Baseball
The story of the development of baseball among Cook County schools was similar to that of football. There were several baseball leagues that were formed in the 1880s, but none of them lasted. In May and June 1889, however, there was a plethora of games reported in the Chicago Tribune, involving North Division, West Division, Manual Training, Hyde Park, and Northwest Division teams, but no league was evident. There is firm evidence of an organized league in 1890. Evanston, Englewood, Hyde Park, South Division, West Division, Manual Training, and Harvard met on February 7 and formed a conference. The person credited as being most instrumental in launching of the baseball league was Christian Miller, principal and baseball coach at Evanston High. He was an early advocate of athletic competition for schoolboys, and during the 1880s wrote such advocacy pieces for the education journals of the day. Evanston was the league champion and dominated the first several years of competition.
Read more about this topic: Cook County High School League
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“When Dad can’t get the diaper on straight, we laugh at him as though he were trying to walk around in high-heel shoes. Do we ever assist him by pointing out that all you have to do is lay out the diaper like a baseball diamond, put the kid’s butt on the pitcher’s mound, bring home plate up, then fasten the tapes at first and third base?”
—Michael K. Meyerhoff (20th century)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)