Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend (review)

The deflation of Alexander Cartwright as the sole founder or “father of the game” is the major purpose of Monica Nucciarone’s biography, which both diminishes the legend and enlarges the man. Her book provides an excellent caveat about considering anyone the sole founder and father of any noteworthy endeavor, which always involves lineage and teamwork. The only previous book-length study of Cartwright was Harold Peterson’s The Man Who Invented Baseball (1973), which, as the title suggests, is inadequate and inaccurate in a number of areas. Nucciarone’s book is divided into two parts; the first part, which contains ten chapters and is entitled “A Legendary Life,” provides an account of Cartwright’s life from his birth in New York on April 17, 1820, to his death in Honolulu on July 12, 1892. The second part, entitled “The Mythography of a Man,” consists of five chapters in which she dissects and evaluates the extent and validity of his baseball contributions.

Nucciarone does an excellent job in piecing together disparate information from journal entries, family letters, reminiscences, and newspaper clippings to create the narrative of an eventful life which paradoxically does not yield much evidence about Cartwright’s personality and his perceptions of his various endeavors. The events and accomplishments of his life can be traced, but the man at the center is to a large extent missing. Consequently, a number of speculations concerning important gaps of information have replaced hard historical facts. To compound the problem, twentieth-century writers accepted the unproven testimony and thus a scheme of legends surrounding Cartwright has been created, which Nucciarone emphasizes in her subtitle, “The Life Behind the Baseball Legend,” and the respective titles of the two parts of her book.

At one point, Nucciarone seems to argue for William Wheaton as the most important person in the early development of baseball. He was one of the founders of the Gotham or New York Base Ball Club in 1837 and the famed Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845. In 1887, the San Francisco Daily Examiner published an article containing an interview with Wheaton in which he recounted his central role in the establishment of both clubs and his standardizing of the original rules for the game. Unfortunately, Cartwright never provided a written account of his role with the Knickerbockers. Nucciarone concludes that Cartwright was a formative influence not because of the existence of any real proof but by inference from the organizational abilities he exhibited throughout his life and especially in Hawaii where he became a powerful public figure who served five monarchs.

Ironically, the only extended testimony from Cartwright concerning a major event in his life raises even more speculation. In 1849, Cartwright embarked upon a transcontinental journey from New York to the California gold fields. During his travels, he is supposed to have taught and played baseball with his companion travelers and Indians they met on the way. He recorded these events in a diary which has been used by Harold Peterson, among others, as key evidence of Cartwright’s becoming the “Johnny Appleseed” of baseball.

But the historical authenticity of the diary has been thoroughly compromised by the existence of different versions of it, including the Cartwright family’s typed version, private collectors’ copies, the Hall of Fame copy, and another copy in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which have appeared, disappeared, and later been rediscovered under questionable circumstances. The original diary Cartwright kept during his transcontinental gold rush was said to have been burned, perhaps to censor certain comments he made about some important people. Nucciarone provides the most complete and illuminating, albeit inescapably confusing, account of the vexed history of the diary.

It is difficult to determine what claim of authenticity any of the remaining versions have. To indicate the nature of the problem, Nucciarone produces two different versions of the same entry from the handwritten copy in the Bishop Museum and the typed one owned by the family, which, unlike...