Baseball’s Magna Carta Finds a New Home
Frank Murray was the C.E.O. of an air-conditioning concern, as well as a dabbler in map collecting, when, in 1999, a Sotheby’s representative called and asked if he’d like to bid on anything in its upcoming auction. Murray didn’t have the catalogue at hand but vaguely recalled that he’d been interested in item No. 323. “The baseball docs?” the rep asked. This didn’t ring a bell—but then, Murray loved baseball. His relatives had been minority owners of the New York Giants, before the move to San Francisco. Sure, he said, put him down for a bid. Soon, his wallet was about twelve thousand dollars lighter, and Murray was in possession of what would come to be seen as baseball’s Dead Sea Scrolls: handwritten revisions to the rules that first codified the sport as we more or less know it.
Not that he had any inkling at the time. Murray showed the brittle papers, which seemed to enumerate the “Laws of Base Ball,” as recognized by New York’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, to some antiquarians, who were unimpressed. “You got snookered,” he was told. Murray’s “Laws” were scrawled in 1857; the Knickerbocker was established in 1845. Into a drawer they went, and remained, until 2015. In a fit of spring cleaning, he finally noticed them again. A friend recommended that he consult John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian. “Oh, shit!” Thorn said.
Murray was recounting all this the other day at the Round Hill Club, in Greenwich, as he prepared for a trip to Cooperstown, where the documents will go on public display later this week. He is no longer their owner—he sold them in 2016, for more than three million dollars, a profit of some twenty-five thousand per cent—but he retains a personal interest, verging on a crusade, in the cause of promoting their significance. He showed a slide to his guests with an image of the Hall of Fame plaque honoring Alexander Cartwright, a Knickerbocker founder, as the “Father of Modern Base Ball” and crediting Cartwright with establishing crucial standards that remain in place today: nine innings, nine fielders, ninety feet between bases. “None of that’s true,” Murray said.
Mid-nineteenth-century baseball, he went on, was an amalgam of several games, among them cricket, rounders, and stoolball, an ancient pastime of British milkmaids. In Massachusetts, the batter stood between first base and home, and there were two catchers, one behind the other. The Knickerbockers, using Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, typically played games to twenty-one, innings be damned. The bats varied in shape. They pitched underhand. “It was basically ‘Don’t be late,’ ” Murray said of the rules, such as they were. “ ‘We’ll pick captains and they’ll divide up the people. If you don’t have enough, you can just pull people from the audience.’ It wasn’t a team. It was a club. And that was Alexander Cartwright: he was a club guy.”
Some latter-day club guys went on munching Cracker Jacks and sipping I.P.A.s, unoffended, as Murray explained that Cartwright moved to California in 1849, chasing gold. “And then he failed out there and decided to move to Hawaii,” Murray said. “He had nothing to do with the modern rules.”
A man seated by the bar raised his hand. “So does Cartwright’s plaque get an asterisk—like Alex Rodriguez, who should be in the Hall of Fame?”
“No, they need to trash that plaque,” Murray said. “I really need to shame them into doing the right thing. They won’t do it unless they’re embarrassed.”
The right thing, in Murray’s estimation, would be inducting the “different hand,” as Sotheby’s put it, that drafted the “Laws.” After a careful penmanship analysis, validated by an expert, Murray had identified that hand as belonging to a Knickerbocker named Daniel Lucius Adams, a.k.a. Doc, the inventor of the shortstop position. As it happened, Thorn had long been making a case for Doc Adams as an unheralded pioneer. “Adams was clearly the one who developed the modern game of baseball,” Murray said, adding that he’d been visited in his office by Adams’s great-granddaughter Marjorie, who wept upon seeing the documents. (She died in 2021, but her nephew Nate Downey will be in Cooperstown, pressing the family’s case.)
One man’s modernity is, of course, another’s degradation, and, as dinner was served, the conversation turned to such recent innovations as ghost runners, pitch clocks, and robot umps, none of them to Murray’s liking. “TV forced them to speed up the game,” he said with a sigh. “Because they found that the audiences would drop off very quickly with baseball.”
“Do you know about Banana Ball?” a woman asked. She was referring to the Savannah Bananas, a Harlem Globetrotters-like outfit prioritizing acrobatics and entertainment over tradition.
“It’s goofy ball,” Murray said, and paused. “What the heck. Anything that’s fun, I’m all for it.” ♦