$Unique_ID{BAS00004}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{The True Father of Baseball}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Thorn, John}
$Subject{Father Baseball History Doubleday Knickerbocker Cartwright Rounders
Wright Spalding Hulbert Adams Knickerbockers}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  The History


The True Father of Baseball

John Thorn


     The history of baseball is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation
myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play.  The game's
epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher
democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business--all of it is bunk,
tossed up with a wink and a nudge.  Yet Abner Doubleday, for example, will not
be consigned to the dustbin of baseball history no matter how convincingly one
argues that he did not invent baseball.
     But if the history of baseball is a lie, it is a glorious, vibrant and,
in the grand scheme of life, harmless lie, gripping us in a way that good,
gray fact seldom can.  The bearer of fact cannot hope to annihilate the
legends in baseball's Elysian Fields, but simply to play alongside them,
occasionally getting a turn at bat.
     I believe that the conventional tale of the game's birth is substantially
incorrect.  By this I refer not to the Doubleday fable, pointless to attack,
but to the scarcely less legendary development of the Knickerbocker game,
ostensibly sired by Alexander Cartwright.
     Let's look at the delicate condition of baseball's paternity.  There
would have been no need to establish Alexander Cartwright as a baseball deity
had the Mills Commission report of 1907--created by Albert Spalding not to
explore the origins of the game but to confirm its American roots--not named
Abner Doubleday the father of the game; however, the absurdity of the
Doubleday claim agitated Cartwright's son Bruce so much that he protested to
Spalding, and to Collier's writer Will Irwin, that baseball did not exist
before the advent of Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New
York City.  This claim came at a time when men were still alive who had seen
some rural variant of baseball in the 1820s or 1830s or who had even played
baseball in an urban setting with one of the several ball clubs that had
preceded the formation of the Knicks in 1845, such as the New York Base Ball
Club, the Brooklyn Ball Club, the Eagles of New York, or the Olympics of
Philadelphia.
     Earlier histories of baseball--from those published annually by Henry
Chadwick in the Beadle, DeWitt, and Spalding Guides to book-length histories
such as Charles Peverelly's Book of American Pastimes (1866) and Jacob Morse's
Sphere and Ash (1888)--gave credit to the Knickerbockers for the eventual
ascendance of the New York Game of baseball over the competing Massachusetts
Game, but did not single out Cartwright as the sole creator.  In 1860, in the
premier edition of the Beadle Dime Base Ball Player, Chadwick acknowledged the
existence of the New York Base Ball Club prior to the organization of the
Knicks, but stated "we shall not be far wrong if we award to the Knickerbocker
the honor of being the pioneers of the present game of base ball."  Still, he
never swerved from his assertion in that same essay that it was rounders, the
English childhood game, "from which base ball is derived." Only in the next
century did Cartwright become--no less than Doubleday--a tool of those who
wished to establish baseball as the product of an identifiable spark of
American ingenuity, without foreign or Darwinian taint.
     What did Cartwright do? He suggested that the Knickerbockers, who had
been playing informally since at least 1842, be organized as a club, with a
constitution and playing rules that he did much to formulate (although not
alone--three other Knickerbockers were equally involved in drafting the
original fourteen playing rules).  Notable among these rules--which simply
codified the game that the Knicks were already playing--were the laying out of
baseball on a "diamond" rather than a square, the concept of foul territory,
and the elimination of the rounders and town-ball practice of retiring a
runner by throwing the ball at him.  These are critical differences from
earlier games, sufficient in and of themselves to term the Knickerbocker game
a landmark in the evolution of baseball.  But what Cartwright assuredly did
not do was any of the three central things credited to him on his plaque in
the Baseball Hall of Fame:  "Set bases 90 feet apart.  Established 9 innings
as a game and 9 players as a team."  (More on this in a moment.)  He also did
not create the forty-five-foot pitching distance, nor the requirement that a
ball be caught on the fly to register an out, nor a system for calling balls
and strikes.
     The truth of the paternity question?  Eighty-year-old Henry Chadwick had
it right when he said in 1904, only one year before the formation of the Mills
Commission, "Like Topsy, baseball never had no 'fadder'; it jest growed."  In
fact, until Papa Doubleday was pulled out of the hat, it was Chadwick himself
who had most frequently been honored with the sobriquet "Father of Baseball,"
not for any powers of invention but for his role in popularizing and shaping
the game.  Others to have been accorded patriarchal honors were Harry Wright,
who organized the first openly professional team; Albert Spalding, the
tireless player, magnate, and tour promoter; William Hulbert, founder of the
National League in 1876; and Daniel L. Adams, whose name today is scarcely
known.  Allow me to introduce him.
     Daniel Lucius Adams was born on November 1, 1814, in Mt. Vernon, New
Hampshire, the younger of two sons of Dr. Daniel Adams and Nancy Mulliken
Adams.  He spent his first two years of college at Amherst, then graduated
from Yale in 1835.  Afterwards came a medical degree from Harvard in 1838,
then a general practice in New York City, coupled with an active involvement
with treating the poor at the New York Dispensaries.  He resided and practiced
at 14 Bond Street.
     "Doc" Adams, as he was known to all, began to play baseball in 1839. "I
was always interested in athletics while in college and afterward," he told an
interviewer at the age of eighty-one, "and soon after going to New York I
began to play base ball just for exercise, with a number of other young
medical men.  Before that there had been a club called the New York Base Ball
Club, but it had no very definite organization and did not last long.  Some of
the younger members of that club got together and formed the Knickerbocker
Base Ball Club, September 24, 1845 [actually September 23].  The players
included merchants, lawyers, Union Bank clerks [like Cartwright], insurance
clerks and others who were at liberty after 3 o'clock in the afternoon.  They
went into it just for exercise and enjoyment, and I think they used to get a
good deal more solid fun out of it than the players in the big games do
nowadays.
     "About a month after the organization of this club, several of us medical
fellows joined it, myself among the number.  The following year I was made
President and served as long as I was willing to retain the office."
     What's new here?  Plenty.  According to Adams, the New York Base Ball
Club not only preceded the Knickerbocker, but formed it; for example, such
early New York Base Ball Club members as James Lee, Abraham Tucker, and
William Wheaton all became Knickerbockers in 1845-1846.  As early as 1840,
Adams played a game in New York that he understood to be baseball.  It was the
same game as that played by the men who would become the Knickerbockers,
played on a square, at first with eleven men on a side, as in cricket and
perhaps the Massachusetts Game.  This game--called base ball and not rounders
or town ball--was played in New York City as early as 1832 by two clubs, one
composed of residents of the first ward (the lower part of the city), the
other in the upper part of the city (ninth and fifteenth wards).  By 1843,
when the Knicks were still playing at their original site in Madison Square,
the teams had been reduced to eight--which included a "pitch," a "behind,"
three basemen and three in the field--and the playing field had been changed
from a square to a diamond, as in rounders.  According to Alphonse Martin, a
prominent pitcher in the 1860s who left an unpublished manuscript "History of
Base Ball," it was Cartwright who prompted this move.  In later years, when
asked how the game of baseball originated, Doc Adams declined to identify a
distinct starting point; he believed it grew from rounders.
     Actually, baseball as played by the Knicks in the years 1845-1849
(Cartwright left for California in the gold-rush spring of 1849) was almost
never a nine-man game--eight, ten, and eleven were all more frequently
employed numbers to the side.  Play was conducted in accord with Cartwright's
model of only three basemen, and on the rare occasions when nine or more
fielding positions were created by a surfeit of players, the "extras" were put
into the outfield.  In a game in late May 1847, for example, when eleven men
were available to each side, the Knickerbockers' response was to play with
nine, including four outfielders, and hold two men out as substitutes.
     The advent of the short fielder, or shortstop, was a crucial break with
rounders, and this position was created in 1849 or 1850 by Adams.  "I used to
play shortstop," he reminisced, "and I believe I was the first one to occupy
that place, as it had formerly been left uncovered."  But when Adams first
went out to short, it was not to bolster the infield but to assist in relays
from the outfield.  The early Knickerbocker ball was so light that it could
not be thrown even 200 feet; thus the need for a short fielder to send the
ball in to the pitcher's point.
     "We had a great deal of trouble in getting balls made," Adams recalled,
"and for six or seven years I made all the balls myself, not only for our club
but also for other clubs when they were organized.  [He also supervised the
turning of the bats during this period.]  I went all over New York to find
someone who would undertake this work, but no one could be induced to try it
for love or money.  Finally I found a Scotch saddler who was able to show me a
good way to cover the balls with horsehide, such as was used for whip lashes.
I used to make the stuffing out of three or four ounces of rubber cuttings,
wound with yarn and then covered with the leather.  Those balls were, of
course, a great deal softer than the balls now in use."
     When the ball was wound tighter, gaining more hardness and resilience, it
could be hit farther and, crucially, thrown farther.  This permitted the
shortstop to come into the infield, which Adams did.  Even more important, the
introduction of the hard ball permitted a change in the dimensions of the
playing field.  The Knickerbocker rules of 1845 had specified no pitching
distance, and no baseline length; all that was indicated was:  "from 'home' to
second base, forty-two paces; from first to third base, forty-two paces,
equidistant."  It has been presumed by scholars that when a three-foot pace is
plugged in, the resulting baselines of eighty-nine feet are close enough to
the present ninety so that we can proclaim Cartwright's genius.  In fact, the
pace in 1845 was either an imprecise and variable measure--to gauge distances
by "stepping off"--or precisely two and a half feet, in which case the
distance from home to second would have been 105 feet and the Cartwright
basepaths would have been 74.25 feet.  The pace of 1845 could not have been
interpreted as the equivalent of three feet.  The alternate definition of a
pace as a three-foot measure did not come into practice until much later in
the century.  (Here is the definition of a pace from An American Dictionary of
the English Language, by Noah Webster, 1828:  Pace: "1. A step.  2. The space
between the two feet in walking, estimated at two feet and a half.  But the
geometrical pace is five feet, or the whole space passed over by the same foot
from one step to another."  This definition was not changed for Webster's 1853
revised edition.)
     My research indicates that 75-foot basepaths were the norm well into the
mid-1850s--when the basepaths were first prescribed as "42 paces or
yards"--and were the standard for youth play well into the next decade.
     In 1848 Adams, as Knickerbocker president, headed the Committee to Revise
the Constitution and By-Laws; Alexander Cartwright served under him.  Adams'
interest in refining the rules of the game, already evident, was further
piqued by the formation of additional clubs, beginning with the Washington
Base Ball Club in 1850, which was constructed around several former New York
Base Ball Club members.  In 1852 the Washingtons were renamed the Gothams and
took in additional players, and the Eagle Club, which had been organized to
play town ball in 1840, reconstituted itself to become the Eagle Base Ball
Club.  "The playing rules remained very crude up to this time," Adams said,
"but in 1853 the three clubs united in a revision of the rules and
regulations.  At the close of 1856 there were twelve clubs in existence, and
it was decided to hold a convention of delegates from all of these for the
purpose of establishing a permanent code of rules by which all should be
governed.  A call was therefore issued, signed by the officers of the
Knickerbocker Club as the senior organization, and the result was the
assembling of the first convention of base ball players in May, 1857.  I was
elected presiding officer."  It was at this meeting, eight years after
Cartwright's western expedition, that the winner of a game was defined as the
team that was ahead at the conclusion of nine innings, rather than the first
team to score twenty-one runs.  "In March of the next year the second
convention was held, and at this meeting the annual convention was declared a
permanent organization, and with the requisite constitution and by-laws became
the 'National Association of Ball Players.'
     "I was chairman of the Committee on Rules and Regulations from the start
and so long as I retained membership.  I presented the first draft of rules,
prepared after much careful study of the matter, and it was in the main
adopted.  The distance between bases I fixed at 30 yards--the only previous
determination of distance being 'the bases shall be from home to second base
42 paces, from first to third base 42 paces equidistant'--which was rather
vague.  In every meeting of the National Association while a member, I
advocated the fly-game--that is, not to allow first-bound catches--but I was
always defeated on the vote.  The change was made, however, soon after I left,
as I predicted in my last speech on the subject before the convention.
     "The distance from home to pitcher's base I made 45 feet.  Many of the
old rules, such as those defining a foul, remain substantially the same
today," he concluded in 1896, "while others are changed and, of course, many
new ones added.  I resigned in 1862, but not before thousands were present to
witness matches, and any number of outside players standing ready to take a
hand on regular playing days."  In the 1840s players could not be relied upon
to show up for practice.  Adams recalled that the Knickerbockers frequently
went to Hoboken to find only two or three members present, and were often
obliged to take their exercise "in the form of 'old cat,' 'one' or 'two' as
the case might be."  But, he summed up in 1896, "we pioneers never expected to
see the game so universal as it has now become."
     On May 7, 1861, Adams married Cornelia A. Cook.  Less than a year later
he resigned from the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, and in 1865 he retired from
his practice in New York and moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut.  He played his
last formal game of baseball on September 27, 1875, in an oldtimers' contest
arranged by longtime Knickerbocker comrade James Whyte Davis.  Adams played
backyard ball with his sons even into his eighth decade, when he moved his
family to New Haven, where the boys attended Sheffield Scientific School.  On
January 3, 1899, Daniel Lucius Adams died in his home at 146 Edwards Street.
     Success has many fathers, failure none.  For his role in making baseball
the success it is, Doc Adams may be counted as first among the Fathers of
Baseball.