The List : Class of 1878, 1/2 : Albert G Spalding

Albert Goodwill Spalding (1849-1915), Player
Eligible: 1878
Achievements: Led the National Association in pitcher wins each year of its existence, and the NL in wins his one year playing for Chicago's NL team. Accumulated 252-65 record and 60 WAR in just six full years. Also posted a 116 OPS+ as a regular hitter. Also a pioneering manager and executive with Chicago, and one of baseball's most successful sporting goods makers. Helped William Hulbert found the NL in 1876.

 His is the face of a Greek hero, his manner that of an Anglican Bishop, and he is the father of the greatest sport the world has ever known. 
                 - New York Times, 1899

Simply, there is nobody more deserving than Al Spalding to be this Hall's first player inductee. He was likely the best pitcher of the amateur era, and wasn't just the best pitcher of the National Association (1871-1875), he was the greatest pitcher in each season of NA play. He was the best pitcher in the nascent National League before retiring young to be a championship manager, legendary executive and owner, run perhaps the greatest sporting goods company in American history, and rewrite (for better or worse) baseball's creation myth. Al Spalding is a titan of baseball history.

Spalding's appearance on the baseball world stage is a fantastic piece of baseball history, and also tells a bit about the transition from the early game we discussed in the inductions of 1871-1877, to the modern, professional sport we have come to know and love.

The year was 1867. The sport had grown from the handful of diasporadic 1840s clubs to the inaugural meeting of the National Assotiation of Base Ball Players in February, 1858 to, in 1867, more than 400 clubs ranging from the backwoods of Maine in the north to New Orleans in the south and San Francisco in the west. The Association was more of a loose collection than any official league - schedules were poorly coordinated and while some of the better clubs could claim to be champions, no such structure existed. Two things were important, though - the rules were codified, meaning everybody was playing the same game (as opposed to the 1830s and 40s when the sport was very different in New York versus Boston or Pennsylvania), and the Association clung fiercely to the idea of amateurism - professionalism was strictly outlawed, though most historians agree that players were likely being compensated under the table as early as the early 1850s. Still, the idea was amateurism and sport, though that was all soon to change.

The 1867 National Club of Washington is a fine example of this. The 1866 iteration had been a fine club, going 10-5, but the subsequent year club president (and future US Senator) Arthur Pue Gorman gave up his spot as the club's star shortstop to pursue a developing trend in Association baseball: discreet professionalism. The difference was, Gorman did it better than any team before. Using his connections within government to find pretend public-sector jobs for his new recruits, he stole the star players from New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Rochester clubs, including perhaps the amateur-era's best player in shortstop George Wright from the Gotham club of New York. Wright's place of employment was listed as 238 Pennsylvania Ave, a vacant lot. Declaring themselves the NA's best club, Gorman's Nationals announced a July-long national tour taking on all comers. While they would prove themselves to be the best team in the NA for 1867, they would shape the course of baseball history and in the process uncover a legend.

 Accompanying Wright and his fantastic Nationals was legendary baseball writer Henry Chadwick, invited along as team scorekeeper but serving as chief booster by reporting the team's exploits in The Ball Player's Chronicle while on tour. Their achievements were not few: in preparation for the tour they hosted Washington's five best clubs (including four venerable NA members in the Olympic, Jefferson, Union, and Continental), beating all five including a 91-8 destruction of a Department of the Interior club. Note that high scoring was indicative of the time - remember that at this time pitchers pitched to the batter and there were no gloves or manicured fields making errors commonplace. Fresh off their hometown massacre, the Nationals traveled to Columbus, Ohio to beat the city champion Capitol club, 90-10.

They then traveled to Cincinnati to take on Harry Wright (George's older brother, lured out of a retirement of cricketing and coaching, a former Knickerbocker and perhaps the best player of his time) and the Red Stockings, undefeated for two years and widely recognized as the best team in baseball. Cincinnati had nothing for the Nationals and were crushed, 53-10. So humiliated were the Reds that Harry Wright was instructed by his club president to throw off the veneer of amateurism and pursue professional players. The Reds were baseball's first openly professional club in 1869. But as the summer of 1867 played out the Nationals continued their tour, destroying the Buckeyes and then the city champions of Indianapolis, Louisville, and St. Louis. In the last two games alone they scored 219 runs. Untouchable, the Nationals rolled into Chicago to wind up their tour against two of the country's best clubs, the Atlantics and the Excelsiors (both named for the original Brooklyn clubs).

Before the marquee games against the Excelsiors and Atlantics, the Nationals arranged for a warmup match after many weeks on the road. The Excelsiors suggested the Rockford Forest City club, a middling squad who had given the Excelsiors a game match earlier that season (the Excelsiors had won). The Nationals brought them in to Chicago only to be upset 29-23 at the hands of a visibly-shaken rookie pitcher from the local squad. The baseball world cried foul, claiming the fix had been in to even betting odds before the main matches. The cries grew louder when Washington beat the actual competition the following day by a combined score of 127-21. What the critics couldn't have known at the time was that the nervous 16-year-old pitching for Rockford was already perhaps the best pitcher alive.

Spalding, tall and third from the right, with the Forest Citys

Albert Goodwill Spalding was born in Byron, Illinois, in 1849. He never held a noteworthy job because he was one of baseball's first born professionals - at 14 he was playing in men's amateur leagues, captaining his own Pioneer team, and at 15 had been invited to join the Forest Citys, with whom he became famous in 1867. Shortly after that legendary performance against the Nationals he took a position as a clerk for the Chicago Exelsiors, with the understanding that he was being paid to play baseball, though when the team's financial backer collapsed under the weight of paying enough $40-per-week clerks to fill a baseball team, Spalding returned to Rockford and played 1868-70 with his old teammates, gaining acclaim as the Association's best pitcher, and perhaps its best player.

In 1871 baseball changed tack again. While teams had been turning pro for two years, a number of key clubs from the National Association of Base Ball Players threw off the veneer of amateurism, breaking off to form the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP), while the remaining clubs formed the NAA(amateur)BBP. The NAPBBP would be history's first professional organised baseball league.

One such professional club was the Boston Red Stockings, founded in 1870 by the wealthy president of a net-weaving company, Ivers Whitney Adams. The Red Stockings got their name when Harry Wright (former manager of that Cincinnati club) was enticed to Boston by Adams. Wright also brought along his brother George, still baseball's best player, as well as his former nemeses Spalding and Ross Barnes, baseball's best second baseman, from Forest City, as well as young stars Charlie Gould and Cal McVey.

Baseball is a man-maker.

The NA had no answer for Spalding and the Red Stockings. In five years of NA play (1871-75) Boston took the first four pennants and finished second in '75. Spalding, sporting a strong fastball and change (then called a 'dew-drop') was far and away the Association's best player, going 204-53, leading the league in wins every year, FIP twice, and IP twice. His 2.21 ERA over that span was good enough for a 131 ERA+, but he managed to throw 2346.2 innings in the five years, leading baseball in WAR as well. He was simultaneously one of baseball's best hitters, hitting .323 with a 121 OPS+. By wRC, only four players created more offensive value in the NA (two of them, Barnes and Wright, his teammates). Spalding completed most of his 264 starts, but manager Harry Wright liked to surprise opponents by pulling the hard-throwing Spalding and putting himself in the game to throw soft breaking pitches.

Spalding, top, with his teammates on the legendary Red Stockings

1874 was a very important year for Spalding. Not only did he win 52 games and score 80 runs, more importantly, he opened a sporting goods store in Chicago with his brother, Walter. This was the foundation for an incredibly successful franchise that would make balls for professional baseball until the 1970s, invent the modern bat, and serve as America's most successful sporting goods company for the next 100 years, but it was also Spalding's introduction to business management, and what he found, to his surprise, was that he liked it. He liked it more than baseball - and while he was easily the best baseball player in the world, he may have been a better businessman.

A born leader, Spalding had organized and led a semi-pro team as a boy, and opened a booming business at 23. While his contemporaries were notorious drinkers and gamblers, Spalding rarely drank and kept well clear of the shadowy characters of baseball, which enamored him to Harry Wright and later William Hulbert. Wright, though, would select Spalding to lead a World Baseball Tour in 1874. Spalding left for England in January, organzed supporters for his planned exhibition trip, organized the first ever game of baseball in England on February 27, returned in March in time to lead his Boston club to another Pennant, then took the Red Stockings and the volunteering Philadelphia Athletics back to England in July for a string of exhibitions all over the British Isles, as well as some cricket matches against British clubs. The tour was mostly a failure - Brits were largely uninterested in the game, and the tour lost money on turnouts lower than expected, with no impact left behind. They returned to Philadelphia on September 9.

The tour is a good example of two things, however. Spalding's organizational and business acumen, and his distaste for the English. The latter was not rare at the time - in the 1870s the Revolution was less than a century old, and the British had just supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. Still, Spalding considered the British effete and the game of cricket 'genteel' compared to the rigorous, manly, and American game of baseball. Harry Wright saw both of these traits in Spalding, and chose him to head his grand tour of England, but both would be immensely important as Spalding's life and career progressed.

Spalding had one last trick on the diamond, however. During the days of the NA frequently breaching contracts or changing teams was common among players, referred to as 'revolving,' and one such instance involving Philadelphia infielder Davy Force would change baseball forever. Following the 1874 season Force managed to sign contracts with both Philadelphia and (his current club) Chicago. A panel of NA officials decreed the Chicago contract, which Force had signed first, would be honored. When a new president of the Association was elected later that winter, one hailing from Philadelphia, he awarded Force to Philadelphia. Chicago president William Hulbert, incised, pulled his White Stockings from the Association and started a new league, the National League.

The NL, which commenced play in 1876, insisted on higher membership fees and that schedules be honored (it was common for NA teams to stop playing either when eliminated from contention or once their home schedules were finished, leaving other clubs holding the bag for lost ticket revenue), and imposed harsher rules on player conduct. Hulbert inserted himself as League President but maintained his White Stocking club (today's Cubs) and immediately set his eyes on a powerhouse. He appealed to Spalding's Illinois roots and brought him and Ross Barnes back to Chicago. He also managed to poach Deacon White from Boston and Cap Anson from Philadelphia. The quartet represented most of baseball's best players, and went 52-14 en route to the inaugural NL Pennant.

Spalding, who went 47-12 with a 1.75 ERA in 1876, didn't just come to Chicago for money, though. In order to get him to move Hulbert had to promise him the manager's seat and give him a minority share in the team, as well as letting him help organize the NL and recruit players for it. Already, Spalding was showing an increased interest in the operations side, and he confirmed this when he gave up pitching in 1877. With side-arming becoming allowed, Spalding felt he could no longer serve as the game's dominant pitcher, and ceded pitching duties to the mediocre George Bradley, inserting himself as the regular first baseman. While he was always regarded as a superb hitter, Spalding had a rough year, hitting a career-worst .256 and hanging up his cleats for good. He threw 11 innings in 1877, but the team was a lacklustre 26-33 as the Boston Red Stockings reassembled their juggernaut. Spalding stepped off the field for good, as player and as manager, to focus on his booming business and running the White Stockings as secretary and right-hand-man to Hulbert.

1889 edition of the Spalding's Base Ball Guide

Spalding also went into publishing in the late 1870s, publishing not just the first set of league rules for the NL, but also the wildly successful Spalding Guide, for which old friend Henry Chadwick served as editor. William Hulbert died in April, 1882, leaving Spalding as the principal owner and president of the White Stockings. He is credited with the first Spring Training, held in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1886. Between 1880 and 1886 the club won five more Pennants with Spalding running the club. Meanwhile Spalding lead the wars against the American Association, Players League, and the Union Association, various attempts to start a rival major league.

During the winter of 1888-89 Spalding took a group of the NL's best players on a worldwide tour, canvassing Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, Hawaii, Ceylon, Italy, and France, promoting the sport (and his sporting goods company) with exhibition games and returning to great fanfare in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Spalding shocked the baseball world when he retired as White Stockings president in 1891, mirroring his snap retirement as a player. The 1890s would be the story of AG Spalding Sporting Goods, as the firm opened stores and bought factories all over the United States. By 1893 Spalding had acquired most of his competition, and he became very wealthy as his company became a mainstay of the American sporting world to this day.

Later in his life Spalding withdrew from baseball. He sold his controlling stake in the White Stockings (by now the Chicago Orphans) in 1902, though in the first decade of the 1900s he became determined to prove that baseball was an American game (remember his irreverence toward the English), arguing with Chadwick, who believed (correctly) that it was based in English rounders. Spalding convened the 1908 Mills Commission and was respected enough that his influence proclaimed Abner Doubleday the father of baseball, and when Chadwick died, leaving his papers to Spalding, Spalding used the old writer's records to recreate baseball's past, releasing America's National Game in 1911, the first scholarly attempt at writing baseball's creation story.

Spalding became involved in the controversial Theosophic community in San Diego late in his life, dying far from the spotlight in 1915. Still, he is remembered as a titan of baseball history, and of American sport history. In 1880 the Boston Herald wrote: "Next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the name AG Spalding is the most famous in American literature." In 1900 he was named as Commissioner of the USA's Olympic committee by President McKinley.

The best player of both the amateur era and the beginning of the professional era, one of the great baseball minds and executives in baseball history, an influential writer and publisher, and the founder of perhaps the most important sporting goods company in the game's long history, Spalding deserves to be on this list again and again, for many independent reasons. He would be on baseball's Mount Rushmore - he could be all four faces. Spalding impacted the game in so many different ways, in such influential ways, he truly is one of the most important people in baseball history.

The genius of our institutions is democratic - Base ball is a democratic game.

The List : Class of 1877, 1/1 : William Cauldwell

William Cauldwell (1824-1907), Builder
Eligible: 1875
Contributions: Ran the Sunday Mercury from 1850-1895, provided perhaps the first regular coverage of baseball, and hired Henry Chadwick to cover the sport, his first major role in baseball.

Henry Chadwick might be the most influential writer in baseball history (a sport which has produced more tenured sportswriters, including all of the pioneering writers, than any other American sport), but he wasn't the first, and the posting from which he made many of his observations at the Sunday Mercury was given to him by the man who was actually first to cover the sport: William Cauldwell.

Cauldwell in the 1880s

Cauldwell was born in New York City, 1824. As a boy he spent several years living with an uncle in Louisiana during the Cholera epidemic of the 1830s and spent three years in Missouri at Jefferson College. He returned to New York and eventually found work at Samuel Adams's publishing company. Following Adams's 1841 murder Cauldwell found work as a typesetter at the New York Atlas, where he worked until purchasing a one-third share of the Sunday Mercury in 1850. Around 1850 he began playing ball with the new Union club, though no real record of his playing exists.

It is at the Mercury that Cauldwell has such an impact on baseball history. In 1853 Cauldwell published an account of a game between the Knickerbockers and the Gotham clubs of New York, the first known game recap, and a publication that began the Mercury's regular baseball coverage - the first publication to cover the game regularly. In 1856 he became the first writer to use the term 'National Pastime' and in 1858 he hired a talented young baseball writer named Henry Chadwick to cover games for the Mercury, lending a voice to one of the most important people in baseball history.

Cauldwell had accumulated a 100% ownership stake in the Mercury by 1876, and in or around 1890 tried to take the Sunday Mercury daily, a decision that cost him and his eventual financial backers a great deal of money. He sold the paper for a hotel, the Hotel Empire, in 1895. In 1901 he returned to journalism as editor of the Daily American, a position he held until his death in 1907. He served in various levels of politics, as a member of the New York senate from 1868-1871 and as Supervisor of The Bronx until it's annexation by New York.

Cauldwell was also a significant contributor to baseball's creation myth. While the Mills commission was operating in 1907, and while secretary James E Sullivan had compiled 66 pages supporting the rounders/cat theory (that baseball was evolved from the old English boys games), he had also presented to AG Mills one page supporting the immaculate conception/Doubleday theory, in which US General Abner Doubleday thought up the game one day in 1839 and drew a playing field that somehow ended up with the Knickerbockers in New York six years later. When Mills selected this latter theory, he was supported by several witnesses from baseball's infancy, among the most notable of whom was William Cauldwell, who had covered baseball for over 50 years at that point and said he had never heard of rounders. Mills took this testimony to mean the game had to have been invented suddenly by an American, and the Doubleday theory was the only alternative suggested.

At the end of the day, Cauldwell never sat on a rules committee or had a plaque in Cooperstown. But it should be noted that he was the first in a long, long and illustrious line of newspapermen to recognize the demand for baseball coverage, and to provide it. He was baseball's original booster, before Chadwick himself, and for that Cauldwell deserves recognition as one of baseball's earliest influential figures.

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.

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.

The List: Class of 1874, 1/1: Duncan F Curry

Duncan Fraser Curry (1812-1894), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: First president of the Knickerbocker Club (1845), where he held sway until the late 1850s. Helped organize and chaired the first meeting of the NABBP in 1857.

Duncan F Curry

Duncan F Curry was born in New York City in 1812, going into a career in insurance at a young age. By 32 he was secretary of the City Fire Insurance Company, and at 40 he had founded the Republic Fire Insurance Company, which he ran for 30 years until his death in 1882.

By the early 1840s, as many young men in the New York professional class were doing, Curry was playing sports in clubs around the city. In 1842 he was associating with a loose group of men who played what Curry remembered as roughly-organised bat-and-ball games, and what John Montgomery Ward and Al Spalding called (much later) baseball. By 1845 he joined several of the more serious ballplayers in forming the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. While he was not one of the original framers, Curry was present at the inaugural meeting that formed the Knicks in September 1845, and was in fact elected as the organization's first president.

Curry would maintain later in life that he had a hand in drafting the rules for the Knicks, but there is not much secondary evidence to support it; credit is largely given to Wheaton, Adams, and Tucker, all of whom we have discussed already. Curry probably does deserve some credit in this regard inasmuch as he was in the Club - it was a small, tight group that played regularly and likely adjusted the regulations frequently over the decade between the 1845 drafting of Wheaton's rules and the 1857 distribution of Adams' 'Laws of Base Ball' to the nascent NABBP - it would be hard to imagine any regular member during that time could not have influenced the rules, let alone a man in Curry who sat on the Knickerbockers' rules commission from 1845 through at least 1856. In 1853 Curry allowed the Eagle Base Ball Club to join his committee, marking the first steps toward regulatory unification.

Original Knickerbockers, Curry featured bottom left

Curry began losing influence in baseball after that 1857 meeting of base ball clubs that became the NABBP. It was held largely because of a debate over the length of games. The leading faction of Knicks, headed by Curry, wanted a seven-inning game, while a minority, headed by Louis F Wadsworth, wanted nine innings. When the outside clubs were invited, Wadsworth and his backers drummed up enough support that the game was set, as it still is, at nine innings.

Curry in old age

Curry mostly fades from baseball history from that point, coinciding perhaps with his 1859 marriage to Angie Kerr. We know he maintained his successful insurance firm until late in life, and that he passed away at his home in Brooklyn in 1894. In the decades before his death he spoke to pioneer sportswriter William Rankin, whose accounts of those conversations, as much as thirty years after the fact, were generally contradictory or otherwise flawed and played a significant part in both Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright's coronation as the Father of Baseball. Owing perhaps to Curry's late-in-life promotion of his own claim to the mantle, Curry was laid to rest under a tombstone reading 'Father of Baseball.'

The List: Class of 1873, 1/1: William H Tucker

William H Tucker (1814-1894), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Helped William Wheaton draft Knickerbocker rules, was very involved in Knicks baseball until early 1850s. Possibly played first baseball game on West Coast in San Francisco, 1851.

This one's going to be short and sweet because, primarily, there exists very little biographical information about Tucker, and his achievements in baseball were limited, if important. But we'll get to that.

Our inaugural inductee was the young attorney William R Wheaton, who wrote the first set of rules of baseball. Something needs to be said here. If you do a group project in school and the teacher asks who did most of the work, the students will disagree. It would be a tall task to demand unanimity in the question of who wrote baseball's first set of rules, especially because the stories were generally told about fifty years after the fact, in the 1880s as baseball became a larger phenomenon. Wheaton's claim comes from an impeccable and cross-checked recollection of events in an interview from 1887, supported by the testimony of Duncan F Curry in 1886, which claim Wheaton as the author of both the 1837 Gotham Club rules and the 1845 Knickerbocker rules. These claims are disputed, however - Curry said at other times that he (Curry) or Alexander Cartwright were the principal authors, and others have made various claims over the last 150 years. What is not contested is this: Wheaton, or whoever wrote the Knickerbocker rules in 1845 had a partner, and that was William H Tucker.

We don't know much about Tucker, but we know that he was a successful tobacconist and well-regarded ballplayer in the early 1840s. We know that his father, Abraham W Tucker, was the founder of the family cigar business and one of the original 1837 Gothams, a man of enough import to baseball that in 1846 the Knickerbockers made him one of their first honorary members. We know that William H Tucker was recruited by Wheaton to join the Knickerbockers in 1845. The two men sat on the inaugural rules committee and while most baseball historians believe the rules' authorship to belong to Wheaton, his partner on the committee was Tucker. Tucker was also Treasurer in 1846 and 1847.

Tucker was a talented player and his old New York Club continually sought to bring him back into the fold after he left to join the Knicks. While Tucker played in the Knicks' very first game, scoring three of their eight runs, he missed five games in 1845 and 15 of 50 1846 contests, typically because he was playing in big matches with his old New York comrades, such as his performance in an October 24, 1845 series between the New York Club and the best of the Brooklyn clubs. Tucker's allegiance was in constant doubt, but on June 19, 1846, he showed loyalty to the Knicks, helping them defeat his New York Club, an All-Star matchup that the Knicks asked Tucker to arrange.

1848 Knickerbockers. Tucker top-right

Tucker continued to star as pitcher, catcher ("behind"), and second baseman through 1848, but disappears from the Knicks records after that until May 1851. We don't know where Tucker was for those two years (1849-50), but John Thorn has done, as always, some exceptional historical sleuthing and determined that it is likely that Tucker wound up in San Francisco, and Thorn submits that Tucker, Wheaton, Cartwright, and others from the New York baseball community that had gone west with gold fever in 1849 are likely to have played the first baseball game in San Francisco in February 1851, just before Tucker left to return to New York. This would mark the birth of baseball on the west coast, an incredibly important date, and one which changes the once-accepted date of 1860.

Tucker disappears from baseball history shortly after his triumphant May, 1851 return to the Knicks, with one exception: in 1875 the Knickerbockers hosted the game's first old-timers day, celebrating the 25-year career of Knickerbocker James Whyte Davis (whom we will discuss later). The game pitted the Knicks of 1850 against the squad of 1860, and Tucker was invited to play for the 1850 team, an offer he accepted. Unlike Wheaton, who walked away in 1845 never to return to the Knickerbocker fold, Tucker apparently maintained his relationships with his old teammates and remained in their high regard.

We don't know much of what happens to William H Tucker after this. He maintained a property in Manhattan with his father selling tobacco, and we believe he died in the Brooklyn home of his son-in-law in 1894.

The List: Class of 1872, 1/1: Daniel 'Doc' Adams

Daniel Lucius 'Doc' Adams (1814-1899), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Helped found the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, credited with deciding several important baseball rules, and led organized baseball as frequent president of Knicks and later rules committee member of the NABBP until his resignation from both in 1862.

We last left off with William Rufus Wheaton, writer of the rules and vice-president of the Knickerbockers. One regrettable fact of the Wheaton saga is that he was, while enormously important  from 1837-1845, rather short-lived in the history of the game. In this article, I'd like to take a look at one of baseball's first 'lifers,' a man who dedicated decades to the founding and growing of the sport, a man of enormous influence in baseball both in its birth and in its fledgling march toward legitimacy, professionalism, and widespread renown, founding Knickerbocker Dr. Daniel Lucius 'Doc' Adams.
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Daniel Adams, Sr.

Adams was born in Mont Vernon, NH in 1814, the son of Dr. Daniel Adams, Sr, a renowned physician, author of texts on medicine and mathematics, and titan of American medical history. Daniel Jr graduated Yale in 1835 and Harvard Medical School in 1838, moving to New York to start up a practice the following year. Adams later attested that his school years imported more than just an affinity for medicine upon him:
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I was always interested in athletics while in college and afterward, and soon after going to New York I began to play base ball just for exercise, with a number of other young medical men. Before that there had been a club called the New York Base Ball Club, but it had no very definite organization and did not last long.
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Adams joined his NY Base Ball Club in 1840. As we noted in the Wheaton entry, this 'NY Base Ball Club' was a loose affiliation of young professional men (doctors, attorneys, bankers) who formed casual clubs to play intramural games of ball (among other sports). Some of these early clubs were the NY Club, Wheaton's Gotham club, the Magnolia, the Eagle, and others. Because of the different levels of commitment of the players, the clubs were quite fluid and, according to John Thorn, the New York Club was often composed in part by members of the other clubs, and may even have served as an umbrella term for members of the various ballclubs of New York. In 1845 some of the more serious players set out to rectify this, and the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club was founded to play a strict practice and game schedule. Doc Adams joined a few weeks after the club was founded, and is pictured in a daguerreotype of the original six members.

1845 daguerreotype of the first six Knickerbockers. Adams featured bottom, centre

Adams deserves special attention here, because while others, including our first inductee in Wheaton, had enormous roles in such things as rule writing, advertising or recruiting, Adams maintained a guiding hand on the sport for nearly two decades following the founding of the Knickerbocker. He played eight different positions for the Knicks, including shortstop, which he invented (originally to function as a full-time cutoff man or rover). He umpired games regularly. He was elected one the Knicks' first vice-president in 1845, and served as president in '47-'49, '56, '57, and '61. He made the equipment for the Knicks, and in 1849, in an effort to standardize the game's equipment, he personally made balls for each NY club and contracted and oversaw woodworkers making bats for each club as well. He advocated the adoption of the Knicks' ruleset, and truly drove the campaign to make his club's rules the whole city's rules, eventually the ruleset of the national pastime.
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By the late 1850s the game was becoming very popular in New York and slowly catching on around the country. In 1857 sixteen New York and Brooklyn base ball clubs set up a committee to regulate the rules and scheduling, and Doc Adams was nominated presiding officer of the first convention. In 1858 he sat as Chair of the Rules Committee, handing out to the clubs of New York the 'Laws of Base Ball', which contained such regulations as: nine men to a side, nine innings to a game, 90 feet between the bases and 45 feet from the pitcher's box to home plate, and the complete banishment of betting on games. He also supported William Wheaton's 'fly' rule - that a batter could only be put out on balls caught on the fly, not on a single bounce as some clubs played. This rule was not universally adopted until 1865. The specifications about team size, game length, and field dimensions are the first time the modern measurements were codified, and Adams's Laws serve as a crucial document in baseball history - in fact, a copy of his original Laws were sold at auction in 2016 for $3.26 million, the second most expensive piece of baseball memorabilia ever.

Adams continued to sit as chair of the Rules Committee of what was by 1858 known as the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), the first governing body of baseball outside of a single club. The Knicks would no longer dictate the accepted rules of the game from their closed meetings, but Adams maintained his influence by sitting on the rules committee. John Thorn also notes that Doc Adams was a good enough player to start for the Knicks into his mid-forties, so there is a good chance he was one of the better players of the 1840s and early 1850s.

Daniel L 'Doc' Adams

Also in 1858 Adams umpired a three-game 'Fashion Course' series, a set between top New York and Brooklyn players that can lay claim to being 1) the first baseball All-Star Game, 2) the first baseball game with paid attendance, and 3) the first game played in an enclosed park.

Adams would ultimately resign from both the Knickerbockers and the NABBP in 1862, but, he later noted, his five years as head of the Association were a time of incredible growth: by 1862 what was a little-respected boys game just 20 years previously now drew crowds numbering in the thousands. Upon retiring from the Knicks he was granted lifetime membership and awarded the title 'Nestor of Baseball Ball Players' by the club. The NABBP would have almost 100 member clubs by 1865 and more than 400 by 1867, before ultimately being replaced by the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871, the first season of truly professional baseball.

In 1861 Adams married Cornelia A Cook, an act he considered the crowning achievement of his storied life. He retired from medicine in 1865 and moved to Ridgefield, CT, serving in the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1870. In 1871 he took up the position as first president of Ridgefield Savings Bank, a post he held off-and-on until 1886, interrupted by a brief post as treasurer of the Ridgefield Library.

Though Adams retired from organized baseball in 1862, his old teammate James Whyte Davis organised one of the sport's first old-timers contests in 1875, and Adams, now 61, caught the entire game. His sons fondly remember him playing backyard ball with them into his 70s. Adams spent much of his later life in ill health and ultimately died of pneumonia in 1899, aged 85.

Whereas Wheaton was perhaps the most influential Knickerbocker in 1845, Adams had a lasting impact both on the initial Knickerbocker club and, more importantly, on the development of the sport in the early years and into the organization of the sport with the New York clubs and the NABBP.

An aged Adams, 1890s

I would like to illustrate one final point. We are, in these pages, recognizing the people who have made baseball what it is today, and the early men involved had such a simple, yet staggering impact. Take, for example, the issue of innings played. Initially, in the 1830s and even through Wheaton's 20 rules in 1837, the game was played to 21 runs, with no set innings cap. By 1856 some debate had arisen among the Knicks following an exhibition game that had gone tied to conclusion on account of darkness. Many Knicks (the 'Old Fogies', followers of Duncan F Curry, whom we shall explore later) supported the adoption of a magic number : seven - both men to a side and innings played. This was aired during a meeting and, because other members supported the rule of nine, William F. Ladd suggested the formation of a committee to decide the matter once and for all. When meeting chair Alexander Drummond appointed Ladd to the committee, he declined; Adams, a staunch supporter of nine stood in.

Adams was actually outnumbered on the Knicks - most supported the rule of seven - but he used the opportunity to invite all New York clubs to the December, 1856 Knickerbockers meeting, and then canvassed to bring them in personally. When the clubs finally came together in February of 1857 Adams had enough support from his invitees to force through the rule laying down, then and forever, nine innings of play. This 1857 meeting came to be regarded as the first meeting of the NABBP and the beginning of organized baseball.

It is through actions like this that the early pioneers of baseball had massive impacts through small actions. Adams worked to construct baseball, but instead of winning a batting title or building a World Series winning club, he did nothing less than shape the format of the game.

The List: Class of 1871, 1/1: William R Wheaton

William Rufus Wheaton (1814-1888), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Helped found both the Gotham Base Ball (1837) and Knickerbocker (1845) Clubs, two groundbreaking baseball clubs, and wrote the rulebooks for both. Provided insight into the invention of baseball in 1887 investigation.

There are thousands of influential men, women, and organizations in baseball history, people who shaped the course of the sport, and the industry, and subsequently impacted the lives of millions, if not billions of people over the last 175 years. But no player, manager, or announcer, surely, has had the impact as the person, or people, who invented the sport, right?

The matter of baseball's invention has been the subject of some debate almost as long as the game has existed, and came to a head in the early 20th century with the publication of the 1907 Mills Commission report which incorrectly named Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown, NY as the father and place of baseball's invention, respectively. One of the best baseball books ever written is John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden, which chronicles the actual history of the sport, as well as the history of baseball's creation myth and works to correct much of the false narrative baseball has maintained since 1907.
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Ultimately, Alexander Cartwright would end up in the Hall of Fame as the inventor of baseball, primarily for founding the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1845, the club that drafted the first recognized rules of the modern game and that played the first officially recorded game in 1846. This is much closer to the mark than the Doubleday assertion, but Thorn lays out some very important facts, including that Cartwright himself probably doesn't deserve all the credit that could be applied to the Knickerbocker Club. There were several men on the Knickerbocker that deserve to be recognized for writing the actual rules, in addition to helping to guide the sport's formation in the early decades, and foremost among them was a prominent New York lawyer named William R Wheaton.
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A young William R Wheaton

So let's set the scene for our first induction. The year is 1871, baseball has been growing as the national sport for several decades, and after some initial resistance in the mid 1860s, has been accepted as the national pastime and a professional sport. 1871 marks the first season of play for the National Association, the first true, relatively organized professional baseball major league. To go along with the adoption of baseball as the national pastime, let's say we immediately start up a Hall of Fame, celebrating the heroes of the game's past.

Now that past is a long and convoluted tale that may have no true beginning - bat and ball games go back, at least as far as Egypt circa 2500 BC and almost certainly farther. What we know as baseball is likely the recent iteration of an older English ball game like rounders, cat, or round ball. In fact, long before the game caught fire in 1830s-40s New York it was extremely popular in different parts of the country as 'town ball' or 'country ball', and there existed a popular variant known as the Massachusetts Game. These different games, typically unorganised, were usually played by schoolboys or young men, and had wildly different rules, although some core principles were shared: the ball was pitched to a batsman who tried to hit it in play, and had to be put out by the fielders. While these games indeed evolved into baseball, they also branched out to become codified as cricket in the United Kingdom and in many English-speaking nations (including, to a lesser degree of popularity, the Americas).

By the late 1820s rudimentary manuals and playing field diagrams were being published for young boys, such as the 1829 The Boy's Own Book, displaying games with bases, bats, and outs. In 1833 a base ball club formed in Philadelphia (playing a largely different game to the one later developed), the Olympic.

Six original Knickerbockers, 1845. Wheaton featured top left

Such was the state of baseball when a group of enterprising young professionals began organising base ball clubs in Manhattan, the first of which was likely the Gotham Base Ball Club, formed in 1837 by, among others, a 23-year-old attorney, William R Wheaton. Wheaton has the distinction, however, of codifying the club's rules, including his eradication of the 'bound rule' which put the batter out if the batter ball was caught on a single bounce, and the addition of foul territory. Wheaton outlawed 'plugging' or 'soaking' the runner - putting a runner out by beaning him with the ball while between bases, an integral part of cat that Wheaton considered too dangerous with grown men throwing the ball. Among others, these rules helped distinguish our game of baseball from the myriad previous bat-and-ball games, and it was Wheaton who wrote them.

We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn't suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837... We played for fun and health, and won every time. 

The early 1840s saw three more clubs spring up in Manhattan - the New York, the Eagle, and the Magnolia. The purpose of these clubs was mere exercise - Wheaton recounted in 1887 that he and his fellow players used baseball as a gentlemanly retreat from the career-focused majority of the New York business world at the time and credited it with their good health. In 1845 Wheaton and others found the Gotham club too casual and quit to form the famous Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, men who would take the game more seriously than any club before. Before 1845 all games were intrasquad - an 'A' team playing a 'B' team, and allowances made for reducing the game to a three-or-four-man game of cat depending on how many players showed up. The Knickerbockers took the game seriously, charged a high membership fee, and admitted only those who promised to attend every scrimmage. They also intended to branch out into inter-club matches, which would eventually take place in 1846.

Again, Wheaton was responsible for drafting the club's rules, mainly a version of his 1837 Gotham regulations, along with fellow unsung baseball pioneer William H Tucker. After Wheaton and Tucker's 1845 rules, the runner had to be tagged. The Knicks were, for a long time, regarded as the first baseball club and featured several renowned names including Wheaton, Tucker, Doc Adams, William F Wadsworth, and Alexander Cartwright, who is enshrined in Cooperstown. The Knicks played their first intrasquad game on October 6, 1845. Wheaton served as umpire.

I realise that this post has served more as an incredibly brief early history of baseball and less as a biography of William Wheaton, and the truth is, he is largely a titan of the game's history, but he is a mere roleplayer in the foundation of the game. Nonetheless, what follows is a very brief biography of the man.

Older, San Francisco-era Wheaton

William Rufus Wheaton was born in New York in 1814, attended the Union Hall Academy and began practicing law at various firms in the city before passing the bar in 1836 and forming a private practice with an Ebenezer Griffin. It was at this time that the young Wheaton, always fond of the exercise common among the New York business class, took a shine to baseball, joining the Gotham in 1837 and penning their first set of rules. He married Elizabeth A Jennings that same year and the two would go on to have seven children. He was admitted to the Supreme Court of New York in 1841, and helped form the Knickerbockers in 1845, serving as vice-president and sitting on the committee for by-laws (rules) for the duration of his time with the club. We know that he was the lead recruiter for the new, more competitive club, and that he umpired the first intrasquad game in October of 1845.

Wheaton was a lifelong cricketer, however, and left the Knicks in early 1846 to resume his cricketing, playing for New York clubs through 1848, in which year he won a trophy as the city's best batsman. Following his departure from the Knicks in 1846, he essentially evaporates from the annals of baseball history, but a fascinating life continued: he was a miner '49er, living mostly in California from 1849 until his death in 1888, initially as a miner, prospector, and outfitter, but he resumed his law practice in the early 1850s. He was active politically, appointing mayoral candidates in both New York and San Francisco, and was politically engaged enough that he was appointed Register of the Land Office of the US by president Grant in 1876, holding the position for ten years and four administrations.

It should be noted that Wheaton made no friends when he left the Knickerbockers to return to cricket. In 1846 the Knickerbockers began distributing lifetime memberships to old, retired New York ballplayers, including several of Wheaton's old Gotham teammates. Despite his significant role in the formation of baseball's most important team, Wheaton was never awarded the honor, nor appeared in any Knickerbocker minutes, ever again. He vanished from Knickerbocker history by walking away in 1846.

Of all Wheaton's contributions to the game, his most important might be that he serves as the game's sole primary source for its invention. In an 1887 interview with the San Francisco Examiner he laid out how the game evolved from cat on those Elysian Fields in the 1830s, and his role in that transformation. The interview went forgotten until SABR unearthed it in 2004, and it saw more exposure in Thorn's aforementioned 2011 book.

Wheaton spent only a few years in baseball, never posted any career statistics, and left his name in few places. But he holds perhaps the finest distinction of all: he wrote the rules. They were adapted from existing games, made in concert with dozens, perhaps thousands of other voices - from sporting business men in booming New York, from jeering schoolboys across Britain and the US, from ladies and patrons sipping juleps from the sidelines - but he reduced them to the 20 rules of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, and he went on to tell us the story. Thorn called him the most important Knickerbocker and one of the men perhaps most deserving of the title, 'father of baseball.' The game existed long before him, and it changed significantly after he left it in 1846, but William R Wheaton stands front and centre in the effort of taking the schoolyard ballgame and creating the sport of baseball.