Quote of the Day | July 14, 2008: Henry Chadwick's Baseball Morality

From Jules Tygiel's 2001 Past Time: Baseball as History.

In the middle decades of the nine-teenth century, American health reformers and sportswriters evolved what Melvin Adelman has called a "new sports ideology" that justified baseball and other pastimes for their utilitarian benefits for the troubled urban social order. [Henry] Chadwick was a prime architect of this ideology. He publicized baseball as a "moral recreation" that would exert "a powerful lever . . . by which our people could be lifted into a position of more devotion to physical exercise and healthful out-door recreation." Baseball, he wrote, merited "the endorsement of every clergyman in the country . . . (as) a remedy for the many evils resulting from the immoral associations [that] boys and young men of our cities are apt to be connected with."

Chadwick's writings reverberated with the rhetoric of American reform. He sought to make baseball more "scientific" and "manly." He extolled team sports for their emphasis on "order" and "discipline." As Warren Goldstein notes, Chadwick's model baseball club constitution, first published in 1860, suggested fines for "profane language," "disputing the decision of the umpire," and "refusing obedience to the captain," offenses that exhibited a player's lack of self-control. He continually favored strategies that emphasized displays of skill, control, and intellect over those reliant on unbridled power. "The true estimate of good pitching," he wrote in 1868, "is based on the chances offered fielders for outs. Striking out simply shows inferior batting, not superior pitching. . . . [A pitcher] would be more effective were he to depend less on mere speed." Twenty years later he hailed the reduction in the number of called balls necessary for a walk from five to four, because "it would moderate the dangerous speed in delivering the ball to the bat." Chadwick repeatedly rejected reliance on the home run over more "scientific" strategies for scoring.

Tags: Jules Tygiel, Henry Chadwick, baseball