No sport keeps records like baseball. Every pitch has a category, every outcome a line in a table, and arguments about players who retired a century ago are still conducted with figures. That habit has a starting point, and it belongs to an English cricket writer who moved to Brooklyn.
Henry Chadwick was born in Exeter in 1824 and emigrated to the United States as a boy. He grew up reporting on cricket, encountered baseball as a young man, and concluded that the American game had all the virtues of the English one and could be made respectable if people could follow it properly in the newspaper.
Borrowing from cricket
Cricket already had scorecards. Chadwick adapted the idea into a compact grid showing every player, his position and what he had done, and published it in the New York papers. The format he settled on is recognisably the box score that still appears today, which is a remarkable survival for a piece of nineteenth-century page furniture.
He also built a system of notation for recording a game pitch by pitch, assigning numbers to the fielding positions so that a play could be written down in a couple of characters. Anyone who has ever written 6-4-3 to describe a double play is using his shorthand.
Why K means strikeout
The letter S was already in use in his notation, so for the strikeout Chadwick took the last letter of struck, the standard word of his day. It is an arbitrary choice from the 1860s that is now printed on placards hung over outfield walls whenever a pitcher is having a good evening.
Several of his other decisions proved equally durable. He pushed the batting average as the headline measure of a hitter and promoted earned run average as a fairer way of judging a pitcher on a team with poor fielders. Both are still quoted daily.
Numbers as argument
Chadwick's deeper purpose was moral as much as journalistic. He believed that publishing individual performance would discourage the gambling and sloppiness that plagued early professional baseball, because a player who dropped easy catches would have it recorded next to his name for everyone to read.
It had an unintended consequence that he would probably have welcomed. Once performance was public and comparable, fans could argue about it indefinitely, and the sport acquired a second life in print that continued all winter when no games were being played.
Give a game a table and you give it an argument that never ends.- On the invention of the box score
The limits of the old statistics
For a century the traditional measures went largely unexamined. Batting average treats a single and a home run identically. Runs batted in depend heavily on whether team-mates reach base ahead of you. Pitcher wins depend on run support, which is why the finest pitcher of the dead-ball era lost so many games for a weak team.
Everyone knew these problems existed. What was missing was any systematic alternative, and for most of the twentieth century the official record simply carried on counting the things it had always counted.
Sabermetrics
That changed when a group of researchers began treating baseball records as a dataset rather than a scrapbook. The Society for American Baseball Research was founded in the early 1970s, and the term sabermetrics was coined from its initials by Bill James, a writer who self-published annual books of analysis from outside the industry entirely.
The central insights were unglamorous and correct: outs are the scarce resource, so avoiding them matters more than batting average suggests; walks have real value; and much of what looks like clutch performance is noise. It took professional baseball roughly two decades to stop treating this as an eccentric hobby.
Into the front office
By the early 2000s clubs were hiring analysts, and the approach reached the general public through the story of a low-budget Oakland team that competed by valuing skills the market had underpriced. The methods spread quickly, because the advantage only lasted while rivals ignored them.
Today every organisation employs an analytics department, and the measures they use would be unrecognisable to Chadwick: on-base plus slugging, wins above replacement, expected outcomes based on the speed and angle of the ball leaving the bat.
Chadwick is the only writer enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a full member rather than through the writers' wing. The plaque calls him the father of baseball, which is a generous description of a man who never played it well and a fair one of the man who taught it to keep score.
Scoring your own game
One consequence of Chadwick's system is that an ordinary spectator can keep a complete record of a game with a pencil and a printed grid. Scorecards are still sold at ballparks, and a minority of fans in every crowd fill them in from the first pitch to the last.
There is also an official scorer at every professional game, a human being who makes judgement calls that go into the permanent record: whether a misplay is an error or a hit, which pitcher is charged with a run. Those decisions can be appealed, and arguments about individual rulings have occasionally run for years.
The cost of measuring everything
There is a counter-argument, and it is not foolish. Cameras now track every pitch and every movement on the field, and clubs use that data to position fielders, limit pitcher workloads and dictate what hitters should attempt. Critics say the result is a more optimised and less interesting game.
The sport has responded by changing rules to restore some of what the optimisation removed. That is an odd position to be in, and it is the direct descendant of a decision taken in a Brooklyn newspaper office in the 1860s, when one man decided that a game was more interesting if you wrote down exactly what happened.
