Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

Mrs. Check has a surprise—the actual old notebook containing an account of Cartwright's journey to California. William believes this to be the extract from Alexander's diary copied by his son, Alexander III; Mary believes it to be some part or version of the original. In either event, it contains some additional material, including a list of animals seen—"Prairie Hens, plenty; Plover, millions; Brown Wolves, plenty; Buffalo, 20,000"—and also Indians ("We have passed through and had intercourse with the following Tribes of Indians: Shawnee, Caws or Kansas, Delaware, Pottawattomies, Pawnees, Sioux, Crows"). "I think this is the original journal," Mrs. Check says, "because the start of the trip to Hawaii is in the back."

Mary is the daughter of Alick's son Alexander III, the one who loved baseball. "Bruce didn't do anything but wear four-inch collars and gardenias in his buttonhole and his nose in the air," she says, "but my father played baseball constantly. They played without gloves, you know, and his fingers were all out of shape.

"We used to go to baseball games every Sunday. He took me before I could talk. I played baseball myself, any old position. I still follow the Giants and get mad at them. I used to cut school in the most polite way to watch the Seals. I had bands on my teeth, and I would go to the principal and tell him they hurt. We used to root for Truck Eagan, who was built like a truck and ran like one.

"Although Father was called Little Alick, he was 6'4" and very heavy on his feet himself. He gave up playing when, one day, he planted himself on a base and his best friend ran into him, bounced off and broke a leg. Father said never again, and hung up his glove.

"Grandfather named me, but he died when I was 6 months old. Mother said he looked like Santa Claus, had a very keen sense of humor and just loved life. Father remembered his talking about how he scrawled out the first rules in a notebook balanced on his knee and how he fiddled around with baseball a little while in San Francisco."

When Mrs. Check had told all she knew of her grandfather and the visitor had finished the 7-Up she had provided, the visit—and the long search for Alexander Cartwright and his invention—seemed at an end. Mrs. Check accompanied her guest to the door.

"Oh, there is one other thing," she said. "My father remembered having cut up a baseball when he was a child to see what was in it. He got the only licking of his life for it. Years afterward, he often thought that that might have been the Knickerbocker ball, the original baseball."