Most have heard that Alexander Cartwright is credited as being the
"father of baseball;" while some still dispute this, he should at
least be credited with doing the most to invent the modern game of baseball.
In 1938, Alexander Cartwright received the honor of being inducted into
the National Baseball Hall of Fame for his contributions to the nationally
played sport.
On June 3rd, 1953, the US Congress officially cited the research of New
York City librarian Robert Henderson that clearly proved Alexander Cartwright
had "founded" the game of baseball and not Abner Doubleday.
Alexander "Alick" Cartwright worked as a clerk for a broker
and later for a bank, and, weather permitting, played variations of cricket and
rounders in the vacant lots of New York City after the bank closed each day.
Rounders, like baseball, is a striking and fielding team game that
involves hitting a ball with a bat; players score by running around the four
bases on the field (the earliest reference to the game was in 1744.)
Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders become popular in the United States
in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball",
"base" or "baseball".
In 1845, Cartwright organized the New York Knickerbockers team with a
constitution and bylaws, and suggested that they could arrange more games and
the sport would be more widely-played if it had a single set of agreed-upon
rules.
Many of these ball-playing young men, including Cartwright, were also
volunteer firemen. They named their
team after a volunteer fire department in which Alexander Cartwright and
several other players belonged to.
One of these wrote in his notes, "We were all men who were at
liberty after 3 o'clock in the afternoon and played only for health and recreation...
and merely wanted to join a club to set up new uniform rules".
Cartwright played a key role in formalizing the first published rules
of the game, including the concept of foul territory, the distance between
bases, three-out innings and the elimination of retiring base runners by
throwing batted baseballs at them.
The man who really invented baseball spent the last forty-four years of
his long life in Hawai‘i and laid out Hawai‘i’s first baseball diamond, now
called Cartwright Field, in Makiki.
When he left Manhattan, Cartwright took with him a bat, ball and a copy
of the old manuscript rule book, that he helped to draft. Fifteen years later,
he sent a letter from Honolulu:
"Dear old Knickerbockers, I hope the club is still kept up, and
that I shall some day meet again with them on the pleasant fields of Hoboken. I
have in my possession the original ball with which we used to play on Murray
Hill. Many is the pleasant chase I have had after it on Mountain and Prairie
and many an equally pleasant one on the sunny plains of Hawaii ... Sometimes I
have thought of sending it home to be played for by the clubs, but I cannot
bear to part with it, so linked in it, is it with cherished home
memories."
Cartwright went on to teach people in Hawai‘i how to play the game;
and, he did a lot more when he was here.
In Hawaiʻi, he continued the volunteer fire fighting activities he had
learned as a member of the Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 12 in New York City
– and, he was part of Honolulu's first Volunteer Fire Brigade.
Shortly thereafter, the Honolulu Fire was established on December 27,
1850, by signature of King Kamehameha III, and was the first of its kind in the
Hawaiian Islands, and the only Fire Department in the United States established
by a ruling monarch.
Then, on December 27, 1850, King Kamehameha III passed an act in the
Privy Council that appointed Cartwright Chief Engineer of the Fire Department
of the City of Honolulu. Shortly
thereafter, he became Fire Chief.
Aside from his duties at the Honolulu Fire Department, Cartwright also
served as advisor to the Queen.
Cartwright was the executor of Queen Emma's Last Will & Testament,
in which she left the bulk of her estate to the Queen's Hospital when she died
in 1885.
Cartwright also served as the executor of the estate of King Kalākaua.
As part of its customs and traditions, cornerstone ceremonies were held
for the construction of new Hospital buildings.
Cartwright participated in the first public Masonic ceremony on the
islands at the laying of the Queen's Hospital cornerstone in 1860.
He also was appointed Consul to Peru, and was on the financial
committee for Honolulu's Centennial Celebration of American Independence held
on July 4, 1876.
A group of men, Cartwright among them, founded the Honolulu Library and
Reading Room in 1879. In the local newspaper, the Commercial Pacific
Advertiser, editor J. H. Black wrote, "The library is not intended to be
run for the benefit of any class, party, nationality, or sect."
Some of the founders wanted to exclude women from membership, but
Cartwright disagreed, writing to his brother Alfred: "The idea keeps the
blessed ladies out and the children.
What makes us old geezers think we are the only ones to be spiritually and
morally uplifted by a public library in this city?" It wasn't long before the committee changed
the wording of the constitution to make women eligible for membership.
Born in New York City on April 17, 1820, Mr. Baseball, Alexander
Cartwright died at the age of 72 in Honolulu on July 12th, 1892. A large, pink
granite monument in Oʻahu Cemetery marks the final resting-place of Alexander
Joy Cartwright, Jr.
Many baseball greats, such as Babe Ruth, have visited this spot to pay
tribute. Today, baseballs and notes can
regularly be found lying at the foot of his large grave marker.
I have included other Cartwright images in a folder of like name in the
Photos section on my Facebook page.
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