Alexander Cartwright Marquee Hall of Fame 1938

The Hall of Fame credits Alexander Cartwright with writing baseball's foundational rules, a claim the surviving evidence complicates. He never played professionally; there was no professional game in the first half of his life. Born in April 1820 and dead in July 1892, he was elected by the Centennial Commission in 1938.

He was a bookseller and volunteer fireman in Manhattan and a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, which in 1845 wrote down a set of rules. His plaque credits him with the ninety-foot baselines, nine innings and nine men, and the surviving Knickerbocker minutes do not support that: they show a committee, and several of the specifics arrived later.

He left for the California gold rush in 1849 and settled in Hawaii, where he ran a business and died. His plaque went up in the years the Hall was also promoting the Doubleday story, which is worth knowing about how the claim came to be made.