the Rivals, the Ashlands, the Ravenwood Ravens, the Thistle Cyclists, the Fat Men, and the Jungbluts playing in field houses, ballrooms, armories, and theaters.
Thirty years after its invention, indoor baseball no longer had the kind of organizational force and evangelical fervor that could foster it as a spectator sport and help it compete against other wintertime diversions. Through the 20s, indoor baseball lost more ground to basketball, long a rival for players and playing space. In 1939, Cleveland Indian legend Tris Speaker inaugurated the National Indoor Baseball League. It went bust after a month.
