The Attribution Problem

The Hall of Fame’s Cartwright Problem

For more than a century, baseball has struggled to tell the truth about its own beginnings.

The game has always preferred a clean founding story: one inventor, one origin point, one heroic architect who can be memorialized and explained in a few lines of bronze. But baseball’s actual early history is not neat, and it never was. It is collaborative, contested, incremental, and full of men whose contributions were absorbed into the game long before they were properly recognized.

No figure better exposes that problem than Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams.

Adams remains outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame, despite a historical record that places him among the most consequential figures in baseball’s formative development. He is widely credited with creating the shortstop position, helping establish 90-foot base paths, playing a leading role in the adoption of nine-player teams and nine-inning games, and shaping the early rules and organization of baseball at precisely the moment when the sport was becoming something recognizable and durable.

And yet Adams is still not in Cooperstown.

That is not simply an omission. It is the result of a larger institutional failure — one that has allowed an older and weaker version of baseball history to remain more powerful than the evidence that has since corrected it.

At the center of that failure is Alexander Cartwright.

That story made sense in a certain kind of American mythology. After the collapse of the absurd Abner Doubleday invention legend, baseball still wanted a founder — someone respectable, plausible, and easy to commemorate. Cartwright fit the role. He was elevated into Cooperstown in 1938 and came to occupy the place once reserved for myth: the man who supposedly brought order to the game.

For decades, baseball elevated Alexander Cartwright as the central founding figure of the modern game. But historians — including MLB official historian John Thorn — have challenged several of the specific innovations long associated with Cartwright, including 90-foot base paths, nine players per side, and nine-inning games.

These are exactly the kinds of contributions more closely associated with Doc Adams and the 1857–58 rules standardization era. That is why this issue is bigger than one man’s Hall of Fame candidacy. It is about whether baseball’s most powerful historical institution is still preserving outdated attribution.

Alexander Cartwright founded the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845. Doc Adams joined the team shortly after its inception and by 1846 was elected its President for the first of his six terms.

The rules did not change drastically until the first baseball convention in 1857. Doc Adams was elected President of the convention and for the remainder of his career, he served as Chairman of the Rules and Regulations Committee for the National Association of Base Ball Players.

The three rules that Cartwright was credited with as the “Father of Modern Base Ball” were not implemented until that convention of 1857, eight years after he headed west, leaving the Knickerbockers to join the California Gold Rush in 1849.

Doc Adams handwritten draft, the “Laws of Base Ball” were presented at that convention marked the true beginning of modern baseball. Besides the three fundamental rules incorrectly attributed to Cartwright on his Hall of Fame plaque, another fundamental rule that appeared for the first time in the 1857 “Laws of Base Ball” was the prohibition of gambling.

We shouldn’t become overly fixated on any single rule in isolation. Much of that focus likely stems from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum defining the “modern game” through the familiar framework — nine innings, nine players, and 90-foot basepaths — long associated with Alexander Cartwright’s plaque.

At the same time, there is broad historical consensus that the 1857 Base Ball Convention marked a true turning point — the moment when baseball began to take the form we recognize today.

But Adams’ story is about more than just rules. As there was no single “Father of Baseball” – leadership and innovation was fundamental to evolve a game to a sport.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the center of the matter: Cartwright entered the Hall of Fame during an era when baseball preferred clean legends, while Adams has sought entry in an era that knows more history but offers fewer opportunities to correct old mistakes.