Chadwick, Henry, 1824–1908, Anglo-American journalist who helped popularize baseball in the United States, b. Exeter, England. Moving to Brooklyn, N.Y., with his family in 1837, he was a cricket reporter for the New York Times in the mid-1850s when he began reporting on baseball for the New York Sunday Mercury and Clipper. Becoming an expert on baseball rules, he edited Beadle's Dime Base-Ball Player (1860–81) and DeWitt's Base-Ball Guide (1869–85), and wrote The Game of Baseball: How to Learn It, How to Play It, How to Teach It (1868). Chadwick introduced the modern box score and helped to implement the fly catch, replacing the bound catch, which allowed a fielder to retire a batter by catching a hit ball after the first bounce. In the 1880s and 90s he edited Albert Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide and wrote for Sporting Life and, later, the Brooklyn Eagle. He was (1938) the first journalist to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
See biography by A. Schiff (2008).
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