Alexander Cartwright (April 17, 1820 - July 12, 1892)

Alexander Cartwright was born in New York City in 1820 and invented the modern baseball field in 1845. Cartwright and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club devised the first rules and regulations that were accepted for the modern game of baseball. Alexander "Alick" Cartwright worked as a clerk for a broker and later for a bank, and, weather permitting, played variations of cricket and rounders in the vacant lots of New York City after the bank closed each day. In 1845 he joined the New York Knickerbockers, a club that played under what were called "New York rules", as distinguished from other clubs that played a similar game called town ball under "Massachusetts rules". Cartwright organized the team with a constitution and bylaws and suggested that they could arrange more games and the sport would be more widely played if it had a single set of agreed-upon "Knickerbocker rules". Cartwright chaired a committee of four Knickerbocker players that drew up a set of rules generally seen as the founding moment for modern baseball. The changes in these new rules included the distinction between fair and foul territory and the requirement that runners be put out by being tagged with a ball in a fielder's control. Previously runners could be tagged by being hit with a thrown ball which sometimes left runners not just out but out cold. Knickerbocker rules also stipulated that the bases be laid out in a diamond array with 42 paces between home plate and second base and the same distance between first and third bases, which works out to bases about 90 feet apart, the same distance as in today's game. The first recorded baseball game was held in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. The game was held at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Cartwright left the Knickerbockers to follow the California gold rush in March 1849 and took with him his ball and rulebook. In his letters from the cross-country trip he wrote of playing baseball games with locals as he journeyed west. He made a small gold strike in California and used his earnings to pay passage to Hawaii where he worked as a bookkeeper for a ship chandlery business and introduced baseball to other settlers. Cartwright had been a volunteer firefighter in New York City and was appointed Honolulu's Fire Chief in 1851 by King Kamehameha III. A prolific reader, he was a co-founder of the Honolulu Library and Reading Room, forerunner of Hawaii's present-day state library system. He successfully fought to block a rule that would have prohibited women and children from becoming library members. Alexander Cartwright died in 1892 in Honolulu from blood poisoning. He was buried in Oahu Cemetery in Honolulu where baseballs and gloves are often laid at his gravesite.