Baseball's Johnny Appleseed

Although he was the team's best player at several positions, Cartwright volunteered to act as umpire (as we shall see in a moment, this was disastrous for the Knicks). In that capacity he enforced baseball's first fine, a 6� levy for swearing. A drawing of an antediluvian encounter at Elysian Fields in the resort town of Hoboken, N.J. still exists, as well as an observer's description of the first game, "played under perfect skies" as "lady visitors sat under a canvas pavilion to protect their alabaster complexions from the sun."

The Knickerbockers took the field in a uniform of blue pantaloons, white flannel shirts and chip (straw) hats, an outfitting which was later modified to include mohair caps and patent leather belts. The New York Club beat the Knicks 23-1. (The idea of the nine-inning game was not originated until some years later. Matches at this time ended with the inning in which a team had gone over 21 runs, or "aces.") So much for the Marylebone tradition.

Scores of other ball clubs sprang up. Long Island workmen formed the Pastime Club; policemen organized the Manhattans; barkeeps the Phantoms; schoolteachers the Metropolitans; dairymen the Pocahontas Club. Already there were fans, called cranks, which is what losing managers still call them.

Cartwright's game did not instantly replace all other forms. There is a story that as late as the 1890s, when Rube Waddell first entered league ball, he tried to "soak"—throw at—a base runner. When the umpire remonstrated with him for this unseemly attack on an opponent, Rube protested, "That's out, where I come from."

The Civil War only propagated the game. Many Southern boys learned baseball in Union prison camps, and it has been reported that once a pause was called on the front lines to allow for a contest between Northern and Southern troops. Baseball spread west. In 1866 Peverelly's Book of American Pastimes (which still credited the Knickerbockers as "the nucleus of the now great American game of Base Ball, so popular in all parts of the United States, than which there is none more manly or health-giving") already mentioned a Frontier Club at Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

In 1868 Harry Wright, one of the best of the early players, reorganized a theretofore amateur club called the Cincinnati Red Stockings as the first team to play openly for money. By 1903 there were some 400 men earning fame and a fair living by playing baseball on 16 teams in two major leagues, and there were 19 minor leagues. Not a one could have told who Alexander Cartwright was.

So completely had Cartwright vanished from the annals of baseball—the most documented of all American sports—that by the time of his death in 1892 not even an obituary in agate type appeared in Sporting Life, the baseball bible of the period. Reach's baseball chronology, which detailed the minutest events day by day, instead had a nice note on the passing of good old Joe Blong.

Cartwright's fame became further obscured as a result of a report made by the Mills Commission, formed in 1904 to determine the origin of baseball. It was organized by Abraham G. Mills, who had been third president of the National League, and was a close friend of Albert Spalding, a superb pioneer professional player and the founder of the sporting goods firm. Henry Chadwick, the first sportswriter to cover baseball, had written a historical sketch in which he traced its origins to the old English game of rounders, and Spalding hated the idea that any part of the sport might have started outside the United States. The mission of the Mills Commission was to destroy that notion. It was made up of seven men. Among them were Mills himself and two oldtime players who had become manufacturers of baseball equipment, Al Reach and George Wright.

The most interesting member of the commission, and the man who could have done most to set the record straight, was Wright. George had played ball in New York in the 1860s, and he unquestionably was familiar with the older men who had played with Cartwright. He later played shortstop for Cincinnati and got $1,400—$200 more than his brother Harry. In the 1880s, when his playing days were over, he headed the Boston club in the old Union Association, and founded the sporting goods firm of Wright & Ditson.

Among many other prejudices, Mills hated the Union Association. He called it an organization of deadbeats and played-out bums. When Augustus Busch of the brewery company backed the St. Louis club in the Union Association in 1883, Mills sneered that the new circuit was floating on beer money. Another source of chagrin was that the Union Association teams played with Wright & Ditson instead of Spalding baseballs. But by 1904 the Union Association had disappeared, and one would think that Wright, a wealthy manufacturer who was venerated as the grand old man of baseball, could hardly have been ignored.