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Originally Posted by paul
I don't get it. I thought that Cartwright set the rules of the game in 1846, 11 years before this document. Does this document somehow disprove Cartwright's earlier contribution? In any case, it's interesting that the new father of the game is supposed to be Doc Adams, who missed out on election to the HOF this past year. I guess next time he'll do better.
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As bmarlowe1 pointed out, Cartwright's role in the development of early baseball has been greatly exaggerated. This has been pretty well established in recent years by a lot of historical research on the development of the early game, summarized in the book "Baseball in the Garden of Eden" by John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. Thorn's blog, at the link below, has a ton of great info on early baseball research, including several posts about the 1857 convention that the new document came from:
http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/
As for Alexander Cartwright, Monica Nucciarone's 2009 biography "Alexander Cartwright: The Life Behind the Baseball Legend" (with a foreword by Thorn) is well documented and definitive. It shows that, while Cartwright was a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and present at key moments in the early development of the game, there is no evidence that he had a particularly prominent role in those developments, and he had nothing to do with any of the specific innovations listed on his HOF plaque. He was still a very interesting guy, just not the "inventor" of baseball.
http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Cart...dp/0803249268/