A week from now, some of Hawaii’s most influential people will gather at a cemetery to lie to each other.
No, they won’t assemble to figure out how much of your money to pocket from their gravy train and the future stadium it will support — they do that kind of business in the Irish bars on the waterfront afterward.
This annual occasion at Oahu Cemetery is to celebrate the 203rd birthday of Alexander Joy Cartwright, Hawaii’s gift to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although serious baseball fans make up the majority of the crowd, they are far from alone. There will be librarians (Cartwright’s donation helped start the Hawaii Library System), physicians (his role as financial adviser to the crown got The Queen’s Medical Center built), and firefighters (he was among Hawaii’s first fire chiefs).
All of those accomplishments are true and indisputable. Yet he is most famous for his work as “the father of modern baseball,” which I believe mostly never happened.
He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938 along with legendary pitcher Grover Alexander and sports writer Henry Chadwick, who is more the father of modern baseball than anyone.
Speakers at Cartwright’s annual birthday celebration triumph his baseball accomplishments, but every word of his Hall of Fame plaque is under heavy dispute and has been for 80 years. The accepted Cartwright origin story for baseball is that he single-handedly dragged the national pastime from the primordial ooze that borders New Jersey onto the Elysian Fields.
His plaque credits him with:
>> Setting bases 90 feet apart.
>> Establishing nine innings as a game and nine players as a team.
>> Organizing the Knickerbocker Baseball Club of N.Y. in 1945.
>> Carrying baseball to Pacific Coast and Hawaii in the pioneer days.
It’s a tragedy that Rob Manfred laid waste to Cartwright’s first three rules in the past few years by putting the bases closer, employing seven-inning doubleheaders during COVID and making the designated hitter universal. Cartwright did carry a baseball from New York and wrote a letter about it, professing love for the orb like a modern adult might reminisce about their favorite Strat-O-Matic card, but he had nearly nothing to do with the game once he landed on our golden shores. Even the legend of our hero laying out Cartwright Field in the 1850s is probably not true.
A lot of this misinformation happened when Cartwright’s grandson, Bruce, edited Joy’s journal from memory with claims of his grandpa (who died when Bruce was 10) being the big shot in Hawaii baseball. Alexander Joy Cartwright never mentioned the game other than the letter about the ancient ball, and his full page obituaries in the Hawaii newspapers didn’t mention the sport, either, except for one line that he was “fond of athletics.” Major League Baseball was desperate to wipe away the Abner Doubleday creation myth and that was the only evidence it needed.
A.J. Cartwright was certainly there when the New York Nine destroyed his Knickerbockers 23-1 in four innings in 1845, but we now can trace the game back to the 1830s with numerous clubs.
Why is baseball so insistent on finding a single figure to credit with inventing it? It is hard for me to believe that Cartwright or anyone else woke up one morning with perfection that not even Manfred can kill.
Cartwright is right to be celebrated every year and certainly belongs in the Hall of Fame as a representative of those Knickerbocker clubs, but I am not sure he would want to be. By all accounts he was a prince of a man, his hearse pulled by two black horses was followed by 46 carriages, and the state government adjourned for the day at 10 a.m. so that they could attend.
I visit Cartwright whenever I am in town, always keeping a wary eye on my wallet because Lorrin Thurston is right around the corner. My usual thought when looking at the stack of baseballs adorning his grave left by well-wishers is that they are missing the point and that Cartwright did so much more than codify the rules of my favorite game.
Given all of the mythology, I am all for running Cartwright out of Cooperstown — he belongs to a higher hall.
