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.