Harry Wright
(photo from National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.)
The brilliant and highly athletic Harry Wright was a baseball genius on many levels. Like his friend Henry Chadwick, Wright was born in England but moved to America with his family as a boy. The son of an excellent cricket player, Wright played the game but gradually moved toward baseball. He excelled as a member of the Knickerbockers and played in baseball's first tournament, the Fashion Course games of 1859. Later, Wright made his mark as a manager developing in-game strategy and a structured conditioning program that included baseball specific drills. Wright was also the first real businessman of baseball, shrewdly leading the first openly all-professional club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, to a remarkable seventy game winning streak.
Though highly respected for his own baseball talents, Wright was modest. When William Hulbert called him the "Father of Baseball" Wright demurred. He said although "it has been my pleasure to me to do what I could to make base ball interesting and worthy of the support of the public . . .There is a gentleman in New York, Henry Chadwick, Esq. who is richly deserving of the title, 'father of the game," for 'the pen is mighty' and he has . . . used it for the best interest of the game, as you know."Albert Spalding
(photo from the Naitonal Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.)
Albert Spalding was a man of my talents. Although his name is most associated with the sporting goods company he founded in the late 1870s, Albert Spalding began as a baseball prodigy, a tall, lanky right-handed pitcher from the midwest who--as a sixteen year old, in 1867--led his underdog Rockford, Illinois club to an incredible upset victory over the star-laden Washington Nationals. Traveling with the National team was the great baseball journalist Henry Chadwick, who met the young man and came away impressed with his ability and intelligence. The two developed a lasting freindship, a friendship, though, that would have many tumultuous moments.
Spalding went on to have a fantastic career as a professional baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings, managed by Harry Wright, during the heyday of Chadwick's much adored National Association (1871-75). Later, Spalding, just prior to the founding of the National League in 1876, secretly signed with the Chicago White Stockings to pitch and to manage the team. Only a couple of years later, however, Spalding retired. Amassing over 200 wins, the first pitcher to reach that total, Spalding moved into a management position with the White Stockings. Spalding was now ready to emerge as one of the great off-the field figures in baseball after having learned from some of the brightest minds in the game: Chadwick, Wright, and the venerable William Hulbert had been his mentors, and greater still, Spalding had a brilliant baseball and business mind of his own.
Shortly thereafter, Spalding started his own business, the well-known sporting goods company, and manuevered to garner the exclusive rights as professional baseball's sporting goods supplier. After he succeeded, Spalding's Base Ball Guide was made the official guide of the National League.
In the early 1880s, after the death of Lewis Meacham, Spalding annointed Henry Chadwick to be the official editor of the guide completing a circle: Once, Chadwick had been his mentor, now Spalding had become Chadwick's boss.
Aside from his sporting goods company, Spalding also became involved in one of the most successful baseball and business scams of all time. Although he at first believed, like Chadwick, that baseball had evolved from the British game of rounders, Spalding became convinced that baseball was an American creation and had no British roots. After twenty years of arguing his case privately and in public, Spalding, in 1905 put together a committee to research, once and for all, baseball's true origins. The Mills' Commission was made up of some of the best known people associated with the game in order to convince the public that it was serious in its endeavors. Whatever its intention, the Commission came to the conclusion, with flimsy evidence, that dead Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Spalding was behind it all, creating the myth even though Doubleday never had anything at all to do with the game. Chadwick tried all his might to defend his position, but he must have realized that it was a lost cause: his aging voice of reason (Chadwick was in his eighties at the time) was drowned out by Spalding and the other men who fed the frenzied American public hungry for a hero during the rise of American nationalism.
Although the two battled in public, Spalding and Chadwick maintained their friendship. Chadwick even sympathized, on some level, with Spalding's efforts to Americanize baseball's roots. After Chadwick's death in April, 1908, Spalding was entrusted with Chadwick's scrapbook of news clippings.