Henry Chadwick (October 5, 1824 – April 20, 1908) was an English-American
sportswriter,
baseball statistician
Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a player or team.
Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and normally players act individually rather than performing in clusters, the sport lends itsel ...
and historian, often called the "Father of Baseball" for his early reporting on and contributions to the development of the game. He edited the first baseball guide that was sold to the public. He is credited with creating
box scores, as well as creating the abbreviation "K" that designates a
strikeout
In baseball or softball, a strikeout (or strike-out) occurs when a batter accumulates three strikes during a time at bat. It usually means that the batter is out. A strikeout is a statistic recorded for both pitchers and batters, and is deno ...
. He is said to have created the statistics of
batting average and
earned run average
In baseball statistics, earned run average (ERA) is the average of earned runs allowed by a pitcher per nine innings pitched (i.e. the traditional length of a game). It is determined by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number ...
(ERA). He was posthumously inducted into the
National Baseball Hall of Fame
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a history museum and hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York, operated by private interests. It serves as the central point of the history of baseball in the United States and displays baseball-r ...
in 1938.
Early life
Chadwick was born on October 5, 1824 in
Exeter
Exeter () is a city in Devon, South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol.
In Roman Britain, Exeter was established as the base of Legio II Augusta under the personal comm ...
, England.
His grandfather, Andrew Chadwick, had been a close friend of theologian
John Wesley
John Wesley (; 2 March 1791) was an English people, English cleric, Christian theology, theologian, and Evangelism, evangelist who was a leader of a Christian revival, revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The soci ...
. His father, James Chadwick, was a supporter of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...
who also tutored
John Dalton
John Dalton (; 5 or 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, which he had. Colour b ...
in music and botany. James Chadwick had served as editor of a publication known as the ''Western Times''.
Edwin Chadwick's mother had made James Chadwick a widower shortly after Edwin's birth.
Chadwick was the younger half-brother of Sir
Edwin Chadwick
Sir Edwin Chadwick KCB (24 January 18006 July 1890) was an English social reformer who is noted for his leadership in reforming the Poor Laws in England and instituting major reforms in urban sanitation and public health. A disciple of Uti ...
, England's sanitary philosopher who developed environmental measures and laws designed to counteract the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Chadwick moved to
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
with his family at the age of 12. Biographer Andrew Schiff writes that Henry 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." He began to write music and to teach piano and guitar.
In 1848, Chadwick married Jane Botts from
Richmond, Virginia
(Thus do we reach the stars)
, image_map =
, mapsize = 250 px
, map_caption = Location within Virginia
, pushpin_map = Virginia#USA
, pushpin_label = Richmond
, pushpin_m ...
. Botts' father Alexander had been president of the Virginia State Council. She was also related to politician
John Botts
John Minor Botts (September 16, 1802 – January 8, 1869) was a nineteenth-century politician, planter and lawyer from Virginia. He was a prominent Unionist in Richmond, Virginia, during the American Civil War.
Early and family life
Botts w ...
.
Chadwick edited John Botts' work titled ''The Great Rebellion''. Chadwick and his wife had three children, Richard Westlake Chadwick, in 1849, Susan Mary Chadwick, in 1851, and Rose Virginia Chadwick, 1853.
Chadwick became a frequent player of
cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...
and
similar ball games such as
rounders. 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
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
''; he watched a match between New York's Eagles and Gothams.
[ In 1857 he focused his attention as a journalist and writer on baseball after joining the '' New York Clipper'', and was also soon hired on to provide coverage for other New York papers including the '']Sunday Mercury
''Sunday Mercury'' is a Sunday tabloid published in Birmingham, UK, and now owned by Reach plc.
The first edition was published on 29 December 1918. The first editor was John Turner Fearon (1869–1937), who left the Dublin-based ''Freeman's ...
''.[Spink, Alfred Henry]
The national game
p. 356 (1911)
Contributions to baseball
Promotion of the game
Chadwick was one of the prime movers in the rise of baseball to its popularity at the turn of the 20th century. 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. 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.
Early baseball had a provision known as the "bound rule", which held that a fielder could catch a batted ball on one bounce and that it would still be recorded as an out. Chadwick was an outspoken critic of the rule for many years, stating that fielders should have to catch a ball on the fly for it to count as an out. In 1864, the bound rule was eliminated for balls hit into fair territory. The bound rule for foul balls persisted into the 1880s.
Chadwick edited ''The Beadle Dime Base-Ball Player'', the first annual baseball guide on public sale, as well as the Spalding and Reach annual guides for a number of years and in this capacity promoted the game and influenced the infant discipline of sports journalism
Sports journalism is a form of writing that reports on matters pertaining to sporting topics and competitions. Sports journalism started in the early 1800s when it was targeted to the social elite and transitioned into an integral part of the ...
. In his 1861 ''Beadle'' guide, he listed totals of games played, outs, runs, home run
In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run i ...
s, and strikeout
In baseball or softball, a strikeout (or strike-out) occurs when a batter accumulates three strikes during a time at bat. It usually means that the batter is out. A strikeout is a statistic recorded for both pitchers and batters, and is deno ...
s for hitters on prominent clubs, the first database of its kind. His goal was to provide numerical evidence to prove which players helped a team to win.
In 1867 he accompanied the National Base Ball Club of Washington D.C. on their inaugural national tour, as their official scorer. The next year, Chadwick wrote the first hardcover baseball book, ''The Game of Base Ball''. In 1874 was instrumental in organizing a tour of England which included games of both baseball and cricket. In his role as journalist, he campaigned against the detrimental effects on the game of both alcohol and gambling.
Despite a friendship with Albert Spalding, Chadwick was scornful of the attempts to have Abner Doubleday declared the inventor of baseball. "He means well", said Chadwick, "but he don't know". Chadwick later willed his baseball library to Spalding.
Author William Cook wrote that "Chadwick was at times a bit self-aggrandizing, but his heart was always deeply rooted in looking after the best interest of the game." An 1876 ''Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...
'' article attacked Chadwick's status as the father of baseball, saying in part that Chadwick "has had enough experience to have made himself a man of respect had heaven but given him a head ... he proceeded to call himself the '"Father of the Game,' and to assume much on the strength of the title. But he found an unruly child, and one which disinherited him with rapidity and ease."[ Cook writes that Chadwick may have been a victim of "Western journalism", a sensationalized style of writing.][
]
Box scores and statistics
Chadwick is credited with devising the baseball box score (which he adapted from the cricket scorecard) for reporting game events. The first box score appeared in an 1859 issue of the ''Clipper''. It was a grid with nine rows for players and nine columns for innings. The original box scores also created the often puzzling abbreviation for strikeout as "K" – "K" being the last letter of "struck" in "struck out". Chadwick assigned numbers to each defensive position for scorekeeping purposes, a system that remains in modern baseball scorekeeping.
Newspapers had previously tallied runs scored, but Chadwick's 1859 box score looked similar in structure to modern ones. Baseball researcher Bill James
George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. ...
credits Chadwick's creation of the box score with his interest in the game, but he criticized Chadwick's omission of the walk
Walking (also known as ambulation) is one of the main gaits of terrestrial locomotion among legged animals. Walking is typically slower than running and other gaits. Walking is defined by an 'inverted pendulum' gait in which the body vaults ov ...
from calculation of a player's batting average: ""What they failed to understand is that actually the batter has as much or a little more to do with when the walk occurs as the pitcher does. They ignored that element of it and that did distort the game for a lot of people."[ The box score was popularized in 1925 when '']Baseball Magazine
''Baseball Magazine'' is a now-defunct baseball magazine, the first monthly baseball magazine published in the United States. The magazine was founded by Boston sportswriter Jake Morse prior to the 1908 season. It continued publishing until Sep ...
'' republished Chadwick's 1859 ''Clipper'' article.[
Chadwick is credited with devising statistical measures such as batting average and ]earned run average
In baseball statistics, earned run average (ERA) is the average of earned runs allowed by a pitcher per nine innings pitched (i.e. the traditional length of a game). It is determined by dividing the number of earned runs allowed by the number ...
(ERA). He felt that batting average was the best representation of a batter's offensive skills. He initially scored walks as errors charged to the pitcher. Walks did not exist in cricket (though there is a penalty run for a wide
WIDE or Wide may refer to:
*Wide (cricket)
*Wide and narrow data, terms used to describe two different presentations for tabular data
*WIDE Project, Widely Integrated Distributed Environment
*Wide-angle Infinity Display Equipment
*WIDE-LP, a radio ...
) and upon learning about them in baseball, he felt that they did not have anything to do with offensive skill. He later removed walks entirely from baseball statistics. ERA originated not in the goal of measuring a pitcher's worth but to differentiate between runs caused by batting skill (hits) and lack of fielding skill (errors). He is also noted as believing fielding range to be a superior skill to avoiding errors.
Journalistic style
The following description of a game was written by Henry Chadwick and appeared in his ''Base Ball Memoranda''. It is typical of his style of sports journalism, and that of his time:
A Base Ball tourney had been held in Chicago on July 4, 1867, in which the Excelsiors of that city and the Forest City Club, of Rockford, had been the leading contestants. The former had defeated the Forest City nine in two games, by the very close scores of 45–41 in one, and 28–25 in another, when the Forest Citys were invited to meet the Nationals at Chicago on July 25, a day which proved the most notable of the tour. The contest took place at Dexter Park, before a vast crowd of spectators, the majority of whom looked to see the Nationals have almost a walk-over. In the game A. G. Spalding
Albert Goodwill Spalding (September 2, 1849 – September 9, 1915) was an American pitcher, manager, and executive in the early years of professional baseball, and the co-founder of A.G. Spalding sporting goods company. He was born and raised ...
was pitcher and Ross Barnes shortstop for the Forest City nine; these two afterwards becoming famous as star players of the Boston professional team of the early seventies. Williams was pitcher for the Nationals and Frank Norton catcher. The Nationals took the lead in the first innings by 3 to 2; but in the next two innings they added but five runs to their score, while the Forest Citys added thirteen to theirs, thereby taking the lead by a score of fifteen to eight, to the great surprise of the crowd and the delight of the Rockfords. The Nationals tried hard to recover the lost ground. The final result, however, was the success of the Forest Citys by a score of 29 to 23 in a nine innings game, twice interrupted by rain.
Later life
Late in life, Chadwick continued editing the ''Spalding Base Ball Guides'' and producing a column for the '' Brooklyn Daily Eagle''.[ In late 1905, he wrote the editor of ''The New York Times'' to propose widening of the baseball bat to overcome the advantage that pitchers had established in the game. In his letter, Chadwick noted that some cricket experts had advocated for the narrowing of the cricket bat to bring balance to the advantage that belonged to the batter in that game.]
In the winter before the 1908 baseball season, Chadwick was struck by an automobile and was bedridden for several weeks.[Schiff, p. 215.] He recovered and attended an exhibition game at the Polo Grounds
The Polo Grounds was the name of three stadiums in Upper Manhattan, New York City, used mainly for professional baseball and American football from 1880 through 1963. The original Polo Grounds, opened in 1876 and demolished in 1889, was built fo ...
the week before the season began. He caught a cold while at the game, and the illness worsened when he attended an Opening Day game at Washington Park in Brooklyn.
On April 19, Chadwick was moving furniture from the fourth floor of his apartment to the second 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. Henry Chadwick is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Legacy
For his contributions to the game of baseball, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a history museum and hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York, operated by private interests. It serves as the central point of the history of baseball in the United States and displays baseball-r ...
by the Veterans Committee in 1938
Events
January
* January 1
** The Constitution of Estonia#Third Constitution (de facto 1938–1940, de jure 1938–1992), new constitution of Estonia enters into force, which many consider to be the ending of the Era of Silence and the a ...
. He was inducted in the same ceremony as Alexander Cartwright
Alexander Joys Cartwright Jr. (April 17, 1820 – July 12, 1892) was a founding member of the New York Knickerbockers, New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in the 1840s. Although he was an inductee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Mu ...
.[
In 2009, the ]Society for American Baseball Research
The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball primarily through the use of statistics. Established in Cooperstown, New ...
(SABR) established the Henry Chadwick Award
The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball, primarily through the use of statistics. The organization was founded in C ...
to honor the outstanding contributions of baseball researchers. Bill James and John Thorn
John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.
Personal profile
Thorn was born in ...
are among the award's recipients.
A collection of historical baseball items, which featured a letter written by Chadwick on the origins of baseball, sold at auction in 2004 for $310,500.
Chadwick was inducted to the Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame during 2020.
Chadwick, through the Spalding Athletic Library collection, added "The Ancient History of Base Ball" in 1867 and "Technical Terms of Base Ball" in 1897.[The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary: A Cyclopedic Reference]
Retrieved Feb 11, 2021
Notes
References
*Tygiel, Jules. ''Past Time''.
* Alan Schwarz, Schwarz, Alan (2004). ''The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics''. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.
*Schiff, Andrew (2008). ''"The Father of Baseball": A Biography of Henry Chadwick''. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
External links
*
Hall of Fame graves
– Gravesites of Baseball Hall of Famers
*
*
The Game of Base Ball (1868)
– Complete text of Chadwick's 1868 book
Review of "The Father of Baseball: A Biography of Henry Chadwick"
*
Green-Wood Cemetery Burial Search
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chadwick, Henry
1824 births
1908 deaths
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
American sportswriters
Baseball developers
Baseball writers
English emigrants to the United States
Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery