Spirit of Aloha | Features | March/April 2005

Baseball in the Kingdom
By: Bob Dye

Long before free agency and steroids, gentlemen and missionary sons played kinipopo with straight branches cut from kukui and hau trees

America’s favorite hyperbolist, Mark Twain, wasn’t exaggerating when he said baseball was “the very symbol of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century.” But he was dead wrong when he went on to say there was “no possible kinship between baseball and the Sandwich Islands!”

The occasion of Twain’s foul-ball remark was a banquet on April 8, 1889, in famed Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City. Teddy Roosevelt and other illustrious Americans had gathered to celebrate the conclusion of a successful six-month world tour, during which baseball all-stars played 53 games in 50 cities, in such novice baseball countries as Australia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy and France. Honolulu was supposed to be one of those cities, but the game between the Chicagos and All Americas, scheduled for one o’clock on Saturday, Nov. 24, was never played.

In Honolulu, there had been great anticipation for the event for many weeks. Makiki Field was ready, bleachers seating 800 had been erected and a thousand fans were expected. The Royal Hawaiian Band, along with leading local ballplayers and patrons, was up early to meet the steamer Alameda off Diamond Head and accompany the players to the Oceanic dock, where a large crowd of eager fans waited to cheer them.

The organizer of the tour was A.G. Spalding, owner of the Chicago White Stockings (not for nothing was his middle name Goodwill). A premier pitcher of the 1870s, he won 47 games in 1876 when the White Stockings won the first-ever National League championship. He called his players “baseball missionaries,” because they were introducing baseball to the world. Others called them The Baseball Giants, because they were “the cream of baseballdom.” Spalding’s cousin in Honolulu, businessman George W. Smith, was chairman of a welcoming committee dominated by missionary sons who were former Punahou School ballplayers.


Auwe! The ship was delayed and arrived a day late, on a Sunday, when notorious blue laws were in force. Pious businessmen, many of them avid fans and baseball players, protested that the games would have to be cancelled. Nonsense! The blue laws be damned (or words to that effect), said King Kalākaua, the games must go on. If a fine needed to be levied for playing on a Sunday, he added, fans would be happy to pay it. A hastily drafted petition was circulated supporting the king’s position, and more than a thousand persons signed it. The battle line was drawn and a tug of war declared. Before the dispute reached revolutionary proportions, Spalding settled the matter by reporting he would obey the blue law of the land, and would not field his teams.

A true sport, Kalākaua accepted his honored guest’s decision, but went ahead with a lavish lü‘au for the players at Queen Kapi‘olani’s private residence, paid for by four of his richest cronies—George Beckley, John Cummins, John ‘Ena and Sam Parker. Twain’s observation that there was no kinship between baseball and Hawai‘i is perplexing, and he should have known better. By 1888, there were four well-established baseball clubs in Hawai‘i. A local scribe had written, “There is no community in America or anywhere else which takes a greater interest in baseball than this community.”

Twain retorted: “Baseball is all fact; the Islands all sentiment.”

Was this another case of never the Twain shall meet? Sentiment aside, when Twain made a four-month visit to the Islands in 1866, baseball was already an established sport in Honolulu. A knowledgeable crowd watched that year’s exciting Fourth of July game when the Natives beat the Haoles, 2-1.

At the time of Twain’s visit, some form of baseball had been played in Honolulu for at least a quarter of a century. Although details of the game’s origins here, as elsewhere, are murky, some things are definitely known and others are simply assumed.

Pau hana, after work, there was little for a foreign male to do in Honolulu in the early 1840s that didn’t lead either to jail or to the dispensary. About 400 foreigners were then living in Honolulu town, more than half of them Americans, a quarter English, half of that number Chinese and the rest French, Spanish or Portuguese. High-minded missionaries claimed everybody was having a good time in the town’s bowling alleys and pool halls, which were thought to be gambling dens and cesspools of drunkenness. Whether saint or sinner, everyone also agreed there was a public need for manly outdoor activities that tickled minds and exercised bodies.

Imagine, then, the collective sigh of relief when, from the nearest vacant field, a shout roared into the day: “Play ball!” The year was probably 1840, because the Polynesian newspaper reported on Dec. 26 that a game of “good old bat and ball” had been played. Since there were many early versions of baseball, we will never know which of the many bat-and-ball games played around the world was played that day in Hawai‘i (although many baseball historians claim that the first recorded modern baseball contest actually took place as early as 1846 in Hoboken, N.J.). It was probably town ball or “rounders,” or a local hybrid of those popular foreign games, since it is generally accepted lore that baseball as we know it today evolved from many bat-and-ball games played by the English colonialists. (The game of rounders has been played in England since Tudor times. According to Chris Mouser in The Baseball Archive, “rounders is the 16th century version of a bat-and-ball game that dates back to the dawn of time.”)

Men who took to the field that day had been sent here to staff the American and British commercial outposts. Those bat-and-ball games they had played at home were as similar or different as how they spoke their common language. The fast Irish game of hurling was vastly different from the slower English game of cricket. But those bat-and-ball games that used bases (in Barn Ball the base was the side of a barn) were somewhat similar. Rounders as played in Ireland and England was nearly the same game.

Hawaiians called all games played with a ball kinipōpō. To play haole (foreign) kinipōpō required a vacant lot to serve as a playing field, and everyone who wanted to play did. If too few players showed up for a team game, competition was limited to a contest called one-old-cat, two-old-cat, three-old-cat, etc.—a ball game still played by kids today.

The no-holds-barred commercial competition in the Islands between the Americans and the British didn’t carry over to sports. When the two sides played ball, they used rules agreed to by both sides. Disputed calls were settled amicably and without the rancor that troubled discussion of important civic matters. Tempers flared so often in public debate that when the foreign residents formed
an association of gentlemen, called the Sandwich Island Institute, in 1837, the rules stated that members were to meet “with an unshackled cordiality, free from all the trammels of national, sectarian or party spirit, that we may meet as citizens of the world and as brothers.”

When Punahou School opened in July 1842, the missionary sons who attended played a stick-and-ball game, called, by them, ‘aipuni. An observer of the game remembered “it was played with less science but more fun than in these days.” ‘Aipuni translates as “to go around,” so we can assume the game may have been a version of rounders. Other ball games, such as old cat and prisoner’s base, were also played.

In that first year at Punahou, there were only 15 boys enrolled, so teachers and townsmen, some of them eminent citizens, joined the student teams to play “bat and ball.” Principal Daniel Dole demonstrated his prowess by hitting high, “almost out of sight,” fly balls to the boys. The Chamberlain boys, James and Levi, had cut straight branches from kukui and hau trees to use as bats. Bags filled with sand served as bases.

Exactly when the American rules for baseball reached Hawai‘i is not known, but Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr., the man who devised many of them, set foot in Honolulu on Aug. 10, 1849. Cartwright, at over 6 feet and 220 pounds, had played baseball with other volunteer firemen in New York City on a team called the Knickerbockers, which he had helped organize into a gentleman’s club in 1845. He brought his baseball from New York, and played with it on “the sunny plains of Hawai‘i nei.” But whose rules were used? If you played with his ball, you played by his gentleman’s rules, is my guess.

In keeping with the gentlemanly aspect of the now refined game, Cartwright’s innovations outlawed the rule that a runner could be thrown out on the base paths by striking him with a thrown ball. Baseball would no longer be a blood sport. This change made it possible to use a harder ball and, in turn, led to a faster but less exciting game. More order was then established by specifying that the distance between bases would be 90 feet. Further, the field was divided into fair and foul territory, a brilliant idea that narrowed the hitter’s range to the space between foul lines and reduced the number of defensive players. The number of players on the field was not specifically stated, but, by 1846, games were usually played with nine men on a side, and that number was later made official.

To avoid endless arguments over calls, Cartwright’s seventh rule stated: “All disputes and differences relative to the game, to be decided by the Umpire, from which there is no appeal.” Cartwright umpired the first game played under his rules on June 19, 1846, at Elysian Field in Hoboken, N.J., and, ever the gentleman, assessed a fine of six cents against a player for swearing.

A Hawai‘i missionary son, William R. Castle, was then a student at Oberlin College in Elyria, Ohio, and played what he called the New Game of Baseball. “At that time,” he wrote, “the underhand toss was the vogue and it was the accepted method of pitching, or, as it was called, tossing the ball.” Castle scoffed that it was a “weak and ineffectual method,” and he detested it. When he returned home, Castle taught the rules he learned at Oberlin to the baseball club at Punahou. He asked a local foundry to cast a home base, which was “a circular iron plate, perhaps fourteen inches in diameter and three-quarters of an inch thick, the top being painted white.”

On other islands, clubs were then organized and, as usual, the game adapted to the style of the community. Castle reported the rules were “laughable” in a game he saw played on the Big Island at Wai‘ōhinu, in Ka‘u. He wrote: “If two runners got caught on the same base, they decided which of the two was to be put out, although the decision oftentimes resulted in the wildest opposition, uproar and excitement.”

The first professional baseball games were played in America in 1869. The owners hoped the games would attract wealthy fans, but the blue-collar crowd took to the game like mustard to a hot dog. The same was true in Hawai‘i, with some fans arriving in horse-drawn carriages and others hoofing it.

In 1875, Kalākaua became the first Hawaiian monarch to watch a baseball game. It was a long one, called because of darkness in the sixth inning after three hours of play, with the score in favor of the Athletes over the Pensacolas, 38-33. The king, who loved sports, became a great fan, and the sport gained in popularity throughout his kingdom. The first interisland game was played in Honolulu in 1883, with the Honolulu Athletic Club beating Sprecklesville of Maui, 33-16.

The missionary sons who squabbled with Kalākaua over the blue laws helped strip him of his kingly powers in a bloodless revolution in 1887. The king saw his last baseball game in San Francisco, just a few days before his death on Jan. 20, 1891. He was 54.

A year later, Cartwright died in Honolulu, at age 72. To this day, hundreds of baseball fans make the pilgrimage to his gravesite at O‘ahu Cemetery. In 1938, Makiki Field, the site of the aborted all-star game in 1889, was renamed Cartwright Field, to honor his seminal contribution to the game.

And the game played on. Despite the loss of two of its biggest fans, Hawai‘i’s favorite pastime continued to flourish. Punahou School was joined by other high schools in fielding championship teams. The University of Hawai‘i plays competitive NCAA Division I ball in the Western Athletic Conference at Murakami Stadium, one of the finest collegiate ballparks in the country. A professional Triple A Pacific Coast League franchise moved to Honolulu in 1961, and was dubbed the Hawai‘i Islanders. The team had some great players—Tony Gwynn and Barry Bonds, among them—and won division titles, but high travel costs and dwindling attendance doomed the franchise, which was moved to Colorado Springs in 1987.

No kinship between baseball and the Hawaiian Islands? Indeed, there is, was and always will be. Mark Twain struck out when he uttered those words, which he should have eaten at that nine-course banquet in 1889.

BOB DYE is the author of Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains: Afong and the Chinese in Hawai‘i, and the editor of the Hawai‘i Chronicles series of books. His articles on Hawai‘i have appeared in Newsday, The Honolulu Advertiser, the Hawaiian Journal of History, Honolulu magazine and other journals.

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