Alexander Cartwright Research Paper

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Pages: 3

Alexander Cartwright was born on April 17, 1820, in New York. He died July 12, 1892, Honolulu, Hawaii he was a surveyor and baseball enthusiast. Cartwright was a founder of the amateur New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and chaired the commission that established baseball's official rules. These included the requirement of tagging out a base runner rather than hitting him with a thrown ball. The distance between bases was 90 ft apart. The first game under the newly codified rules was apparently played in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846. Cartwright laid out the key rules of the game, including the dimensions of the field. He was put in the National Baseball Hall of Fame even as baseball propagated a myth that Civil War General Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Which was a false statement, Cartwright came up with the rules of the game and the dimensions of the field not General Doubleday. The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club played the first recognized baseball game in Hoboken, New Jersey, at a park called the Elysian Fields. Cartwright later traveled west across the United States, spreading the game around California and …show more content…
The baseball fans where critical and thought that the Knickerbockers club and Cartwright should be credited for making those rules. For the first several years of their existence, the Knickerbockers usually played with a catcher, pitcher, and three outfielders and there were 8 players. In other games they used 9, 10 or even 12 players. The position of shortstop was not solidified until 1849, when it was established as relaying throws from the outfield to the infield. At the time the ball was so light it was hard to throw it all the way in from the outfield. In 1857 a couple of ball players came up with only nine innings and up but generally the first team to score21 runs was the