In New York City in the 1830s and '40s, young Alick Cartwright grew up playing all kinds of games that used bats, balls and bases - but none of them were called baseball, for that game had not yet been created. In his teens, Alick and his friends ventured into other neighborhoods to play various ball games, including at the grassy squares at Madison Square and Murray Hill, and he earns a reputation as one of the best players in the city, whatever the game, be it cricket, rounders, barn ball, burn ball, stick ball, soak ball, goal ball, town ball or several "old cat" games - one old cat (one base), two old cat (two bases), etc. But one thing drove Alick crazy - every area played by different rules, sometimes using two bases, sometimes five, and the number of players on the field varied from just a few to more than 20. Sometimes a base was a tall wooden stick in the ground, sometimes a rock, sometimes a barrel top or just an old hat. Plus, the distances between bases were always different. Worse, because the rules were always different, they spent as much time arguing about the rules as playing the game. Alick played for one reason, to have fun, and arguing was not fun. After a particularly contentious argument that nearly comes to blows until Alick intervenes, he sits down with pencil, paper and ruler to create a more perfect game. After his best pal nearly dies after getting hit in the head by a thrown ball during a game of town ball, Alick writes down the rules of modern baseball. A year later, he organizes the first team, the Knickerbockers - as in the knickerbocker Fire Company, of which he was a member, as well as the first game and first scorecard. Three years later Alick is among the thousands of people joining the 1849 Gold Rush. He kept a meticulous journal along the way, a copy of which I obtained from Bishop Museum in Honolulu. I also obtained everything the Baseball Hall of Fame has on Cartwright, made several visits to the Hawaii State Archive in Honolulu. And while Alick is the focus of this book, the Oregon and California Trails and all of the other emigrants are co-stars. Growing up in Oregon, where the state seal includes oxen pulling a covered wagon and the state song includes the lyric "land of the pioneers," and having been born in the Gold Rush centennial year of 1949, I was always aware of the history and lasting influence of the Oregon Trail pioneers. It turns out that the California Trail, after it breaks off from the Oregon Trail, was even more perilous in some ways than the Oregon. The story of the courage and determination of all the people - men, women, children - and their animals who crossed rivers, plains, deserts and mountains to reach Oregon and California is also one that needs to be retold, especially in a world where yesterday is old news already. Without the pioneers of 1849 and ensuing years, America would not be the nation it is today, in so many ways. Their example too is worth remembering and emulating. My teaching degree and classroom experience, along with years of coaching kids, not to mention parenting, show through in the form of questions at the end of each chapter. Together, they emphasize vocabulary, mathematics, geology, geography, health and literary concepts, among other academic topics, as well as questions designed to explore human relationships, personal responsibility and ethics, and personal thoughts and feelings. The questions can be used by school teachers and home-schoolers, or by parents reading with their children (or ignored altogether). The story is written for young people, but the drama is real and riveting for any age. I hope you'll find "The Ball That Changed The World" both entertaining and informative, and Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. to be as admirable and heroic a fellow as I do.
About the Author: "The Ball That Changed The World" is written for a younger audience. Each two-page chapter concludes with questions that can be used by teachers or home-schooling parents to emphasize academic topics from English to geology, as well as personal development and ethics. Mr. Chapman is also the author of three published non-fiction books, "Mauna Ala: Hawaii's Royal Mausoleum,", "You Know You're In Hawaii When ..." and "Boys of Winter: the Story of the Hawaii Winter Baseball League." Between 2001 and 2005, he wrote six novels that were published in daily serialized form by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin under the general heading My Kind of Town. Mr. Chapman is editor-in-chief of a Honolulu publishing group that includes Hawaii's best-read newspaper, a glossy magazine division and a weekly paper with readership of more than half a million. In 2005, Mr. Chapman was one of six American journalists chosen for the first U.S.-Korea Journalists Exchange Fellowship, sponsored by the East-West Center and the Korea Press Foundation. Other U.S. journalists represented Newsday, National Public Radio in Washington D.C., Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and a D.C. TV station. In Seoul he attened a baseball game between the Doosan Bears and Samsung Lions, one of the best baseball experiences of his lie. As a free-lance writer, Mr. Chapman has contributed to more than 30 publications. He previously worked as a daily columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser for 13 years, and before that as sports writer/columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and sports editor at the Pendleton East-Oregonian. Before studying journalism as a graduate student at the University of Oregon, he was a theology major as an undergrad and later spent one year in a seminary in St. Louis. His baseball background includes serving as a batboy for a minor league team (Salem Dodgers), lettering in high school and college, covering professional baseball for the San Jose Mercury News, and coaching youth leagues for eight years, including three state tournament teams. A resident of Hawaii since 1979, he is a native of Salem, Oregon.