It’s spring, and in the US that means the Baseball Season is here. Baseball is a sport that’s been around for about 150 years or so, and at one time was the most popular sport in the US — and was called the “national game.” Even so, it’s played in very few other countries (Japan is one). Regardless, the professional championship series at the end of the season (in the fall) is called the “World Series.”
For whatever reason, there are any number of oddities about baseball, and one of them is where it came from. Alexander Joy Cartwright, Jr., who was born April 17, 1820, is known by some as the “father of baseball,” and may have written the original rules. But the whole story is disputed. Also disputed is the declaration that Cartwright was named the inventor of baseball by the US Congress in 1953. It’s been repeated many times, but everything Congress does is (supposedly, at least) recorded in The Congressional Record — and there’s no mention of it in there.
Anyway, Cartwright was born in New York City and worked in a bank doing clerical work. He was also a volunteer firefighter, and after work he and his firemen colleagues would play informal bat-and-ball games in the streets. His firehouse was the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, and in 1842 Cartwright headed the creation of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Just a couple of years later, a committee from the club wrote a set of rules for the game. Ah, you’re thinking, that’s where Cartwright got his claim on being the father of the game! That would make sense except for the fact that he wasn’t on the rules committee.
Despite that, Cartwright was credited with establishing the standard distance between bases (90 feet), the standard number of team members (9), and the number of innings in the game (also 9). There’s a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame that says so! However…none of it is true. Those standards were created by the “inter-club convention of 1857.” Cartwright, though, had left New York in 1849 to search for gold in California.
Cartwright continued west and settled with his family in Hawaii, where he became the fire chief in Honolulu from 1850 to 1963. He’s credited with setting up the first baseball field in Hawaii in 1852. But that’s not true either; baseball didn’t arrive in the islands until 1866.
In spite of all the controversy, the Makiki baseball field in Honolulu was renamed Cartwright Field. Hawaiian school baseball teams compete for the Cartwright Cup. There are at least three biographies of Cartwright, and two of them credit him with inventing baseball. The third calls him “one of” the founders. Meanwhile, another father of baseball is Abner Doubleday. All the stories about his contributions are just as reliable.
The real story is likely to be that baseball evolved informally from a British game called rounders, and lots of different groups put together their own sets of rules. But there’s one more thing about baseball in the US: fans can happily argue about it forever.
