Abraham W Tucker (1793-1868), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Founding member of the Gotham/New York Base Ball Club in 1837, instrumental to the prototypical game's growth in popularity among the sporting class. Father to William H Tucker, who helped co-write the Knickerbocker rules in 1845. Influential enough to the game that the Knicks named him an honorary member upon their founding in 1846.
Famed baseball writer and statistician Henry Chadwick grew up in New York in the 1840s and began covering the nascent sport of baseball for the local papers in the 1850s. He later watched over the growing professional game like a careful grandfather, and throughout his time observing the game, he developed his own theories about its genesis and lineage, and maintained his own careful history of the sport. While the later stages of his life was hallmarked by his failure to promote his own (more accurate) history of baseball (that it was the descendant of English bat and ball games) against the fantasies of Al Spalding and AG Mills in the early 20th century, when he died in 1908 he left his invaluable trove of records to his great rival, Al Spalding.
In 1911 Spalding published America's National Game, drawing from his own recollections (he was a star from baseball's amateur era in the late 1860s) as well as Chadwick's papers, and this served as the first great attempt at telling the story of baseball's inception. In this work he mentions 11 men who founded the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and, as such, he considered the fathers of the sport, "gentlemen who... should be honoured and remembered as the founders of the national game by the million baseball players of the present day". Of these men, six (Cartwright, Adams, Wheaton, Curry, Lee, and William H Tucker) have been previously covered in these electronic pages. Others, like Dr. Ransom and James Fisher had no reported impact on the development of baseball, and will not be covered here, but there is one more name I'd like to draw upon: William H Tucker's father, Abraham Tucker.
If possible, we know less about the life of Abraham Tucker than we do his fellow 1846 honorary Knick, Col. James Lee. We know that he was born in 1793 and lived most of his life in New York City, with his profession listed in 1822 as the proprietor of a 'segarstore' on Bowery street. His son and previous Hall inductee, William H Tucker would eventually help him run the store and remained his partner until Abraham's death in 1868. That's most of what we know about him.
Abraham is important for reasons we don't really know, but what we do know is that in 1846, after the Knickerbocker formed, they decided to honour two of the city's legendary old ballplayers with honourary membership: James Lee, and Abraham Tucker. Both men had been playing ball since perhaps as early as 1812 on public grounds that would become Madison Square, and both men we already known ballplayers at the forming of the Gotham Club in 1837, the first team to codify the rules of the game that became the sport we know today.
This is a weird entry because we basically have to take other people's word for this one. Tucker is notable for his membership in the Gotham and whatever status he achieved in the game was enough for him to be recognized by baseball's first real organized body in 1846. One imagines he could have been a great player, organizer, rulemaker, or some other champion of the game. Perhaps he is notable for fathering one of the games first rule writers. In any case, the Knicks and two of the early game's most prolific historians and great primary sources, Al Spalding and Henry Chadwick, all considered Abraham Tucker to be one of the game's great influencers.
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