Louis F. Wadsworth

Louis Fenn Wadsworth (May 6, 1825 – March 26, 1908) was an American baseball pioneer, who was a player and organizer with the New York Knickerbockers in the 1840s. "Baseball's man of mystery," he is now credited by John Thorn, Official Baseball Historian of Major League Baseball, with developing the number of innings and players on each team (9 for each, instead of 7), Wadsworth graduated from Washington College (now Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.), and worked as a naval office attorney in the New York Custom House. Curry said that Wadsworth's "plan caused a great deal of talk, but, finally, we agreed to try it." Reporter Rankin advised the Mills Commission about Curry's 1877 statement, attributing the invention of baseball's diamond shape to Wadsworth, in 1905. Wadsworth was mentioned in the 1908 Spalding guide, in regards to the Mills Commission's findings of the origins of baseball, although nobody on the Mills commission could locate him

Unbeknownst to the members of the Mills commission, after Wadsworth's playing days, by the 1870s he resettled in Plainfield, New Jersey where he became a justice of the peace and then a judge. He died in a poorhouse 8 days after the Spalding Guide was released. He had purportedly taken to drink and squandered what was once a $300,000 fortune ($ in dollars).