Old documents call Cartwright’s legacy into question

Each time he drives past Oahu Cemetery, baseball broadcaster and fan Pal Eldredge says, “I think how cool it is that Alexander Cartwright, the man who invented the sport, is buried here in Hawaii.”

Thursday, less than a week into the 2016 major league season, that vision was jarred for Eldredge and a lot of other local fans by a report claiming that Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, not Cartwright, “is the true father” of the game.

“It was, ‘Wow, what if that were true?’” Eldredge said.

Seventy-eight years after Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. was inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, N.Y., celebrates him as the “Father of Modern Base Ball,” Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, said, “He (Adams) is the true father of baseball, and you’ve never heard of him.”

Thorn cites an 1857 set of “Laws of Base Ball” documents put up for auction this week by California-based SCP Auctions, where he is a consultant.

On the SCP website Thorn writes, “Something odd, unusual, unexpected, even — to one not inclined to superlatives — utterly amazing has just now turned up, some 160 years since it vanished. It is a document … or, rather, a trio of them … that together form the Magna Carta of Baseball, the Great Charter of Our Game. The manuscript rules of the game drafted by the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club for presentation to the first convention of New York vicinity clubs, which commenced on January 22, 1857, have emerged from the dark. No earlier baseball manuscript of this significance has ever come onto the open market.”

SCP, which advertises the discovery as “the most important baseball document ever discovered,” lists a minimum bid of $100,000 for the set. Bidding, as of Thursday evening, was up to $146,410 on the website.

But skeptics about Adams’ claim on history abound, especially locally. Lewis Matlin, a baseball historian and former general manager of the Hawaii Islanders who annually hosts a memorial service at Cartwright’s grave, said, “The dates don’t match. Cartwright and his associates developed the first codified rules of modern baseball in 1845. The first game played under those rules was played on the Elysian plain in New Jersey in 18 and 46.”

Cartwright, who came to Hawaii in 1849 and remained until his death in 1892, is credited with a hand in founding a number of civic institutions, including the Honolulu Fire Department, where he served as its first fire chief. Along the way he introduced baseball, including laying out the first local baseball diamond at Cartwright Field in Makiki, which is named for him.

For the past 15 years on the April 17 anniversary of Cartwright’s birth, a group of dedicated baseball fans have gathered at his grave at Oahu Cemetery on Nuuanu Avenue to pay homage, some of them leaving baseballs at the foot of his tomb. Over the years a line of baseball greats, including Babe Ruth in 1934, have visited to pay respects.

Matlin, father of UH athletic director David Matlin, said, “The 1845 codification set down many of the rules the game is played by today, from the shape of the diamond to nine men to a team to the baselines. … The only thing he didn’t do was the (distance from) the pitcher’s mound, which was finally established about 1900.”

Anne Cartwright, who lives in Hawaii, said, “He (Adams) wrote down his rules long after my great-great-grandfather had written his.” She said the family has a diary and other items attesting to his role.

Matlin said Thorn “has been on a vendetta to discredit Alexander Joy Cartwright for a number of years.”

Thorn said in an email to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that he was traveling and not able to immediately respond to requests for comment.

Baseball’s origins, shrouded in myth and controversy, have long been a subject of debate. In 1907 a panel headed by sporting goods dealer Al Spalding credited Abner Doubleday as the game’s founder. But BaseballReference.com says that was “due to the desire of Spalding to have a Civil War hero as the inventor of the game.”

The official Hall of Fame biography reads, “It is believed that Cartwright (a volunteer firefighter) and his friends formed their baseball club in the early 1840s and named it after Manhattan’s volunteer Knickerbocker Engine Company. In 1845, Cartwright’s Knickerbockers moved across the Hudson River via ferry to play on the spacious Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. It was there that the club became a driving force in baseball’s rapid development.”

BaseballReference.com says, “Cartwright’s grandson, Bruce Cartwright, launched a campaign in 1938 to have his grandfather’s contributions to the beginnings of the game recognized and sent evidence of his role to the newly formed Hall of Fame. This led to Cartwright being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Centennial Commission as one of the pioneers of the game.”

MidWeek editor Don Chapman, author of “The Ball That Changed the World: The Story of Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr., the True Father of Baseball,” said, “Assuming some truth to this newly unearthed (document), I suspect that after Mr. Cartwright left New York in March 1849 to join the California gold rush west, baseball was continued to be played by his rules with various interpretations, but other ball-bat-bases games such as town ball (no foul ground, unlimited players, base paths of dissimilar length, outs made by hitting a runner with a thrown ball) also continued to be played, and this 1859 gathering apparently standardized baseball’s rules and helped end town ball.”

But Chapman said, “The heart of the game remains in Mr. Cartwright’s 1845 rules. In 1859, by the way, Mr. Cartwright had been in Hawaii 10 years, where he helped found the Honolulu Fire Department, the first library and what today is our modern Hawaiian Telcom phone company, as well as serving Hawaii’s royals as financial adviser — he worked with Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma to found Queen’s Hospital. He also was known to teach his game at what today is Cartwright Field in Makiki, just as he taught baseball to fellow gold rush pioneers, frontier men and Native Americans on his way west, as documented in his diary that forms the basis for much of my book. He had no reason to state otherwise, and I continue to take the man at his word.”

A spokesman for the Hall of Fame said there are no plans to alter or remove Cartwright’s plaque.

Baseball sportscaster Don Robbs, a Cartwright loyalist, said, “Part of what makes baseball special — and different from the other sports — is in its history and numbers going back more than 150 years.”

Anne Cartwright said, “For years people have come up with claims that (other) guys did what my great-great-grandfather did. I just know what my great-great-granddaddy did, and they can’t take that away.”

Eldredge observed, “There will be a lot to talk about this at (Cartwright’s) memorial this April 17th.”