Henry Chadwick

"The Father of Base Ball."

Henry Chadwick played Shortstop for the Knickerbockers, for a little while. Now onto his business ventures.

"The first base-ball match we ever player in, was at the Elysian Fields in the fall of 1847. It was some years after we had been reporting cricket for several seasons that we took up base-ball, getting interested in it and seeing what a lever it would be to lift American into the love of outdoor sports."

Chadwick convinced the New York Times to post the results of their games in their columns. He also became the countries first baseball editor, first for the New York Clipper and then later for the New York Eagle, where he stayed for almost half a century. Chadwick also introduced the newspaper box score, so that one players performance could be measured against another's. He wrote this concerning the value of the newspaper box score:

"…and we are frequently surprised to find that the modest but efficient worker, who has played earnestly but steadily through the season, apparently unnoticed , has to come in, at the close of the race the real victor."

Below, he compared the "fast actioned" pace of a 9 inning baseball game to the slowness of cricket, where you had to score 21 runs to be the winner:

"Americans do not care to dawdle over a sleep-inspiring game all through the heat of a June or July day. What do they do, they want to do in a hurry. In baseball, all is lightning; every action is swift as a seabird's flight."

Chadwick both edited and created baseball guides and yearbooks, he was a member of the Rules Committee of the National Association of Base Ball Players, and was also admired for his encyclopedic knowledge of the changing rules of preseason games.