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.