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| Henry Chadwick's grave, Green-Wood Cemetery |
After I found one of the families at the center of my current book project, I sauntered over to the final resting place of Henry Chadwick. An engraved plaque affixed to the monument that the National League dedicated to Chadwick at Green-Wood grandiosely declared him "Father of Base Ball." But Chadwick, an Englishman whose skill lay in his pen rather than a bat, was known as the preeminent writer on baseball. The English born player of ball games such as rounders and cricket arrived in the United States in 1837 and later took a job as a cricket reporter for the
New York Times. He first observed the American game of "base ball" in 1856 when he happened upon a spirited match played by two New York clubs on the Elysian Fields that reflected an aggressive, high-energized characteristic of mid-nineteenth century Americans: “Americans do not care to dawdle over a sleep-inspiring game, all through the heat of a June or July day,” Chadwick wrote. “What they do they want to do in a hurry. In baseball all is lightning; every action is as swift as a seabird’s flight.”
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| Henry Chadwick, 1874 |
Thus the title of "father of base ball" bestowed upon Chadwick at the time of his death in 1908 must be a mistake if the game and rules of base ball had already been developed by the time Chadwick observed his match. Recent research seems to indicate that others, such as Daniel "Doc" Lucius Adams, are perhaps more fitting of that title due to their part in developing the rules of the national game. At the very least, Adams and those who developed the rules in the 1840s, are among the "founding fathers of baseball." Chadwick, however, popularized baseball among working-class Americans by translating his passion for the sport into regular columns that he contributed to the
New York Clipper and
Sunday Mercury. According to baseball historian John Thorn, Chadwick was baseball's greatest booster, who pioneered the box-score with copious statistics that aided his reporting. Chadwick later wrote in his 1868
Game of Base Ball:
"I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans . . . as much so as cricket is for England. . . . I began to invent a method of giving detailed reports of leading contests at base ball, and, seeing that every thing connected with the game, almost, was new, its rules crude and hastily prepared, with no systematized plan of recording the details of a game, and, in fact, no fixed method of either playing or scoring it, as soon as I became earnestly interested in the subject I began to submit amendments to the rules of the game to the consideration of the fraternity, generally in the form of suggestions through the press, my first improvement introduced being an innovation on the simple method of scoring then in vogue. Step by step, little by little, either directly or indirectly, did I succeed in assisting to change the game from the almost simple field exercise it was . . . to the manly, scientific game of ball it is now."
For more on Chadwick and his role in scoring the national game, see this 2009
NPR piece.
Chadwick biographer, Andrew Schiff contributed the following brief
biography for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
A diamond complete with bases surrounds Chadwick's monument at Green-Wood Cemetery.
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| Henry Chadwick's plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame |
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