1852.1

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Claim: Cartwright Laid First Base Ball Field in Hawaii, Taught Baseball Widely

Salience Noteworthy
Location Hawaii
City/State/Country: hi, United States
Game Base Ball
Text

[After he moved to Hawaii] "Cartwright never forgot baseball . . . As early as 1852 [he] measured out by foot the dimensions of Hawaii's first baseball field. . . .  [He] organized teams and taught the game all over the island."

Sources

Harold Peterson, The Man Who Invented Baseball (Scribner's, 1969), page 172.

This story is also carried in Frederick Ivor-Campbell, "Alexander Joy Cartwright, Jr. (Alick)", in Frederick Ivor-Campbell, et. al, eds., Baseball's First Stars [SABR, Cleveland, 1996], page 24, and in Jay Martin, Live All You Can: Alexander Joy Cartwright and the Invention of Modern Baseball (Columbia U Press, 2009), pp. 62-63.  None of these authors provides a source, but Peterson seems to imply that Cartwright's son may have written of the incident in 1909.

Warning

This story has been seriously questioned by recent scholarship, which has found nothing in Cartwright's own papers, or his family's, that confirm it.  The two claims -- that Cartwright laid out a ballfield and that he taught base ball widely -- are thus not found in Monica Nucciarone's thorough Alexander Cartwright: The Life Behind the Baseball Legend (U of Nebraska Press, 2009).

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