Henry Chadwick Marquee Hall of Fame 1938

Henry Chadwick devised the box score and helped define how baseball would be measured and reported, though he never played professionally. Born in October 1824 and dead in April 1908, he was elected to the Hall of Fame as a pioneer by the Centennial Commission in 1938.

That absence is a joke at his expense, because the record itself is largely his invention. He devised the box score in the 1850s, worked out the batting average and the earned run, edited the first guides, and campaigned for decades on how the game should be scored and reported. Every number on every other page of this site descends from decisions he made.

He was English, born in Exeter, and came to Brooklyn as a boy. He argued to the end of his life that baseball had grown out of rounders, which was the unpopular position and was correct. He was elected as a pioneer, thirty years after he died.