Shortly after their arrival, the Chadwicks moved to Brooklyn. Henry Chadwick had fond memories of his childhood where he spent his first years in Brooklyn fishing in Gowanus Canal, bird hunting, stealing fallen apricots near a Brooklyn farm. He even ice skated in present-day downtown Brooklyn (Brooklyn Heights), on Court Street near Hamilton Avenue.
And it was in Brooklyn, in 1838, where Chadwick was among those watching an historical cricket match between the English towns of Sheffield and Nottingham, an example how cricket was the dominant sport in this still early phase of American history. Of course, Chadwick gravitated toward cricket, as a proper English-born lad, abandoning his childhood fondness for rounders, which he often played with his school companions back in England.
Chadwick, in his later years, recalled how he and his friends would "dig a hole in the ground for the home position, and place four stones in a circle, or nearly so, for the bases, and, choosing up sides, we went in for a lively time at what was the parent game of base ball."
As the young Henry Chadwick matured into adulthood, he began to earn money teaching piano. Chadwick never lost his fondness for music and displayed his creative side by composing numerous waltzes and quadrilles. But his professional destiny, despite his interest in music, would not be in musical composition or music instruction. Chadwick's destiny lay with writing and journalism, the same profession his father had back in England.
In 1844, Chadwick began reporting for the Brooklyn paper the Long Island Star. By the mid 1850s, Chadwick combined his love of sports and writing by becoming a cricket writer for the New York Times. Chadwick would frequent the cricket grounds of Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey to cover matches. It was at Elysian Fields where Chadwick realized that a different bat and ball game with British roots had the potential to be the sport of America. In 1856, after watching a match between the Gotham and Eagle baseball clubs, Chadwick became convinced that he could make baseball America's "national game in word and in truth." Chadwick even realized that he could make baseball "a powerful lever . . .by which our people could be lifted into a position of more devotion to physical exercise and healthful out-door recreation than they had hitherto, as a people, been noted for."
After several minor successes in getting games published in the dailies, Chadwick joined the staff of an entertainment weekly called The New York Clipper in 1857.
Chadwick also began writing baseball for the Brooklyn Eagle as well as other local newspapers. His mission was to popularize the game and was able, due to his passion for promoting baseball, to join the baseball community by attending the rules committee. Chadwick also began to adjust the baseball box score by making improvements, tailoring this statistical device to the elements of the game. By 1860 he began writing a baseball manual for Beadle Dime. Beadle’s Dime Base Ball companion became the quintessential baseball guide. Here, Chadwick developed perhaps the most important statistical creation: the in-game scoring system. The letter K, used to denote a strikeout, was one of the ideas that has survived from his original design.
Chadwick journalism helped the New York version of the game spread to other cities like Philadelphia and Boston, two cities that had been dominated by Townball. After all, New York was the hub of publishing and many of New York’s weeklies were read throughout the country. Chadwick had also become one of the most important people promoting the game and would air his views on baseball matter in the press. One important battle he waged early on was the elimination of the bound catch. In primitive baseball, fielders were allowed to catch the ball on a bounce to retire a batter. Chadwick’s crusade to eliminate the bound catch was in his eyes, and perhaps the others who supported his stance, to make the game more “manly” and more “scientific.” His dual quest was both a reflection of the time and his background. Furthermore, Chadwick's opinions were also related to his interest in cricket, which also required the fly catch. Finally, in 1864, the baseball Rules Committee, finally voted to eliminate the bound catch. This rule change was important for the game's development as continued its spread throughout the Union. Among the rules Chadwick helped to establish was the overhand pitch and the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.
Chadwick, during these years, also began to tabulate home runs, total bases and hits. The tabulation of these numbers led to statistics like the batting average and slugging percentage. What also made Chadwick an important figure in the annals of baseball history was his moral stand against drinking, gambling and hippodroming, the practice of throwing games in an effort to draw interest to a particular series. Chadwick railed against immorality and was the person that was responsible for creating the phrase: “the best interests of baseball.” Today, with steroids threatening the integrity of the game, echoes of Chadwick’s moralism can be heard from the past. Chadwick’s effort to clean up the game became realized when in 1871, National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was created to bring about reform. When the National Association failed and was replaced in 1876 by the National League, Chadwick’s power within professional baseball was curtailed, though he continued to be an important voice in baseball. By the early 1880s, Chadwick began editing the Spalding Official Base Ball Guide, the official guide of the National League, owned by his friend Albert Spalding, a former pitching great for Boston and Chicago, who started his own sporting goods company. Chadwick was among Spalding’s mentors, but Spalding who was a brilliant baseball mind on his own used some of his genius for marketing by entering the sporting goods business. While Chadwick and Spalding remained friends throughout the years, they had their testy moments. Chadwick and Spalding became embroiled in the controversy over the origins of baseball. Nationalism and financial motivation led Albert Spalding to promote the false idea that baseball was created in the United States without any foreign influence or origin. Chadwick held that baseball derived from rounders, the game he played as a youth in England, a game that had been brought over to America by English immigrants. Primitive baseball and rounders shared many of the same rules and Chadwick assumed, with good reason, that the National Pastime derived from the English bat and ball game. Chadwick had stated in the first Beadle Dime of 1860 that baseball derived from rounders. Spalding, however, had other ideas and in 1907 he appointed the Mills commission to determine, once and for all, baseball’s “true origins.” After some deliberation, the committee “determined” that the game was invented by Civil War general Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in spite the fact that Doubleday never mentioned baseball in his voluminous diaries and never even played the sport. Despite being overwhelmed by the numerous baseball voices who claimed this lie to be true, Chadwick stuck to his guns and never changed his mind, though he sympathized with his friend’s effort at making the National sport and American game.
Though he had “lost” the argument, it never sullied Chadwick’s reputation on baseball matters, a reputation that earned him the title, since the early as the 1870s as the “Father of Baseball.” He had earned admirers throughout the nation, even President Theodore Roosevelt recognized Chadwick’s work. In 1904, when Chadwick celebrated his eightieth birthday, Roosevelt wrote:
My Dear Chadwick: I congratulate you on your eightieth year and your fiftieth year in journalism . . . and you are entitled to the good wishes of all for that part you have taken in behalf of decent sport.”
Chadwick acquired a cold following his attendance at two opening-day matches in April 1908 and grew progressively weaker as the cold grew into pneumonia. He died at age eighty-three. Buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his grave is marked my a monument topped by a granite sphere carved to resemble a baseball, and four corners of the lot are marked by stones etched to look like bases.
Chadwick was a visionary. He believed in baseball when no one dreamed to make it the National Game. He saw the day when all sports would receive as much attention in the press as other news. His contribution, his invention of sports journalim, his voice has earned him a not only a place in baseball history, but American history as well. In 1938, Chadwick was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, located, ironically, in Cooperstown, New York. He is the only journalist enshrined in the player’s wing of the museum.
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