Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend

11. “Dear Old Knickerbockers”

ELEVEN “Dear Old Knickerbockers” Alexander Cartwright spent most of his life in Hawaii, and it could be argued that he had as significant an impact on the islands as he had on baseball, but that’s not how he’s most remembered . Instead, he is the “Father of Modern Baseball,” and it is Hawaii that has become but a footnote to his life. However, compared with what we know about him in Hawaii , we know relatively little about Cartwright’s involvement in baseball. Or at least, we know very little from primary sources, or from Cartwright himself. Significant portions of Alexander Cartwright’s legacy are based on the evidence of secondhand stories, and even these are sometimes conflicting. It is to the nature of Cartwright’s baseball legacy, and of those sources, that we now turn. Regarding Cartwright’s baseball legacy, part 2 attempts to answer a series of central questions: Were the Knickerbockers the first organized ball club, and were they founded by Alexander 144 THE MYTHOGRAPHY OF A MAN Cartwright? Did the Knickerbockers and Cartwright play in the first true “match game”? Did Cartwright create or establish any of the rules that the Knickerbockers used (which were officially adopted when the league was established in the 1850s)? Did Cartwright “seed” the game across the country when he traveled west during the California Gold Rush in 1849? And did he introduce baseball to Hawaii? This chapter will tackle the first three questions: Were the Knickerbockers the first club, who organized them, and did they play the first match game? It’s tempting to quip that these questions ask not “who’s on first” but who was first? Beginnings can be hard to determine. It is well documented that, long before the nineteenth century, there were numerous informal games using bats and balls, and there were plenty of teams and contests . So we are looking to pinpoint within this moving stream the moment that one of these games and contests became organized in a way that we recognize as baseball today. In fact, there is a published, firsthand account of the creation of baseball in New York that predates the Knickerbockers by about eight years. William Wheaton was interviewed for an article that appeared in San Francisco’s The Daily Examiner in 1887. The title of the article was “How Baseball Began— A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells about It.” Here is almost all of Wheaton’s tale, which calls into question nearly every claim made for Cartwright. Wheaton begins by saying that in 1836, he had just passed the bar exam and become a lawyer, and that he was “very fond of physical exercise.” He continues: 145 “DEAR OLD KNICKERBOCKERS” In fact, we all were in those days, and we sought it wherever it could be found. Myself and intimates, young merchants, lawyers, and physicians found cricket too slow and lazy a game. Three-cornered cat was a boy’s game, and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball was made of a hard rubber center, tightly wrapped with yarn, and in the hands of a strong-armed man it was a terrible missile, and sometimes had fatal results when it came in contact with a delicate part of the player ’s anatomy. We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us, we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837. Among the members were Dr. John Miller, a popular physician of that day; John Murphy, a well-known hotel-keeper, and James Lee, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce. The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and ordered that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner with it before he reached the base. During the regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bedded boulder or an old stump, and often the diamond looked strangely like an irregular polygon. We laid out the ground at Madison...