Early Baseball In Carmel

The game of softball was invented in 1888 in Chicago. In those days it was called "indoor baseball." It took the name "softball" in 1926, which is the approximate time that it became quite the thing to do in Carmel on a Sunday afternoon. Ever creative, ever ahead of their time, Carmelites formed the first softball league in the West, the Abalone League, honoring the famous mollusk. (Could this name be a precursor of another athletic mollusk, the banana slug of UC Santa Cruz?) Each team in the Abalone League was required to have at least one female member. Singing was part and parcel of the activity, with "The Abalone Song" wafting cheerily across Carmel Point.