A Eulogy

Alexander Cartwright

April 19, 2017– This past Monday, April 17, marked the 197th birthday of Alexander Cartwright, the final Hall of Fame grave that I needed to photograph for the project. I was in Hawaii to take the picture and was asked by the Friends of Alexander Joy Cartwright to talk about the Hall Ball at their annual celebration held at the Oahu Cemetery. The following is the text from that speech.

When I decided 6.5 years ago to take a photograph of a single baseball with every member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, living and deceased, I could not have possibly imagined this moment. Here I am, standing in paradise, with a group of people listening to me tell the story of what brought me to this place, on this day, while those people who love me most stand close by. I just thought it would be a fun thing to collect. I had no idea that this project was going to change my life in such a fundamental way.

I loved baseball as a kid. I played little league. I collected baseball cards. I grew up in upstate New York, so I was a Yankee fan, like my father, until 1984. Then, two things happened. The Mets started to get good and I hit puberty which, to me, meant rebelling against everything my father stood for. I remained a fanatic until 1994, when I graduated from college to pursue a career in theatre and the infamous player’s strike happened. I stopped paying attention to the old game.

Then, in 1998, I was working for Calvin Klein as the manager of their mail room (I was still having trouble getting that theatre career to take off), and the owner of the company gave me tickets to his box at Yankee Stadium. That warm July night, the day after David Cone had pitched a perfect game on Yogi Berra Day, I sat only ten feet from the field. The smell of the grass, a luxury in New York City, was intoxicating. The sheer sense memory thunderbolt of all those hours spent at Shea Stadium, and the fields of the Hudson Valley Little League, was a transformative experience. My love of the game was rekindled.

That very night I started studying the history of baseball. I watched Ken Burns epic documentary on constant repeat. I read every book the New York Public Library had to offer. By the summer of 2010, I considered myself to have a pretty solid background in the story of baseball and how it came to be the sport it is today. For example, I knew that it was not invented by Abner Doubleday and that we owed a much greater debt to Alexander Cartwright’s New York Knickerbockers.

But what The Hall Ball has taught me is that the amount of what I knew about baseball at that point in my life was the barest drop of the great depths of its rich history. So much of what we know about baseball is myth and legend. But the true story of how it came to be the game we play today is unknown to most people. This summer the Hall of Fame will induct 5 more members, bringing the current total to 317. Even the most ardent fan would be hard pressed to name 100 of them. And the Hall is just a microcosm. A total of 18,951 men have played major league baseball, plus countless thousands more men and women have played professional ball in the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and in Japan, Mexico, Cuba and over twenty nations across the globe.

There is so much out there to know. How does one person begin to even comprehend the vast sum of it all? For me, that answer was The Hall Ball. I didn’t know that in August 2010. But that is what it has become. A crash course in the history of baseball. Since then I have become a member of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and been active in its efforts.

I have become the head of a committee called the 19^th Century Baseball Grave Marker Project, dedicated to placing stones at the previously unmarked graves of the game’s pioneers. We placed our first last fall, for James Whyte Davis, who joined the Knickerbockers the year after Alexander Cartwright left to seek his fortunes West. Our next will be for Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, whose Pittsburgh grave features only a cracked, ground-flush stone bearing his name and nothing else.

I have had the honor of holding the game books of the Knickerbockers, one hundred and seventy-year old documents, in my hands. As a contributor to the Protoball Database, a web-based effort to chronicle every instance of the game before it became a professional enterprise in 1870, I have been transposing the Knick Game Books into digital format so that future historians can understand how the game evolved from a loose collection of guidelines to the 172-page document that constitutes the current Major League Baseball Rulebook.

I have discovered that the great Cuban slugger Cristóbal Torriente is not buried in his native country, as the historical record has stated for over fifty years. I learned that he is, in fact, buried in Queens, a short drive from my own home in Brighton Beach.

I have befriended some of the greatest historians in the game, whose stores of knowledge keep the true story of our game’s history alive. They are the keepers of truth and I consider it an honor that I get to learn at their sides. Just as I consider it an honor that I am standing before you today.

And I owe it all to the Hall Ball.

The journey that brought me here today started in Staten Island, just six miles from my home at the time, with a visit to the then-unmarked grave of Sol White, the great Negro League player, manager, executive and historian. Since then I have traveled over 40,000 miles. I have seen 34 states and almost 200 hundred cities and towns. I went to Puerto Rico and Cuba. I am on this very day standing in a place that has always had the unreal quality of nirvana to me.

I have stood by the graves of giants, like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and seen first hand how a stone can tell the story of a man. Ruth’s marker is gigantic, ten feet tall, eight feet wide, a stone carving of Jesus with his arms wrapped around a little boy in a baseball uniform adorning the front. Gehrig’s is in a different cemetery that shares a border with the one where Ruth lies for all eternity. His stone is small, discreet, adorned with only a small copper door within which the ashes of the Iron Horse and his beloved wife Eleanor are placed. The markers, in their stark difference, are perfect symbols of these men.

I have paid homage to some of the lesser known names of the game. Men like Jack Chesbro, whose league leading 41 wins in 1904 remains a record to this day, but whose story is mostly lost to history. His marker is not one of the finely carved geometric works like you see around you today, but instead is a giant boulder that looks as though it just rolled out of the Berkshire Mountains where he is buried. Or men like Arky Vaughan, who was raised a country boy in Arkansas and then moved to the remotest part of northeastern California after his days of being one of the best run scorers of the 1930s and 40s were over. He moved there for the fishing, and that’s where he died, just four years after he played his last game. He fell out of his fishing boat and drowned. Today, his grave is the most isolated of the Hall of Famers, located six hours from San Francisco to the south and six hours from Boise, Idaho to the north.

I have visited the cemetery in Los Angeles where two of the game’s most influential owners both lay. Walter O’ Malley, who became a villain to the people of Brooklyn and a savior to the people of Los Angeles (and Hawaii) when he initiated the great migration west and brought the Dodgers to California. Buried just a few hundred yards away lays Effa Manley, the sole woman in the Hall of Fame. Co-owner of the Newark Eagles, with her husband Abe, it was she that was the real driving force behind the team, proving that women can love the game with just as much passion as a man.

I’ve been to the cemetery in Baltimore which has the distinction of being the burial ground of the most Hall of Famers. Ned Hanlon, who led the National League incarnation of the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s, and his three protégés, Joe Kelley, Wilber Robinson, and the legendary John McGraw, are buried in nearby plots of New Cathedral Cemetery. These four men, each raised in the northeast, formed connections amongst each other and the city they came to call home. Now, because of lifetimes each spent pursuing the craft of baseball, they lay there together, forever.

I have stood in places meant to symbolize those who have chosen not to be buried. I went to Springfield, Illinois to find the last remaining physical structure of the Peabody No. 59 coal mine, a shaft a tenth of the mile off the road in the middle of the woods. It was at that mine that Al Barlick started his career when he umpired his first game for the company team. I have stood on the beach of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the wreckage of the plane carrying the legendary Roberto Clemente washed ashore after it crashed on New Year’s Eve in 1972. I have gone to the cryonics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona where, contrary to urban legend, the entire body of Ted Williams patiently waits for science to catch up with his son’s dreams. I stood on the mound of Progressive Field in Cleveland where Early Wynn’s ashes were spread and I stood on the third base line of Wrigley Field where Ron Santo had his remains forever interred within the Friendly Confines.

I have looked at enough graves to know that at this point in history, when the stars of the 1940s and fifties are quickly leaving this earth, the inscriptions on their stones are more likely to mention the military career of the player than their baseball exploits. This is especially true if they starred in the Negro Leagues, and likely needed the assistance of the US government to provide a stone after they passed.

I have seen the graves of two men who have come to symbolize the story of the Negro Leagues. Josh Gibson, who died penniless, intoxicated and raving mad, has a simple, small stone which contains his name, the years of his birth and death and the words, “legendary baseball player.” It was placed years after his death by a local church in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, there is the mammoth three tiered structure that is the marker for Gibson’s sometimes battery-mate, sometimes opponent, Satchel Paige. Paige would live to 76 years of age and, despite his spendthrift ways, would make enough money from his time as the biggest draw in black baseball to die in comfort. He would pass during a blackout in Kansas City, on June 8, 1982, the day my wife was born.

I have seen the final resting place of two men whom history has labeled the game’s vilest racists, and discovered that there is always more to the story. When I visited Royston, Georgia, I saw a small town with a state of the art medical system funded by a legacy that was left by the business-savvy Ty Cobb. I would learn soon after, when I read Charles Leerhsen’s brilliant book, A Terrible Beauty, that everything I had been taught about Cobb was a lie. The legend of the racist, hateful Cobb has been corrected by historical research. But, before that book, my journey had already shown me a man whose wisdom and generosity still provides college scholarships to the poor youth of his community to this day.

Similarly, I drove down a hidden, overgrown road, whose “no trespassing” sign and closed gate I ignored because my satellite map had shown me that Rogers Hornsby was at the end of it. Hornsby, too, was known for a hateful streak. His body lies in a small cemetery that is on family land in the small town of Hornsby Bend, TX. Adjacent to it is a Mexican cemetery, land donated by the Hornsby family to the local Mexican church to assist its poor, immigrant members with a place to put their loved ones. There is always more than one side to the story.

I’ve seen the cemetery in Chicago that contains two of the individuals whose influence and truly racist natures actually contributed to the prevention of black men playing major league baseball between 1887 and 1947. Cap Anson, one of baseball’s first superstars, refused to allow his teams to play against any team that featured a black player on their roster. And Kennesaw Mountain Landis who, as baseball’s first commissioner, had it within his power to end the “gentlemen’s agreement” that barred blacks from the majors. Instead, he insisted there was no such agreement while simultaneously assuring that it would take his death before Jackie Robinson was allowed to set foot on a major league diamond. In a poignant irony, Oak Woods Cemetery, where they both lay, is currently almost entirely staffed by African Americans.

I have gone through the heavily Amish land of Peoli, OH to find the legendary Cy Young and I have stood 100 yards from where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to take a picture of the grave of the much lesser known Eddie Plank in Pennsylvania. I have visited the grave of Old Hoss Radborne, in a cemetery in Bloomington, IL where, in a bizarre twist of fate, the father of Abner Doubleday is also buried in an unmarked grave.

I have visited Henry Chadwick in Brooklyn, whose grave resembles a baseball diamond, with stone bases marking the four corners of the plot. I have visited Paul Waner in Bradenton, Florida and Lloyd Waner in Oklahoma City. Harry Wright in Bala Cynwyd, PA and George Wright in Brookline, MA. Three-Finger Brown in Terre Haute, IN, Ray Brown in Dayton, OH and Willard Brown in Houston, TX. Eddie Collins in Weston, MA and Jimmy Collins in Lackawana, NY. Rube Foster in Blue Island, IL and his half brother Bill in Claiborne Co., MS. Walter Johnson in Rockville, MD, Ban Johnson in Spencer, IN and Judy Johnson in Wilmington, DE. King Kelly in Mattapan, MA and George Kelly in Colma, CA.

I’ve met living members, over 65 of them so far. I’ve met Bobby Doerr, who played his first game in 1937, ten years before my own father was born. And I’ve met Greg Maddux, whose rookie card was part of my own collection, with a career that began concurrent with the time when my youthful love of the game ran its hottest. I’ve met tender souls like Ernie Banks and Yogi Berra who have, since I photographed them, gone on to the other side. I’ve met hard men like Bob Gibson and Jim Bunning, whose pictures for the project felt more like work than fun.

I have traveled to Cuba, a country that for my entire life was a forbidden land. There, I found a culture that embraces baseball with a single-minded fervor that America has not experienced since before World War II. I saw games in five provinces of the strong-hitting, weak-pitching Cuban Series Nacional, their version of the major leagues. I visited the Monument to Baseballists in Havana, where over fifty Cuban heroes, including Hall of Famer José Méndez, are buried. It was in this cemetery that the previously mentioned Torriente was thought to lay, but my visit proved something else to be true. I also hired a driver to take me three hours outside of Havana to visit the tiny town of Cruces, where I got to share a Buccanaro Beer with Martín Dihigo Jr, before we drove to his father’s grave and played a game of catch by the body of the only man to be elected into the baseball halls of fame of five different countries.

Which brings me to today. As exotic as Cuba was, it was a mere 1300 miles from my home. Today, I stand in a place that is 5000 miles from where I live. I heard lots of stories about Hawaii as a kid, because my upstate New York, Italian-American Uncle fell in love with a Hawaiian woman. Their wedding was a luau. Everyone wore leis and at one point the groomsmen came out in grass skirts. Hawaii was a mythical place that I always swore I would see someday. Today is that day because of this baseball.

For a theatre guy such as myself, there is tremendous beauty to Alexander Cartwright being the last grave I needed to visit to complete my project. It is the alpha and the omega. Cartwright is the first born member of the Hall of Fame. He remains, to this day, the first person in the Hall of Fame to have ever picked up a bat. Recent research has proven that Cartwright is not responsible for those things with which he is credited on his plaque in the Hall. As a historian, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore that. But, as most of you know, Cartwright was more than that. As a member of the Knickerbockers, he likely umpired the first game they ever played. And though he did not author the modern rules, he was a member of the 1848 rules committee. His civic contributions to the state of Hawaii have made him beloved in his adopted home.

And he has, since his election into the Hall of Fame in 1938, served as the sole reminder to those who view the game through the lens of the Hall, that there was a time before it became America’s Pastime. A time when we were just putting the pieces together to make something different from cricket, and rounders, and “one cat, two cat,” and town ball, and all the other bat and ball games that came before baseball came to be. We owe Cartwright and his family a debt for keeping that door open. For encouraging new research that lets us continue to find the true story behind the creation of baseball.

And thus it is a fitting place that this part of The Hall Ball comes to an end. With the man who represents baseball’s beginning. Because the story of baseball carries on. More men will be elected to the Hall, and I have no idea if the ball will continue to join them. The Hall Ball itself is such a tiny piece of the story of the game. But it’s my piece, and I am honored to be able to share it with you today. Thank you for listening.