Oahu Cemetery, the most historic of Hawaii's many Western cemeteries, is full of famous folks, but there's one final resting place that gets visited more than any other. The words carved into the imposing granite monument to Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr., who is enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame as the "Father of Modern Base Ball," don't mention this most American of sports at all-but visitors can easily identify Cartwright's grave by the heap of baseballs people leave at its base. How active is the pile? The morning I visit, the baseball on top is inscribed from "The Pirkle Family" and dated the previous day.
Many of those balls are inscribed, sometimes in English, often in Japanese. There are a lot of them. "The caretaker of the cemetery tells me he has to move forty, fifty, sixty baseballs several times a year because there's just too many," says Bob Corboy, who is part of a group of baseball enthusiasts who have visited this site every year for decades on Cartwright's birthday to talk baseball, play catch and sing happy birthday.
But Cartwright's legacy in Hawai'i is about more than just baseball. Born in 1820 in New York City, he worked as a bank clerk, a bookseller and a volunteer firefighter. He was also an early member of New York's Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, where the game as we know it today (nine innings, nine players to a team) emerged from a host of variations that included town ball, barn ball, burn ball and rounders. It's these "Knickerbocker Rules," still in use today, that Cartwright is often credited as having created.
In 1849, Cartwright took a wagon west to chase the California gold rush, continued on to Hawaii and stayed. "This guy really planted his feet in Hawaii," says Patrick J. "Korky" Gallagher, another member of Cartwright's birthday celebration group. Cartwright became a trusted figure in the young kingdom of Hawaii, applying skills the growing kingdom needed. He became Honolulu's first fire department chief, an adviser to Queen Emma and the executor of both her will and King Kalakaua's. As a Freemason, he helped lay the cornerstone of Queen's Hospital, later serving on its board. He was a founder of the Honolulu Library, arguing for it to be open to women and children, not just "us old geezers," as he wrote to his brother. When he died in 1892, says Gallagher, "according to one of our historians, there were over forty wagons that took his body up to Oahu cemetery."
Cartwright also brought Knickerbocker Rules baseball to the Islands. Ballparks sprang up near fire stations, two of his passions. In 1891 a visitor described the game as a big part of Honolulu's leisure life: "Saturday afternoons are given up to base ball, played by gentlemen teams. ... All the island world goes to the grounds, where in carriages, or on the grand stand, they witness the sport." Today, during baseball season, it seems like every public park big enough for a diamond is filled with Little Leaguers and their families, finding new love for a sport that arrived in Hawaii more than 150 years ago.
Did Cartwright singlehandedly set the rules of modern baseball? Probably not, say modern historians. In recent years, research from Major League Baseball's official historian, John Thorn, suggests that the story of baseball's founding is complicated, involving many people and incremental evolutions. And yet Thorn saved Hawaii as the last stop on his years-long tour of every Hall of Famer's final resting place, calling his visitation of Cartwright's grave "the alpha and the omega," even though-or perhaps because-"so much of what we know about baseball is myth and legend."
April 17, 2020 marked Cartwright's two hundredth birthday. Early in that year, the group that celebrates him planned a big bash: Little Leaguers, the Honolulu Fire Department, the Kawananakoa Middle School band. Now-Governor Josh Green, a Pirates fan, planned to attend. And then COVID hit. "COVID canceled a lot of things," says Brooks Baehr, another member of the core group of Cartwright's birthday celebrants, "but baseball's still there."
And so is Alexander Cartwright, resting in peace under a hill of baseballs, there in spirit at all our fire stations and libraries, still indisputably the first Hall of Famer ever to hold a bat. Happy 203rd birthday, old geezer.
