LIU-Brooklyn Professor Joseph Dorinson, author of Jackie Robinson: Race, Sport and the American Dream reviews Andrew J. Schiff's Chadwick Biography.
Andrew J. Schiff’s “The Father of Baseball”-- A Biography of Henry Chadwick is a welcome addition to the bumper crop of books springing up on the fertile subject of baseball. Generally regarded baseball’s father, Chadwick has gradually slipped into near obscurity. Author Schiff’s major contribution, I believe, has been to rescue his subject from that dark hole that is our throw-away culture. In a cogently argued thesis, Schiff persuades this reader that Chadwick really matters. Among his many contributions to our national game, the most important it seems is the invention of the scorecard and the application of statistics. In addition, Chadwick served as rule-maker, historian, publicist, promoter, and moralist. Baseball historian David Q. Voigt regarded him as a modern
Moses.
Remarkably, this book germinated form a five-page term paper at Brooklyn College, morphed into an eighty-five page master’s essay and now, happily, a book. Professor Schiff highlights Chadwick’s multi-faceted roles in baseball’s evolution principally from the British game of “rounders,” and his prolonged advocacy of baseball’s instrumental impact on health, sobriety, and morality. The author deftly traces Chadwick’s odyssey from British roots. Born into a family of radical persuasion—his father and grandfather were inspired by John Wesley and Jeremy Bentham--Chadwick steadily moved to the right on the political spectrum. Schiff does not allow his affinity for Chadwick to blur his objectivity in charting his subject’s growing opposition to
unionization of baseball players, his fawning approach to President McKinley and his dogged insistence that baseball began in Britain .
Schiff deserves kudos for placing his subject in a social-historical context. Indeed, every decade is situated in broadly constructed cultural framework. In the late 1830s, America was visited by economic panic, which Schiff vividly evokes as the Chadwick family arrives in 1837 and settles in Brooklyn to please Henry’s mother who prefers a rural setting . Here again, Schiff provides what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description.” Set in the years of cholera and immigrant influx in the 1840s and 1850s, Schiff artfully paints a world of change with broad strokes of blackand white, rich and poor, elite Protestant culture vis a vis rowdy Bowery B’hoys as festering poverty, disease, and crime fueled fears.
Animated by both fear and a sense of Noblesse oblige, wealthy reformers pushed for park construction to provide clean air and social intercourse across class lines. Chadwick shared this concern but advocated sports as a solution as he battled against alcoholism, gambling, and disease. After twenty years of life in Brooklyn, Chadwick felt fully Americanized, fortified with his love for baseball, which hadreplaced cricket as his favorite sport. From 1857 on, Chadwick trumpeted the benefits of baseball in a variety of publications initiating a new genre of sports journalism.
Chadwick made a major contribution in another capacity as rule maker; hence, the apt analogy to Moses. One of his important innovations was the fly-catch rather than a one-bounce catch rule. Coupled with the elimination of “soaking” i.e. plunking a base runner with the ball to record an out, these changes brought baseball closer to its modern incarnation.
Baseball grew ascendant during that most traumatic decade: the 1860s, dominated by Civil War and industrialization. In this period, the New York game expanded across our country. Chadwick played a pivotal part as rule-maker, educator, and journalist. With a powerful penchant for statistical analysis, he developed significant instruments for measuring performance with an emphasis on RBIs, hits, errors: all recorded in scorecards (79-88). Always concerned with sportsmanship and fair play, Chadwick thundered against deviations from gentlemanly conduct.
Present at the creation, Chadwick attended a critical game. An undefeated team professional from Cincinnati, the Red Stockings engaged the semi-pro Brooklyn Atlantics on June 5, 1870. After nine innings, the score stood 5-5, Cincinnati’s manager, Harry Wright, a transplanted New Yorker, insisted on extra-innings. Describing this pivotal contest, Schiff demonstrates a mastery of detail encapsulated in a compelling narrative.
After a brief argument, to avoid a forfeit, the Brooklyn nine reluctantly returned to the field. In the eleventh inning, the Red-Stockings scored two runs to forge ahead, 7 to 5. In their half of this inning, the Atlantics rallied. Charlie Smith led off with a single. After a wild pitch, Joe Start hit a long fly to right into an overflow crowd sitting in the outfield. Absent a rule for interference, one pugnacious fan jumped on right-fielder Cal McVey scoring one run and allowing Start to reach third base. He scored on a base-hit by team captain Robert Ferguson. The next batter, pitcher George Zeitlein hit a hard liner to first that handcuffed Charlie Gould who threw to second base, where Charlie Sweasy “badly muffed the ball” sending the winning run home and ending the eighty-seven consecutive win streak (119-20). Professional baseball with a premium on winning rose with the Zeitgeist, the Hegelian spirit of the age. The “Gilded Age” spanning the last decade of the 19thcentury ushered in an era of “Robber Baron” corruption. No institutions--economic, political, social--were spared, not even baseball The national pastime became increasingly centralized, corporatized, and bureaucratic (136-38, 155-56). In the turbulent 1870s the National League was founded and Chadwick, marginalized. Bereft of an entrepreneurial spirit in an age of big business, this Renaissance man--musician, poet, composer, amateur scientist, athlete, and intellectual--retreated into a new specialization; sports journalism (156-59). Quirky and opinionated to a fault, Henry hammered away at the home run, inferior fielding, gambling, greedy players seeking unionization, rowdy fans, and ungentlemanly conduct on the field. Schiff astutely observes that economic dependence on Albert Spalding’s largesse and a later stipend of $50 per month for life (169, 174) may have trimmed Chadwick’s ideological sails and compromised his objectivity. Many subsequent sports journalists, print as well as media, fell prey to “shilling” for management by pecuniary seduction.
In one instance, however, Schiff delineates Chadwick’s willingness to demolish the Abner Doubleday invention of baseball myth. A product of fervent indeed feverednationalism emanating from the 1898 war with Spain, this historical gained wideacceptance. Countering the conventional wisdom and gullibility, Chadwick argued that baseball evolved from British sports, principally rounders. Attacked by foes like Will
Rankin and John Montgomery ward and friends like Albert Spalding, Chadwick held his solid if not hallowed ground. Although this moot issue eluded definitive resolution, the aging process at twilight time brought reconciliation and recognition for Henry Chadwick who died on April 20, 1898. The revered subject of many accolades, “The Father of Baseball” was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to which this
reviewer and a vast number of other baseball pilgrims have visited to pay personal homage. Andrew Schiff provides a wonderful photograph and illuminating text of this shrine. The monument, funded by Brooklyn club (later Dodger) president Charles H. Ebbets, is centered with a bronzed catcher’s mask, baseball glove, and two crossed bats. At the apex sits a baseball in granite.
Clearly, Andrew Schiff has drawn a compelling portrait of Henry Chadwick: warts, eccentricities, flip-flops and all. On balance, however, his many contributions outweigh the deficits. Despite the premature deaths of three of his five children (one was adopted), he and wife Jane Botts kept the faith and enjoyed 60 years of marriage and love laced with baseball. Perhaps, more information on devoted wife Jane would be welcome along with less detail on statistical minutiae for this mathematics-
impaired reader. Professor Schiff, for the most part, engages us with a fluid narrative that begins on the Elysian Fields of West Hoboken “early one afternoon in the fall of 1856” and we are “hooked” as it were on the man with “iron-gray beard and…sparkling blue eyes….Standing six feet tall and of heavy build, Chadwick, during the heyday of baseball was often bigger than many players he encountered.” Schiff employs a
painterly style to conjure up his principal protagonist in this vital addition to baseball scholarship. Despite a pardonable penchant for the word “aspect,” he hits high notes in prose that occasionally sings. As a case in point, analyze this:
"Yet he was more than an eyewitness. Chadwick was the man
responsible for helping baseball grow with his work as a journalist, a
statistician, as a proponent of health and recreation, a genius and a visionary who believed, when no one else believed, it could become the national game. He was there when there was only one professional league, when there were labor battles, when baseball had its struggles. It was often Chadwick’s stead hand that guided that sport. Now, that 1908 was here, baseball, thanks to Chadwick’s direction, had woven itself into the American psyche."
responsible for helping baseball grow with his work as a journalist, a
statistician, as a proponent of health and recreation, a genius and a visionary who believed, when no one else believed, it could become the national game. He was there when there was only one professional league, when there were labor battles, when baseball had its struggles. It was often Chadwick’s stead hand that guided that sport. Now, that 1908 was here, baseball, thanks to Chadwick’s direction, had woven itself into the American psyche."
cudgels on the currently “hot” and possible over-rated Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball. Schiff chides Lewis for smugness and “his complete ignorance of Chadwick’s writing and intellectual ideas.” A cold fish, Lewis carps on Chadwick’s overly moralistic use of statistics, gambling, and alcoholism. Schiff counters with references to modern players’ abuse of cocaine in the 1980s and steroids in the 1990s through this decade as well. Applying contemporary standards to Chadwick’s era is to engage in the fallacy of “presentism,” Schiff argues and Chadwick’s good intentions to improve the “game that was constantly changing” deserves kudos rather than censure.
Appendix two alone, teeming with insight as well as inventive, is worth the price of admission to this engrossing study. If, in the final analysis, Henry Chadwick served as baseball’s Moses, who never reached the promised land of modern, racially integrated baseball, then his legatees,
reform-minded, progressive journalists cast in the mold of Wendell Smith, Sam Lacey, Lester Rodney, Bill Mardo, Roger Kahn, and Stan Isaacs function as latter-day Joshuas: smashing the walls of corruption, intolerance, and racism. Add to this heady mix writers like Jules Tygiel, Peter Golenbock, Arnold Rampersad, Lee Lowenfish, Maury Allen, Bob McGee and now, Andrew Schiff; then the path blazed by pioneer Henry Chadwick proceeds to glory. My only regret, echoing Robert Front’s “Road Not Taken” is that Professor Schiff, an excellent, caring compassionate teacher, departed from the classroom where he is badly needed and sorely missed.
Respectfully,
Joseph Dorinson
Professor of History
Long Island University: Brooklyn Center