Baseball History - Alexander Cartwright

Alexander Cartwright

The first published rules of baseball were written in 1845 for a New York City "base ball" club called the Knickerbockers. The author, Alexander Cartwright, is one person commonly known as "the father of baseball". One important rule, the 13th, stipulated that the player need not be physically hit by the ball to be put out; this permitted the subsequent use of a farther-travelling hard ball. Evolution from the so-called "Knickerbocker Rules" to the current rules is fairly well documented.

On June 3, 1953, Congress officially credited Cartwright with inventing the modern game of baseball, and he is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. However, the role of Cartwright himself has been disputed. His authorship may have been exaggerated in a modern attempt to identify a single inventor of the game, although Cartwright may have a better claim to the title than any other single American.

Cartwright, a New York bookseller who later caught "gold fever", umpired the first-ever recorded U.S. baseball game with codified rules in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846. He also founded the older of the two teams that played that day, the New York Knickerbockers. The game ended, and the other team (The New York Nines) won, 22-1. Cartwright also introduced the game in most of the cities where he stopped on his trek west to California to find gold.

One point undisputed by historians is that the modern professional major leagues, that began in the 1870s, developed directly from amateur urban clubs of the 1840s and 1850s, not from the pastures of small towns such as Cooperstown.