The List: Class of 1875, 1/1: Henry Chadwick

Henry Chadwick (1824-1908), Builder
Eligible: 1875
Contributions: Pioneer sportswriter and principal baseball booster for more than 50 years. Invented most of the game's principal scorekeeping methods and statistics, helped set several important rules as part of the NABBP's rules committee. Crucial historian and resource for the developing game.

Chadwick in middle age

So far in our young Hall of Fame we've inducted four men who weren't just pioneers of the sport; they were its inventors, its parents, and for decades, its stewards. The man we will induct here will be our first non-Knickerbocker, and while he was never known for even having played the game, and in no way participated in the Knicks' organization of the sport, he may have had a greater role than any Knickerbocker - indeed, perhaps more than any single person in baseball's storied history. Henry Chadwick was not one of the ephemeral figures rolling on the grass of Hoboken, New Jersey and playing a disputed-but-presumably-immense part in the drawing of the rules or the field of play for baseball, but it is almost impossible to have a single thought about the sport, still today, that was not influenced by Chadwick's touch. He died in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908, and was buried under a tombstone reading 'The Father of Baseball.' Unlike others who have laid claim to the title, none ever deserved it as did Chadwick.

Henry Chadwick was born in Exeter, England, in 1824, into a family of some standing: his grandfather Andrew Chadwick had been a close friend of theologian John Wesely, Henry's father tutored John Dalton in music and botany and published The Western Times, and Henry's older half-brother was Sir Edwin Chadwick, a significant social reformer in London. Henry relocated with his parents to Brooklyn at age 12, received a very good education, displayed real talent as a writer and a musician, taught piano and guitar, and married Jane Botts in 1848, aged 24. It is important to note that as a young English boy, Chadwick passed a great deal of time playing the ages-old ball game of rounders, a sort of baseball (Chadwick believed it to be the parent of the American game, but we'll get to that) that involved, loosely, a bat, ball, bases, fielding and scoring. When Chadwick moved to America, rounders was not so popular, but, as English boys were expected to do, his interest was shifting toward cricket by that time.

Like many young professionals in 1850s New York, Chadwick passed time and found his exercise by playing games in public spaces, namely cricket. As the Knickerbockers and other New York clubs were laying the foundations of organized baseball on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, Chadwick was a cricket reporter for the New York Times. In 1856 he found something that shocked him. Base ball was not new to him - he was aware of base ball since the 1840s and as a sports journalist, he was well aware of what was becoming the most popular sport in New York - but as he happened upon a spirited contest between the Eagle and Gotham clubs, he would later recount:

I watched it with deeper interest than any previous ball match between clubs that I had seen. It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans.

Chadwick, for whatever reason, was drawn to baseball immediately, believing that the vitality and 'manly' aspects of the game were a perfect embodiment for the scrappy young nation. The following season he left the Times and joined up with the New York Clipper as a full-time baseball reporter, writing for the Sunday Mercury as well shortly after.

In this role Chadwick not actually the first baseball reporter (a distinction owed to the Mercury's William Cauldwell), but certainly it's most celebrated. He was a huge booster for baseball, covering the game prodigiously and reporting previously untold details. Chadwick invented the modern boxscore and the idea of the beat reporter reporting from behind the scenes. Also as a sportswriter he invented the method of baseball scorekeeping that is not synonymous with the one thousands of people attempt at every baseball game, but very much the precursor for. Every time a fan hangs a 'K', we should remember Chadwick, who came up with the symbol.

As part of his reporting of game scores and performances, Chadwick also invented the statistics which would reign essential to baseball for the next 150 years: batting average, ERA, RBI, and more. The idea of scorekeeping, detailed records and individual statistics in sport can all be attributed to Henry Chadwick.

He was immediately prominent enough to be given a seat on the NABBP rules committee in the late 1850s, where he lobbied for the elimination of the bound rule (batters put out on a ball caught on a single bounce). Chadwick believed it made the game faster and more exciting, like cricket, and many baseball historians have attributed the game's rapid growth with the 1864 elimination of the rule. He lobbied for rules like the allowance of overhand pitching, and helped decide the distance of the pitcher's box.

By 1860 Chadwick was the lead writer and editor of The Beadle Dime Base Ball Player, the most popular baseball annual in the country, and in 1861 he began publishing season totals for major statistics for the most prominent clubs, the first statistical database for baseball.

An older Chadwick

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s Chadwick was the foremost promoter of the game, making it accessible through his compelling sportswriting and his clear statistical accounting. He very consciously curated the image of the sport, and helped promote it whenever he could. He organized a Silver Ball Match of Brooklyn and New York All-Stars in 1861. He accompanied the Washington Senators for their 1867 season tour as scorekeeper, and in 1874 organized a baseball-cricket exhibition tour of England. He railed against the role of alcohol and gambling in baseball, one of the first to champion a cause that would define the next 50 years of baseball history. By the mid-1870s he was calling himself the 'Father of Baseball.'

An aside: Though Chadwick liked the term, he was generally criticised for using it. In 1898 the New York Tribune relented and called Chadwick the 'Father of Baseball,' and Doc Adams, just four months from his own death, wrote to Chadwick with congratulations (John Thorn believes he was being facetious). Chadwick replied, giving baseball historians the famous line: "That title of 'Father of Base Ball' is out of place. Ball, like Topsy, "never had no fader"; it just growed."

Chadwick was the leading voice and conscience of baseball until 1875. He was a champion of the National Association (1871), but when William Hulbert left the NA to form the National League in 1875 with Harry Wright, perhaps the only man aside from Albert Spalding to challenge Chadwick's magnitude in the game, Chadwick found himself allied with the losing team. For the first time in 20 years, he was on the outside looking in.

Chadwick's 1938 Hall of Fame plaque

No longer a baseball insider or power player, Chadwick was still it's most respected voice, writing the essential guides for Beadles until 1881 and then the Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide until his death in 1908. He remained the game's most respected voice, fighting hard for the Mills Commission to recognize the English ball games like rounders as baseball's forefather (AG Mills famously ignored his correspondence and gave the praise to Civil War hero Abner Doubleday instead). Chadwick would quip: "Most Americans think Abner Doubleday invented the game but he had little or nothing to do with cricket."

Chadwick also attended every opening day from 1871 until 1908, in which year a string of cold, dreary New York opening day sets gave him a bout of pneumonia that put him down while he was trying to move furniture in his Brooklyn apartment. He never recovered and passed away on 20 April of that year. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1938.

Chadwick was a guiding force for the game's rules, ethics, and public representation for fifty years, and wielded real power as a member of the NABBP's rules committee for 20 of the most crucial years of baseball history. He literally invented the way the game is recorded, tracked, reported, and even considered, statistically, and he may still stand as the sport's most influential, prolific, and perhaps greatest journalist. He gave us more insight into the game's beginning and its flourishing than almost anyone else, and at the time of his death he was fighting tooth and nail to have that story told correctly (though Mills and Spalding would conspire to obfuscate that story for the next 70 years or so). Henry Chadwick had his hands on the reigns for baseball's entire childhood, and his impact is still felt every time you read about baseball, look at a batting average, or even consider that a professional player might be better or worse than another based on stats. He didn't birth the sport, but he gave us almost everything that makes the way we consume baseball what it is. Our experience of the game is his brainchild, and because of this, perhaps more than any other single person, baseball belongs to Henry Chadwick.