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.
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| 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.
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 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.'
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.
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| Original Knickerbockers, Curry featured bottom left |
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| Curry in old age |
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