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.