Now You Know

Baseball fans owe a huge debt of gratitude to a cricket reporter. British-born Henry Chadwick was covering cricket matches and general assignments for The New York Times when he attended a baseball game in 1856. He fell in love with the game and became a major promoter, urging newspapers to cover the sport and offering to write the stories himself. Three years later he adapted cricket's box score to baseball, expanding it so reporters could record every play. No longer would games be lost in the folds of time; fans could relive them using Chadwick's notation. He was also a statistician, inaugurating the idea of batting averages and earned-run averages. Chadwick was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in 1938.

Sources: Reporter Phil Elderkin; Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); National Baseball Hall of Fame website (baseballhalloffame.org)