October 5, 1824, 200 years ago: Henry Chadwick (no middle name) is born in Exeter, Devon, in the West Country of England. He is, effectively, America's 1st sportswriter. Absolutely, he was the father of American sports writing.
When he was 12 years old, the Chadwick family moved to Brooklyn. Biographer Andrew Schiff writes that Chadwick "was not brought up to value possessions or with an understanding of commerce and trade; rather he received an education that was drenched in moral philosophy and science." In 1848, Chadwick married Jane Botts, and they had 3 children: Son Richard, and daughters Susan and Rose.
Like many young Englishmen, and many young Americans, of his time, Chadwick played cricket. He began covering cricket for numerous local newspapers, such as the Long Island Star. He first came across organized baseball in 1856 as a cricket reporter for The New York Times, which was founded in 1851, but was far from the "paper of record" that it would become in the early 20th Century.
He was watching a match played between a pair of New York teams, the Eagles and Gothams, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, essentially the capital of baseball at the time. Like so many, he was hooked on the American game, and abandoned the English one.
He focused his attention as a journalist and writer on baseball after joining the New York Clipper in 1857, and was also soon hired on to provide coverage for other New York papers including the Sunday Mercury.
A keen amateur statistician and professional writer, he helped sculpt the public perception of the game, as well as providing the basis for the records of teams' and players' achievements in the form of baseball statistics. Essentially, he created the 1st baseball stat: Batting average. In cricket, batting average is the total number of runs a player has scored divided by the number of times he has been out, roughly comparable, though hardly equivalent, to a baseball player's slugging percentage. Chadwick modified this so that, in baseball, a batting average is hits divided by at-bats.
He also decided that, since both words could both be abbreviated to "S," "shortstop" should be "SS," and "strikeout" should be "K," for "struck." He did not, however, invent the box score, as he is often credited with doing.
He also served on baseball rules committees and influenced the game itself. He is sometimes referred to as "the father of baseball" because he facilitated the popularity of the sport in its early days. In a more recent view, Schiff suggests that Chadwick was the father of baseball because he nurtured the sport for decades, rather than a claim to have started the American game.
From 1860 to 1881, he wrote for Beadle's Dime Base-Ball Player. (Even into the early 20th Century, the sport was often printed as 2 words, sometimes hyphenated: "Base ball" or "Base-ball.") From 1869 to 1885, he contributed to DeWitt's Base-Ball Guide.
From 1878 onward, he contributed to Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide, produced by Albert Goodwill Spalding, former star pitcher who became, as we would say today, the general manager of the team we now call the Chicago Cubs. But Chadwick disagreed with Spalding on the origins of baseball: Spalding wanted to believe it was purely American, while Chadwick said it was derived from English games like cricket and rounders.
Eventually, Spalding set up a commission to determine the origins of baseball, and it came up with the story that it was invented in 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, by Abner Doubleday, who went on to become a hero of the American Civil War. Chadwick knew it was baloney, but America, eager to throw off its immigrant origins, embraced the story.
Or maybe Chadwick was just a traditionalist, and stuck to the older story out of stubbornness. As Richard Hershberger, a historian who specializes in the post-Civil War era, points out, Chadwick could be a bit of a "Get off my lawn, you filthy kids!" type in his writing.
On April 19, 1908, Chadwick was moving furniture from the 4th floor of his apartment to the 2nd floor, when he fell unconscious. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and heart failure. He awakened briefly, and asked about the game between Brooklyn and New York, but he died the next day. He was 83 years old. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the final resting place of many of the early ballplayers he had covered.
In 1938, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. His plaque calls him "Baseball's Preeminent Pioneer," although it also, erroneously, calls him the inventor of the box score. In 1962, the Hall of Fame established the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, for writers. In 2021, due to his support for keeping baseball segregated, Spink's name was taken off it, and it is now the Base Ball Writers Association of America Career Excellence Award. Officially, receiving this award does not constitute being elected to the Hall of Fame. The only 2 writers actually elected have been Henry Chadwick and Sol White, the latter an early black player who went on to write about the Negro Leagues.
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