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