The List: Class of 1876, 1/1: Louis F Wadsworth

Louis Fenn Wadsworth (1825-1908), Builder
Eligible: 1875
Contributions: Member of the Gotham and Knickerbocker Clubs, helped format rules and playing field, and largely responsible for the effort to cement both the number of players and innings at nine.

Louis Wadsworth was not a founding member of either the Gotham or Knickerbocker clubs, and has no real ties to the very founding of baseball. He wasn't a booster like Henry Chadwick or an organizer like Doc Adams or Alexander Cartwright. However, Wadsworth made one of the sport's great contributions when he fought for it's foundational rule (the rule of 9) at the inaugural meeting of the NABBP. He was also perhaps its finest player in the 1850s, and John Thorn believes he may have been its first professional player. Let's find out about the man.

Louis Fenn Wadsworth was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1825. He graduated from Washington College in 1844, weighing careers in law and the military. He was denied entry to West Point in 1845, then moved to Michigan, where his father Amos had accumulated a large estate in the Western Reserve boom. We don't know what he did there, but he returned to New York in 1848 to pursue law, and this is where he enters our story.

In the early 1850s, while working as an attorney at the Customs House in Manhattan he became involved in local politics, supporting the Whig Party. Atlantics Base Ball Club president Thomas Tassie recalled him as a 'gentleman and a scholar.' But he is remembered primarily because at that time, in the early 1850s, Louis Wadsworth took up bat and ball for the Gotham Club and became a sensation.

Wadsworth was likely a capable batter but it should be noted that at the time of its inception and into the 1860s baseball was a game of fielding - pitchers offered hittable pitches, and batters put the ball in play so that they could run and fielders could try to put them out. In this context, the best players were the best fielders, and Wadsworth is remembered as the best first baseman, and perhaps the best fielder in New York in the 1850s. One Knickerbocker remembered:

I had almost forgotten the most important man on the club and that was Lew Wadsworth. He was the life of the club. Part of his club suit consisted of a white shirt on the back of which was stamped a black devil... but few balls passed him. 

By 1854 the Knickerbockers had lured Wadsworth from the Gotham club for "emoluments" which might have been direct pay but may also have been a well-paying nothing job with somebody's company that allowed him to focus on ball. John Thorn suggests that this may make Wadsworth the first professional ballplayer. Wadsworth would resign from the Knickerbockers three times and end up back with the Gotham, suggesting that his skills were highly sought after.

Wadsworth would not leave the Knicks until his greatest contribution to the sport was achieved. In 1856 Wadsworth and Doc Adams moved that the Knicks allow non-members to scrimmage with the club if less than 18 members showed up to practice. Duncan F Curry and his supporters responded that the game could be played with as few as 14 if necessary - seven players a side. The Knicks (who basically set the rules for all of New York baseball) settled on seven players a side until the 1857 meeting of representatives of sixteen of the major New York clubs, at which Wadsworth rallied the support of the other clubs to overthrow Curry and his team, re-establishing the number of players per side at nine and the number of innings at nine. The framework of modern baseball was established, and it was Wadsworth's persistence that got it there. No less of an authority than Henry Chadwick claimed that baseball was not born in 1840 or 1845, but in 1857.

Figures from baseball history including Tassie and pioneering sportswriters William Rankin and William Cauldwell had conspired in the late 19th century to further the narrative that around the time of joining the Knicks (sometime in 1853 or 1854), Wadsworth produced a diagram of a baseball diamond with the modern dimensions, but much of baseball history contradicts this, as different diagrams existed as early as the later 1830s, and many of the distances and scales were created apart from Wadsworth by earlier Knickerbockers like William R Wheaton and Adams.

We do know that Wadsworth produced more ink than any baseball player of the 1850s - LF Wadsworth was mentioned in almost any game recap in which he participated, and even his 'revolutions' (club-jumping) were reported. In 1858 Porter's Spirit, Wadsworth was back with the Gotham 'through some misunderstanding.' He started two of the three legendary Fashion Course games for New York against Brooklyn in a sort of proto-all-star set in 1858.

Wadsworth left baseball in 1862, married into money and moved to New Jersey to serve as a judge. His wife passed away in 1883 and Wadsworth became a heavy drinker, admitting himself to the almshouse in 1898. He spent a decade there, allegedly reading furiously, following baseball avidly, and never entertaining a single visitor. Nobody around him knew he was the famous New York baseball player from 60 years previous, and when AG Mills went looking for Wadsworth in 1907, on the advice of Rankin, Cauldwell, Tassie, and Curry, nobody could be found who knew where -- or who -- he was. He was assumed lost or dead, and Wadsworth passed away in December 1907, just days after Mills's commission published its report naming Abner Doubleday as the father of baseball.