What did Mr. Lincoln enjoy doing?

[Laurie Verge]

From a NY Times review of a book on the history of baseball:

Debate Over Baseball’s Origins Spills Into Another Century
Ivan R. Dee/Associated Press
The 1858 New York Knickerbockers and Brooklyn Excelsiors. The Knicks’ Louis Fenn Wadsworth received belated credit for his innovations.
By JOHN THORN
Published: March 12, 2011
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Moving beyond the binary and false options of Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright Jr. as the father of baseball, three better candidates emerge: Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton and Louis Fenn Wadsworth. Cartwright’s plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame declares he set the bases 90 feet apart and established nine innings as a game and nine players as a team. He did none of these things, and every other word of substance on his plaque is false.


Baseball Hall of Fame
There is evidence that Alexander Cartwright, above, and Abner Doubleday should not be credited with inventing baseball.
Adams, known as Doc, set the base paths at 90 feet, among other notable innovations, including creating the position of shortstop — eight years after Cartwright left New York in the California gold rush of 1849. Wheaton created the Knickerbocker rules by copying a set he had drawn up for an earlier ball club, the Gothams, in 1837.

As to nine men and nine innings — and perhaps even more — these may be credited to Wadsworth. A first baseman for the Gothams and the Knickerbockers from about 1850 to 1862, the mysterious Wadsworth may provide the most compelling story of all.

No one credited him as an innovator until 1907, when the Mills Commission neared the end of its three-year mandate to determine the origins of baseball. On Dec. 30, Abraham G. Mills hurriedly dictated his conclusions to his stenographer and anointed Doubleday, as per the wishes of Albert G. Spalding, whose brainstorm the commission had been.

Yet Mills took care in his final report to note a “statement made by Mr. Curry, of the pioneer Knickerbocker club” that “a diagram, showing the ball field laid out substantially as it is today, was brought to the field one day by a Mr. Wadsworth.” Despite having officially crowned Doubleday, Mills followed with queries about the identity and whereabouts of Wadsworth for nearly three months, fruitlessly.

On March 20, 1908, the commission’s conclusions were published in Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide. No more was heard about Wadsworth until 1973, when Harold Peterson wrote a biography of Alexander Cartwright called “The Man Who Invented Baseball.” In it, he observed, “Mr. Wadsworth, whose Christian name, occupation, residence and pedigree remained secreted in Mills’s bosom, was never heard of” again.

Mills and Peterson believed that if Wadsworth presented a diagram, it must have been in 1845. Herein lay a crucial misunderstanding. Wadsworth was a Gotham until April 1, 1854, when he inexplicably switched allegiances (perhaps in exchange for considerations that would have made him the game’s first professional). Did he bring a diagram to the Knick field in 1854-55, when the baselines were not yet established at 90 feet and the pitcher’s distance was unspecified?

Maybe yes, maybe no. But he certainly gave us a game of nine innings and nine men, at a critical time when sentiment leaned to seven. Before the first convention of New York area ball clubs on Feb. 25, 1857, a Knickerbocker-dominated rules committee adopted Section 26, making the game seven innings and setting the minimum number of players to a side at seven. In the convention, however, on Wadsworth’s rebel motion, the assembled delegates changed the recommendation to nine.

Bu his victory spelled the end of his tenure with the Knickerbockers. Wadsworth failed to appear for a game on June 8, 1857, though he had been named to play. Six days later, he resigned; by the next month, he was again manning first base with his accustomed panache, but for the Gothams.

Wadsworth left a trail that historians and genealogical experts had been unable to pick up. Wadsworth family histories offered no clue. But by 2004, the search tools of the Internet and some proprietary databases opened a new world and, little by little, his story began to unfold.

Wadsworth was born in Connecticut in 1825 and graduated from Washington College in Hartford (now Trinity College) in 1844. Then he went to Michigan, where his well-to-do parents had bought land, and he began a legal career in Manhattan in 1848. A tempestuous character who made enemies easily, Wadsworth was little recalled in New York once his playing days were done.

He later became a judge in New Jersey; was widowed; began to act erratically in his official duties, owing to drink; and lost an estimated $300,000 (perhaps $8 million when adjusted for inflation). Wadsworth was reduced to selling newspapers on the streets until 1898, when he committed himself to Plainfield’s poorhouse. For the next 10 years, no one connected him with baseball.

Wadsworth died on March 28, 1908, eight days after publication of the Spalding guide containing Mills’s decision. An obituary in The Hartford Daily Times said, “A veritable bookworm, day after day, he would sit reading.”

“In the summer,” it continued, “he was particularly interested in following the scores of the ballgames of the big leagues, and of late years, the game was the one great object of interest to him.”

This article was adapted from the book “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” by John Thorn, a baseball historian. The book, to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, examines the origins of the game.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 13, 2011, on page SP11 of the New York edition with the headline: Debate Over Baseball’s Origins Spills Into Another Century..Sign In to E-Get Free E-mail Alerts on These Topics

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