October 1, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: Henry Chadwick

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

For his bicentennial, on three ways the groundbreaking journalist Henry Chadwick (1824-1908) helped shape both the sport and its stories.

1)      Rules: As yesterday’s post indicated, and as I’ll get into even more fully in tomorrow’s post, in its early decades baseball featured a number of different and even contrasting rules. But it’s fair to say that the game wouldn’t have become a truly national sport without a more uniform and consistent set of rules, and despite spending most of his career as a sportswriter (rather than a league official, although he did briefly perform that role as well), Henry Chadwick contributed meaningfully to that evolution. To cite only the most prominent example, for its first couple decades baseball included a “bound rule,” meaning if a fielder caught a batted ball after one bounce it was still ruled an out; Chadwick was the most vocal opponent of this rule, seeing it as an unnecessary protection of fielders, and in the 1860s succeeded in getting it eliminated (by the National Association of Base-Ball Players at their December 1863 convention), an innovation without which modern baseball would look entirely different.

2)      Box scores: As any baseball fan will tell you, one of the greatest joys of following the sport is the box score—ideally keeping score at a game oneself, but in any case reading box scores in the paper (or, yes, on the intertubes) the following day. And while the origins of baseball are hotly contested as I discussed in yesterday’s post, there’s no doubt to whom we can trace the origins of the box score: Henry Chadwick. In his role as the baseball writer for the New York Clipper, Chadwick created the first box score for a game in 1859, including a number of specific details that remain part of box scores and baseball scoring to this day: “K” as the simple for strikeout; the numbers assigned to each of the nine fielders; and more. As I’ve argued many times in this space, the essence of baseball is that it is both itself a story and profoundly connected to many other American stories, and Chadwick’s creation of the box score both reflected and helped amplify that sports storytelling.

3)      Writing: As the many baseball books I’ve highlighted in this space make clear, that storytelling doesn’t just happen through the immediacy of scoring and box scores—it also can be found in the centuries of writing that have accompanied the sport’s development and enduring presence in American culture and society. Henry Chadwick was one of the first to create such baseball books, on two distinct but complementary levels: as the editor of annual guides such as Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player (which launched with that 1860 edition); and as the author of the first hardcover baseball book, The Game of Base Ball: How to Learn It, How to Play It, and How to Teach It, with Sketches of Noted Players (1868). As someone who has needed to research 19^th century baseball for the podcast I’ll share in the weekend post, I’m eternally indebted to Chadwick’s writing—as are all of us who love the game.

Next baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?