Louis Fenn Wadsworth and the Origins of Baseball

Few would disagree that baseball is an American game. From its first incarnation on American soil, to the modern day game, baseball reaches deep into our heritage as a nation. Perhaps no other game is so widely associated with the virtues of American society as baseball. The freedom we feel on a warm summer day at the ballpark is like no other experience in the world. Yet come October, our competitive juices begin to flow, and the restful game of summer gives way to the frenzied activity of playoffs and ultimately the World Series. Who but the Americans could envision world domination in a game played on manicured grass surrounded by ivy covered walls? But I digress.

As inextricable as baseball is from our relatively young national conscience, there is very little that we truly understand about its beginnings. After years shrouded in mystery and deception, recent research may have uncovered the real “inventors” of the modern game of baseball. And as you might guess, a Wadsworth is at the center of the action.

Most people grew up with the idea that Abner Doubleday invented baseball…but nothing could be further from the truth. Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball and was nowhere near the site of the “first” game. Without getting into the details of why he was mistakenly assigned credit, the history of baseball begins with its first organized team, the New York Knickerbockers.

The “Knicks” became the first generally accepted formal baseball club in the United States in the 1840’s. Alexander Cartwright, an early club member, suggested that a committee formulate a set of rules, and in 1845 Cartwright and three of his Knicks teammates, set down 20 basic rules of play. Cartwright; Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams; William Rufus Wheaton; and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each provided input on the new set of rules. The name Cartwright is known to many baseball fans, as he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the year of its founding. Adams and Wheaton have been subjects of years of investigative scholarship. The mysterious Wadsworth, however, is the subject of controversy and speculation. In the end, his may be the most compelling story of all.

The new rules written by Cartwright, Adams, Lucius and Wadsworth, stated that the field was to be laid out on a diamond with a base length fixed at 90 feet. The rising popularity of the game as a spectator sport may have, in part, resulted from the creation of foul lines, which allowed spectators an opportunity to get closer to the action. Finally, changing the game’s length from a “runs” rule to an “innings” rule created a game that would look familiar to a modern spectator. In those days, the first team to score 21 runs was declared the winner. Today’s nine-inning game is the result of the 1845 rule changes.

So what contribution did Mr. Wadsworth make? Well, to answer this question, we reluctantly return to the Abner Doubleday story. In 1905, Al Spalding, a former player and sporting goods entrepreneur, organized a panel to investigate the origins of baseball. The “Mills Commission” report as it was known, based on dubious research, concluded that Doubleday had invented baseball. Abraham G. Mills, who wrote the final report, was not satisfied that the report was accurate, and continued to research the subject beyond the end of the commission’s three month mandate.

Mills, in a letter dictated to his stenographer in the afternoon of December 30, 1907, stated his conclusions and anointed Doubleday as per Spalding's wishes. In the letter, however, he commented on an unsettled question: "I am also much interested in the statement made by Mr. Curry, of the pioneer Knickerbocker club, and confirmed by Mr. Tassie, of the famous old Atlantic club of Brooklyn, 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. Mr. Curry says 'the plan caused a great deal of talk, but, finally, we agreed to try it.'"

Curry had made the statement to reporter Will Rankin in 1877, and Rankin had written about it to Mills 28 years later, looking to adjust his story. No more was heard about Wadsworth until, when rummaging through carbon copies of Mills' letters in 1982, John Thorn came upon a few notes from 1908 indicating that Mills, despite the conclusion of the Commission's work, had continued to search for Wadsworth. On January 6, 1908, Mills wrote to the reporter Rankin: “…you quote Mr. Curry as stating that 'some one had presented a plan showing a ball field,' etc., and ... Mr. Tassie told you that he remembered the incident, and that he 'thought it was a Mr. Wadsworth….”

Tassie was serving on the rules committee with Wadsworth in 1857 when Wadsworth moved that the length of the game be set at nine innings rather than the seven that his fellow Knickerbockers had proposed. Could Tassie’s memory of the incident been wrong? Was it Cartwright and not Wadsworth that suggested the changes as some have speculated? Had Wadsworth previously brought a diagram to the Knick field in 1854-55, before Adams lengthened the baselines to 90 feet and the pitcher's distance to 45? Might Wadsworth have been instrumental in those changes as well? We may never know the answers to the questions about who was responsible for the layout of the modern baseball field and the nine-inning game. The mysterious Louis Fenn Wadsworth is yet another figure in our heritage that makes our family so interesting.

Many thanks to John Thorn for the content of this article. His July 16, 2005 Blog, Four Fathers of Baseball" serves as the basis for this story. I look forward to his next book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, which will be published with Simon and Schuster in the spring of 2008.