Near the top of the episode, I mention the 1949 shooting of ballplayer Eddie Waitkus that helped inspire The Natural. Here’s more from the Chicago History Museum.

The rest of the episode’s first act focuses on slow-pitch softball, whose popularity contributed to the decline of men’s fastpitch and thus the decoupling of men’s and women’s fastpitch softball.

A few things to read there:

• This 1997 Los Angeles Times article about Tony Merola, an inventor whose work in the 1960s helped usher in the “science bat” era.

• This New Republic article by Erica Westly (whose book about fastpitch softball history I recommended in the last Behind the Episode post), discusses the rise of slowpitch and how it affects perceptions of fastpitch.

• Slowpitch softball also has a strong connection to today’s youth travel baseball culture. USSSA, the organization that maintains the leading certification for bats used on the youth travel baseball circuit, was founded as the United States Slow-pitch Softball Association. The acronym now stands for the United States Specialty Sports Association. In the episode I talk about the allure of hitting the ball extra far using a “science bat,” and the modern USSSA standard extends that legacy by allowing for greater performance than the more conservative USA bat standard favored by Little League.

For more on 16-inch softball, check out its Hall of Fame.

I pulled stats on high school sports participation from the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations—especially their archive. (Among the interesting nuggets buried there: In the late 1990s, more than 30,000 girls played on high-school slowpitch teams. That’s tiny compared to fastpitch participation (more than 300K during the same era) but a much larger school-based footprint for slowpitch than exists today.

Here’s a bit more detail on the court case mentioned by scholar Victoria Jackson.

This episode also highlights the contributions of Team USA’s gold medal-winning 1996 Olympic softball team to the sport’s growth. Here’s a complete telecast of the final game.

In passing, I mentioned the women’s pro softball league from the 1970s, called the International Women’s Professional Softball Association. One of the founders was Dennis Murphy, who led several upstart sports leagues of that era, including the American Basketball Association, which eventually merged with the NBA, and the World Hockey Association, which merged with the NHL. Murphy also helped produce Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match against Bobby Riggs. I read Murphy’s autobiography, searching for details about the softball league, but this is all Murphy had to say: “The Women’s Professional Softball League was very competitive — but the timing was wrong. Many fans did love the sport, however, and I hope someday it will achieve great success.”