Cartwright, Alexander Joy

Alexander Joy Cartwright, (born April 17, 1820, New York City, N.Y., U.S.—died July 12, 1892, Honolulu, Hawaii [now in the United States]), chief codifier of the baseball rules from which the present rules were developed.

A surveyor by profession, Cartwright was one of the founders of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, an organization of amateur players in New York City. He was chairman of a club committee that prepared a set of baseball rules, which were adopted in September 1845 and apparently were first used in a game between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Hoboken, N.J., June 19, 1846.

Those 1845 rules were taken in part from Robin Carver’s Book of Sports (1834) but were original in some important respects. A major innovation legitimized tagging out a base runner rather than hitting him with a thrown ball in order to retire him; this made possible the introduction of a hard ball. Cartwright is generally credited with fixing the distance between bases at 90 feet (27.4 metres).