Class of 1882, 1/2: Ross Barnes

Charles Roscoe Barnes (1850-1915), Player
Eligible: 1882
Contributions: Star of the amateur era alongside Spalding, Barnes won two batting titles in the NA and another in the NL. Pundits compared him favourably to famed second-basemen of the early 20th century.

A recurring theme in baseball history, and one of the more romantic aspects of the sport, is the way that its finest players can simply 'lose it'. One day a player can be on top of the world and the next, for any myriad reasons, that same ability can be lost forever. Pro fighter Chael Sonnen says that every fighter goes out the same way: face-down and embarrassed, and the same happens to most ballplayers. One day you're 1934 Babe Ruth and the next you're 1935 Babe Ruth. One of the game's first such nosedives was the disappearing act of Ross Barnes, a star of the late 1860s who simply disappeared as a productive player in his prime. In 1915 WAS Phelon wrote in Baseball Magazine, "No matter how great you were once upon a time, the years go by and men forget. Ross Barnes, forty years ago, was as great as Cobb or Wagner ever dared to be."

 Charles Roscoe "Ross" Barnes was born in 1850 in upstate New York. The family relocated to Rockford, Illinois, in or around 1865. The small industrial city near Chicago had seen an explosion in baseball's popularity after many men returned from the Civil War playing the game, and was referred to as the 'cradle of the American sport in the West.' Rockford happened to also be the home of the best baseball player in the world, Al Spalding, whose star was also about to rise. We don't know when Barnes picked up baseball, but in 1866 he joined Spalding's junior club, the Pioneers. By the end of that season both men were playing for one of the region's best semi-pro clubs, the Rockford Forest City.

Barnes was an immediate star. Playing shortstop as the best fielder on the team, he was known for his intense and speedy play, his sure hands (there were no fielding gloves at the time), and strong arm. He was a fantastic batter and perhaps the game's best baserunner. In 1867 the Rockford club upset the otherwise unbeatable Washington Nationals as part of their national tour, bringing Spalding and Barnes into the consciousness of the baseball world. In 1868 the Rockford club did their own tour, and played against Harry Wright's Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869, nearly upsetting the most dominant (and first openly professional) baseball team of all time in a thrilling match. The following season Rockford defeated Cincinnati, handing them one of only a few losses over a course of several years. During the years 1867-70, when Spalding and Barnes were two of the most respected names in baseball, they were teenagers. Barnes turned 20 in May 1870.

When the National Association of Base Ball Players opened a professional association in 1871, Harry Wright was hired by a Boston businessman to start the city's first professional club, the Boston Red Stockings. He remembered the two standouts from Rockford, and Barnes and Spalding played for Boston for the duration of the NA's existence, from 1871-75. Barnes shifted to second base to allow room at shortstop for George Wright, considered by most the best player of the era. Through the first three years of his contract, Barnes was hitting .424, winning two batting titles, leading the league twice in runs and slugging each, once in stolen bases. As the talent pool increased, Barnes stayed near the top of the game, hitting .354 over 1874-75, including setting the NA's single-season hits record in 1875. He ended up with a staggering 185 OPS+ over the life of the NA. His 445 wRC led second-place George Wright (who Barnes constantly battled for the limelight) by more than 60 runs.

While he was regaled as quick and athletic, Barnes was an intelligent hitter. The Boston Globe: "Not of the class of chance hitter who, when they go to bat simply go in to hit the ball as hard as they can without the slightest idea where it is going. He studied the position and made his hits accordingly." Barnes was the king of the fair-foul hit, a practice that allowed a ball to be put into play fair, and roll foul. Today, balls that go foul either on the fly or before passing first or third base are called foul - at the time, a ball striking fair territory and rolling foul or passing the bases in fair territory while on the fly was considered fair. Barnes was a master of placing a ball in foul territory, and his ability to use this tool has led many historians, including Bill James to dismiss him as a historical talent. However, when the NL banned the fair-foul prior to 1877 one executive claimed "I don't think [the new rule] will affect his average in the least. He can bat equally well to any portion of the field."

For what it's worth, I don't believe it is fair to detract from Barnes's ability because of the rules at the time he played. Do we ignore the greatness of Creighton or Spalding because they were the best at underhanded pitching? Old Hoss Radbourn because he had no pitch counts? Or Arlie Latham for stealing a bunch of bases off of slow pitchers and catchers wearing no mitts? You are compared to your peers. The fair-foul was a fair play at the time, and Ross was revered for his ability at it: "It was univeraslly regarded as requiring exceptional finesse. Only the most highly skilled strikers were able to execute it with consistency." (Robert H Schaefer, The Lost Art of Fair-Foul Hitting) Barnes was never a cheap hitter: he led his league in doubles, total bases, and slugging three times, triples twice. James accuses him of fair-foul bunting, but Barnes was fair-foul hitting.

As a fielder, he was regarded as a star second baseman in a time when second basemen had to cover more ground than any other position - all the ground from first to second, short right and short centre, as well as covering second on steals. The shortstop was more of a rover who patrolled the shallow outfield in left-centre. Player and writer Tim Murnane said that he 'could cover more ground than any man I ever saw. He had a long reach and could pick up ground balls when on the dead run from either side.' Paired with a strong throwing arm, Barnes led the league in assists, fielding percentage, and double plays almost every year. Murnane, who once bested Barnes in the NA steals race (30 to 29) said that he 'had no superior as a baserunner' and that he was the first player to 'throw himself wide of the base and hold onto the bag.'

All of this added up to Barnes being the NA's best position player for the duration of the league (1871-75), and the results showed for Boston as the team won four Pennants. He was also an enormous star for the league. A lifelong bachelor, he was popular with the ladies and quite a fan of drink - a split formed with his teammates Harry and George Wright, Al Spalding, Charlie Gould, and Cal McVey (teetotalers) on one side, and Barnes and the rest on the other. Barnes and Gould hated each other so much that they refused to meet each other's eye on the field (Gould played beside Barnes at first base) and when Gould retired after 1872 it was reported that getting away from Barnes was the primary reason. Barnes was known to be infatuated with his own looks, vain to a fault, but always described as honorable and a gentleman.

Partway through 1874 the Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics postponed their respective seasons to undertake a goodwill tour of England, showing off the American game and playing some exhibition games against English cricket clubs. Cricket games were also played, and the teams you would expect to win at each sport did, but the end result was disappointing. No lasting effect on the English was noted, and both clubs lost money on the enterprise. During the tour, rumors were already swirling that the club might not survive, and be broken up at season's end. The rumors continued through the offseason and into the 1875 season, but by the end of summer a bombshell had dropped: frustrated by Association politics and a lack of discipline from both clubs and players, William Hulbert was withdrawing his Chicago White Stockings from the NA and starting his own association - the National League. Moreover, he had signed most of the best players in baseball, including the 'Big Four' as they were being hailed in Boston: Spalding, McVey, Barnes, and Deacon White. The Red Stockings, long immune to revolving, were crushed.

Rumor was that the players would abandon the club immediately, but they played out their contracts, and in 1876 the Chicago club was the toast of the baseball world. Barnes led the league in almost every offensive category, hitting .429 with a staggering 235 OPS+. He put up 6.0 WAR in just 66 games as Chicago cruised to an easy inaugural NL pennant. It would be Barnes's swan song. He was 26.

Before the 1877 season the NL instituted the modern foul ball rule, disallowing Barnes's fair-foul hits. Because his career nosedives after 1876, modern baseball historians have claimed his success was due to the fair-foul rule, but there was something else going on. By mid-May 1877 Barnes excused himself from the White Stockings. The Tribune wrote: Barnes has been physically incapable of exertion; he is as weak, debilitated and worn as would be any strong man after six month's sickness." Barnes was expected back in June after a quick rest in his native Rockford, but his absence dragged on through the summer as criticism mounted. The Tribune published more than one defense of the great player, at one point publishing a telegraph from Barnes reading: "I seldom leave the house now. I don't feel badly, but I grow weaker every day." He finally returned in mid-August, receiving a raucus ovation from the Chicago crowd, but the papers reported that he had none of his old energy or ability. At 27, Barnes appeared done, and his year-end numbers looked like it, too. He played just 22 games and while he hit a respectable .272, he was a far cry from the 'King of Baseball' some publications called him.

With no recovery in sight, Barnes was not offered a contract for 1878, and spent the season in court, suing the White Stockings for not paying him while he was ill. He was ultimately ruled against. He spent some of '78 in London, Ontario as player/manager for the Tecumseh of the International Association. The IA at the time was the top minor league of the day and probably not a far cry from the talent of the NL. He played a full season of baseball in 1879 with old teammates Cal McVey and Deacon White in Cincinnati, posting an OPS+ of 106, above league average but well below his standards, still suffering from the chronic fever and fatigue that baseball historian and SABR member Robert H Scheafer described as 'ague'. He sat out 1780 and worked as a travelling salesman before old friend Harry Wright invited him to join his Boston Red Stockings in '81. Barnes, now 31, hit like a league-average player (103 OPS+) but played a miserable shortstop and described himself as 'useless as a fifth leg on a horse.'

Barnes was out of baseball after the experiment with Boston. Still a young man, Barnes was reportedly fabulously wealthy, to say nothing of his well-to-do Illinois family. He sat on the Chicago Board of Trade, with fingers in his family's interests in banking and industry. He tried umpiring in 1890 with the Player's League, but found it an exercise in self-abuse and quickly gave it up. He worked as an accountant in Chicago and ran hotel operations in Rockford. The lifelong bachelor died in his Chicago apartment in 1915, aged 64.

Ross Barnes is something of an unsolved tragedy. We don't really know how good he was outside of the fair-foul rule, or outside of his mysterious illness, but we do know that he was one of the very best players of the amateur era, when he was a teenager, and that he was unquestionably the best player of his time, a career that spanned the entirety of the professional National Association and the beginning of the National League. As late as WWI, writers and legends were remembering him as perhaps the best of all time, frequently remembering him as a better player than legends like Nap Lajoie, Honus Wagner, and Ty Cobb, and it's because he might have been. He was the best baserunner of his day, the best defender at a premium position, and he was a career .398 hitter before his illness. He might have been.

Previous: 1881 Col. James Lee
1880s Overview
Next: 1882 2/2: William Hulbert

Class of 1881, 2/2: Col. James Lee

Colonel James Lee (1796-1874), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Original Gotham member (1837), likely importer of the (prototypical) game to New York City.

This will be a quick one, because so little is known of Lee's life and his baseball career. Because the historiography of baseball starts, essentially, with the Knickerbocker's 1845 rules and scorebook, little is known of the history of the game to that point. We do know that, according to Wheaton's late-19th-century interview that Col. Lee was one of the original 1837 Gotham club members, the first group we know of to write the rules of the game down. He was important enough to the Gotham and to baseball that in 1846 the Knickerbockers, shortly after forming, named him an honorary member.

Col. Lee was born in 1796 and remembered later in life playing a version of baseball growing up in New York. A soldier stationed typically in New York, John Thorn suggests that he fraternized and played ball with fellow soldiers during the War of 1812, possibly at the 'Parade,' a plot of land set aside for military drills that would become Madison Square, the site of many Manhattan ballgames in later decades, and eventually Madison Square Garden.

President of the New York Chamber of Commerce as an adult, John Montgomery Ward in his 1888 attempt at writing the early history of the game described him as a "gentleman eminently worthy of belief." Lee, as one of the earliest players in New York and one of the founders of the Gotham, had a heavy hand in baseball's selection as the game of choice for young men, according to Ward (via his source and original Knick William Ladd). He wrote that Lee and his friends chose Base Ball as an inherently American game, and not a foreign invention like cricket. Mere years after the revolution, America was quickly building an identity, and baseball proved an excellent proxy for the culture war against cricket and the English.

In 1907 when Spalding sent reams of evidence to AG Mills (who came to the unfortunate conclusion that Abner Doubleday invented baseball), Spalding listed Lee as one of the seven most influential originators of the sport. Considering that Spalding had been entrenched in the highest levels of the game since the amateur era, and considering the amount of research and discussion he had conducted, his findings were not baseless.

We don't know much of Lee's later life, but he passed in 1874, leaving a little-told and hardly explored, but undoubtedly significant impact on the sport of baseball in New York and, ultimately, America.

Previous: Class of 1880 1/1 Jim Devlin
1880s Overview
Next: Class of 1882 1/2 Ross Barnes

Class of 1881: 1/2 Jim Devlin

James A Devlin (1849-1883), Player
Eligible: 1878
Contributions: For the duration of his brief career (1875-77), Devlin was baseball's best pitcher not named Tommy Bond, posting 22.4 fWAR in just three seasons. At the height of his powers, however, Devlin and three others were banned from baseball for life for throwing games, marking one of baseball's first instances of crushing pressure against gambling interests. Devlin was at once one of baseball's great players and a fine example of a recurring narrative in baseball history, the gambler.

Jim Devlin pitched for three years in the first decade of professional baseball and put up a losing record, and as a result one could be forgiven for dismissing him as any kind of important character in baseball history. One would be remiss, however, not to recognize that at the time of retirement, if you can call it that, following the 1877 season, Devlin ranked 5th all-time in WAR, 2nd in strikeouts, and first in K/9.

Not that much is known about Devlin's early life and career. He was born in Philadelphia in 1849, and presumably grew up playing ball as the sport exploded in the northeast in 1850s and 1860s. He first appears in organised baseball for his hometown Philadelphia White Stockings in 1873 as a light-hitting utility infielder. He signed on with the Chicago White Stockings for 1874 and hit .286 off the bench as a reserve first baseman / outfielder, appearing in 45 of the team's 59 games.

The following year he was a stellar bat off the bench, slashing .289/.298/.381, which in 1874 was good for a 131 OPS+. He also recorded a pair of double plays as an outfielder, good for 4th in the league and displaying what would ultimately be his great gift: his arm. The following year Chicago's ace, old workhorse and amateur legend George Zettlein started to wear down and the White Stockings turned to the 26-year-old Devlin to relieve the veteran's arm (at this time, a team generally only carried a single full-time pitcher). Devlin was already blossoming as a full-time first baseman, establishing himself as one of the league's best fielders at the position and finishing 7th in the league in doubles as a hitter, but still came in to relieve Zettlein four times and made 24 starts of his own. He pitched well in 224 innings, his 1.93 ERA good for a 118 ERA+, and was then signed by the fledgling NL's Louisville Grays as their pitcher for 1876.

Little exists in terms of his repertoire, but we know Devlin had a live arm, and was a big, strong guy. He struck out lots of batters for his era and showed good control as well. He served as Louisville's ace for 1876-1877 and was the best pitcher in baseball outside of fellow Hall member Tommy Bond, going 65-60 with a 1.89 ERA (156 ERA+). He led the league both years in most counting stats, from innings pitched to WAR (18.3 in 1876, 13.4 in '77). He pitched all but 21 innings for the '76 Grays, and every single inning for the '77 edition.

His efforts did little for a rather thin Louisville team - they finished 5th in the NL in 1876 and 2nd after fading down the stretch in '77. By the end of the 1877 season Devlin was one of the top few pitchers in baseball history, even with just two-and-a-half seasons pitched, but his named was forever besmirched when he was indicted in a gambling scandal involving three other Louisville players, who were banned from baseball for conspiring to throw the 1877 NL pennant. Regarded as one of the best pitchers on the planet, Devlin would never play major league baseball again.

Devlin's 1877 banishment was not the first time he was connected to gambling. A previous telegram to Devlin had surfaced the previous season, from Louisville right fielder George Bechtel: "We can make $500 if you lose the game today. Tell John (Louisville manager John Chapman) and let me know at once." Devlin had replied by declining the offer, "I play ball for the interest of those who hire me." Still, the casual nature of the offer and the presumed ease of informing the club manager of a fixed game suggest that it was not a novel proposition. Bechtel was cut from the club and banned from baseball shortly thereafter.

On August 16, 1877 Louisville was in first place in the NL behind the stellar pitching of Devlin and the white-hot bat of left fielder George Hall (hitting .373 to that date), but went 0-8 with a tie on their subsequent road trip, losing a number of exhibitions along the way, and never regained their footing. Hall hit .149 over the next 18 games as the club fell off the pace and lost the NL Pennant to Boston.

Club management already knew what was up and when Devlin was reportedly seen around Lousiville wearing new jewelry, and pitched well in post-season exhibitions after stinking in the stretch run, the Grays held individual interviews with the players, where they pretended that they already had information from co-conspirators. Hall and Devlin confessed immediately to taking money from a man named McCloud to throw the pennant and implicated replacement player Al Nichols as well. No evidence ever surfaced to implicate the fourth man, but when veteran shortstop Bill Craver refused to hand over his telegraph records to the club, he was grouped with the other three and expelled from the club. The Louisville Courier-Journal printed the story on November 3, and the quartet never played major league baseball again.

In his testimony, Devlin confessed not just to taking $100 per game he threw, but to giving Hall, who had connected Devlin to McCloud in the first place, just $25 and telling him McCloud had only sent $50. Hall testified that he only ever accepted the money for exhibition games and that Devlin had never given him a cent for the (at least) nine League games they had fixed.

It was a watershed moment in baseball history, as league president William Hulbert came down on the four men like a hammer. He accepted no apologies or excuses, and listened to no arguments. Even in the cases of Craver and Nichols, who had little or no evidence against them, Hulbert made it abundantly clear: no gambling in baseball. There were far-reaching repercussions for baseball as well. Louisville folded, as did St. Louis, who had signed Devlin and Hall and had hoped to build a club around them. The NL was reduced to just three clubs, and Hulbert scrambled to accept entries from such small markets as Providence, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. Once exclusive, the NL was now much more accepting of new clubs.

Devlin, self-described as 'dumb' and barely literate, had nowhere to turn after baseball. With a wife and young son at home, Devlin traveled to Chicagoafter his banishment to beg forgiveness after his banishment. Al Spalding, at that time sharing an office suite with Hulbert, later wrote:

 The situation, as he kneeled there in abject humiliation, was beyond the realm of pathos. It was a scene of heartrendering tragedy. Devlin was in tears, Hulbert was in tears... I heard Devlin's plea to have the stigma removed from his name. I heard him entreat, not on his own account, he acknowledged himself unworthy of consideration, but for the sake of his wife and child. I beheld the agony of humiliation depicted on his features as he confessed his guilt and begged for mercy. 

 I saw the bulk of Hulbert's frame tremble with the emotion he vaibly sought to stifle. I saw the president's hand steal into his pocket as if seeking to conceal his intended act from the other hand. I saw him take a $50 bill and press it into the palm of the prostrate player. And then I heard him say, as he fairly writhed with the pain his own words caused him, "That's what I think of you, personally; but, damn you, Devlin, you are dishonest' you have sold the game, and I can't tryst you. Now go; and let me never see your face again' for your act will not be condoned so long as I live."

Rebuked by organised baseball, Devlin then wrote a (hardly-legible) letter to Boston manager and baseball royalty Harry Wright begging for work, anywhere, in any league, as a player or even as a groundskeeper. "I have not got a Stich of Clothing or has my wife and child... The Louisville People made me what I am today, a Beggar"[sic]. If Wright ever replied, we have no record of it.

For his part, Devlin was finished as a major-league pitcher, though we have records of him playing for at least nine independent-league teams. The National Association, then little more than a semi-pro operation losing the war against the NL badly, reinstated Devlin for the 1879 season, and the Cincinnati Enquirer subsequently branded them amateurish: "Which can stand it longest - the Association who expels a dishonest player, or the one who welcomes him to their ranks." We know he was still playing ball in San Francisco as late as 1880. Outside of his time in were then known as the 'outlaw leagues', John Thorn suggests that he continued playing under a fake name.

Working as a police officer in his native Philadelphia, Devlin passed away in 1883, aged 34, of either tuberculosis or consumption fueled by his alcoholism, leaving his wife and son. One of many tragic stories in the early history of baseball, Devlin is one of a handful of great players banned for off-the-field behaviour, but he was, for a brief time, the best baseball player on the planet.

Previous: 1880 2/2 Jim Creighton
1880s Overview
Next: 1881 2/2 Col James Lee

The List: Class of 1878, 2/2: Alexander J Cartwright

Alexander J Cartwright (1820-1892), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Led the splinter group of Gothams that founded the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845, promoted the club and recruited top players from New York; regular member until 1849.

In short, Alexander Cartwright did not invent baseball. Need it be restated: nobody did. 'It just growed,' wrote Henry Chadwick. Still, after the Doubleday myth was debunked in the opening decades of the 20th century, it was Cartwright alone who took credit for baseball's invention and earned a plaque in Cooperstown in 1938 following a lengthy campaign by his descendants and the baseball community to find an alternative to the debunked Doubleday myth. Still, we understand the influence of the Knickerbocker Club and rules today, and one of the most influential men involved (besides those already noted) is unquestionably Alexander Joy Cartwright.

A young Cartwright in New York

Cartwright was born 17 April, 1820, in New York City, the son of a merchant sea captain. He began working as a Wall Street clerk at 16, and later at the Union Bank of New York. He was a prominent volunteer firefighter, first with the Oceania Hose Company No. 36, then famously with Engine Company No. 12, nicknamed the Knickerbockers. Growing up, and later with many of his fellow firefighters, Cartwright passed his free time playing bat-and-ball games in the streets and parks of Manhattan, though he would later join the intramural squads of the professional class.

By the late 1830s he was playing base ball regularly, but in 1845 the lot he and some of his fellow firefighters were using to play ball in Manhattan was developed, and Cartwright and his club had nowhere to play. Cartwright found a park in Hoboken, NJ called the Elysian Fields, which were owned by famed inventor Col. John Stevens. Cartwright was allowed to use the field for baseball for the price of $75 per year, and to recoup the costs of the rental, Cartwright founded the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, named for his engine company. This marks, basically, the end of his impact on baseball, but he accomplished a great deed in doing so.

To start his club, Cartwright invited the most serious ballplayers from around the city, men committed to building the sport: Duncan F Curry, William R Wheaton, William H Tucker, Doc Adams. Cartwright enlisted them and charged them a high membership fee, ensuring their commitment. These men, now aligned to the cause of baseball, laid the foundations for the game that was codified in 1845 and grew to become a burgeoning national sport by 1857, at which point the Knicks stepped out of the spotlight as the NABBP took greater influence.

Older Cartwright as fire chief
in Honolulu

Cartwright would umpire the first recorded game of baseball in June, 1846, and stay involved with the Knicks until he left New York three years later. The Union Bank burned down in 1845, and Cartwright went into business as a book seller, printing and selling the published Knickerbocker rules in 1848. Still looking for a reliable source of income after his banking job, Cartwright joined the Gold Rush in 1849, continuing almost immediately to Hawaii, where he served as fire chief of Honolulu from 1850-1863 and allegedly advising Hawaiian royalty. He would die in 1892, six months before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

Many myths abound, since debunked, about Cartwright's role in baseball history, myths that earned him that spot in Cooperstown: that he set the rules of 90 feet and 9 men a side, that he promoted baseball wherever he went across the country and into Hawaii, all of which are false. Still, Cartwright founded the Knicks, brought together baseball's most important people, and gave a jolt of life to a young game that would propel it rapidly into the nation's biggest sport.

NufCed Hall: 1870s Recap

Let's recap the decade of the 1870s. As the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players rises in 1871 only to fold five years later, the National League is born in 1876 to become the dominant, and enduring, baseball league. Professionalism, long denied in the 1860s becomes accepted with the founding of the NA, and the world's best players are (mostly) paid to play baseball. Some of the game's great pioneers, who built the sport in the 1830s, '40s, and '50s, are enshrined in our burgeoning Hall of Fame, introduced here.

Class                              Player                           Builder
1871                               -                                     William R Wheaton
1872                               -                                     Daniel 'Doc' Adams
1873                               -                                     William H Tucker
1874                               -                                     Duncan F Curry
1875                               -                                     Henry Chadwick
1876                               -                                     Louis F Wadsworth
1877                               -                                     William Cauldwell
1878                               Al Spalding                    Alexander J Cartwright 
1879                               Candy Cummings         James Whyte Davis

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.