Alexander Cartwright
From BR Bullpen
Alexander Joy Cartwright (Alick)
- Bats Unknown, Throws Unknown
- Height 6' 0", Weight 210 lb.
- Born April 17, 1820 in New York, NY USA
- Died July 12, 1892 in Honolulu, HI USA
Inducted into Hall of Fame in 1938
[edit] Biographical Information
Alexander Cartwright is considered the true father of the sport of baseball. According to The Baseball Book, "Cartwright, a surveyor, laid out the field with the bases 90 feet apart and drew up rules (including three strikes and three outs) for the first game played between organized teams, in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846." While the team played in Hoboken, the team that Cartwright organized in 1845 took the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York name. [1]
Cartwright worked in New York City, but he and his friends played ball in Hoboken, NJ because that's where there were open spaces at the time. Even there, though, civilization was encroaching, with a glue factory being built on one side of their field and a couple roads also infringing on their space. Part of Cartwright's genius was to design a diamond and have the batters face out toward an outfield. That way, the glue factory and the road wouldn't be a major problem and the other road was in the far outfield, which was also not a problem.
Cartwright was also insistent that his set of rules be the only rules by which his team would play. [2] His rule-set was popular, but of course other people came up with other approaches. One in particular, the Boston rules (also called the "Massachusetts game"), were an alternative that still existed when Ty Cobb was a youth, because he remembered that people would sometimes play by those rules.
Cartwright moved to Honolulu, HI in 1849 after inventing baseball, and taught the game to locals there (while also serving as the Honolulu fire chief). Many years later, Babe Ruth visited Hawaii and honored Cartwright's memory.
For many decades, Abner Doubleday instead of Cartwright was remembered as the father of baseball, due to the desire of Al Spalding to have a civil war hero as the inventor of the game. An elderly engineer who had been with Doubleday many decades earlier testified in the early 20th century before Congress that Doubleday had invented the game, but it seems clear at this point that the man simply got his dates badly mixed up.
Cartwright was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on September 13, 1938 by the Centennial Commission.
