"Alexander Joy Cartwright, (born April 17, 1820, New York City, N.Y., U.S.—died July 12, 1892, Honolulu, Hawaii [now in the United States]), chief codifier of the baseball rules from which the present rules were developed". "A surveyor by profession, Cartwright was one of the founders of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, an organization of amateur players in New York City. He was chairman of a club committee that prepared a set of baseball rules, which were adopted in September 1845 and apparently were first used in a game between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Hoboken, N.J., June 19, 1846". "Those 1845 rules were taken in part from Robin Carver’s Book of Sports (1834) but were original in some important respects. A major innovation legitimized tagging out a base runner rather than hitting him with a thrown ball in order to retire him; this made possible the introduction of a hard ball. Cartwright is generally credited with fixing the distance between bases at 90 feet (27.4 metres)".
Ty Cobb grew up in a small town nearby our farm here. There is a Ty Cobb Museum there, which I've never been in. He was surrounded by controversy, well known for his "flying feet" when he stole bases. I suspect he would have preferred the old rules, with a hardball. LOL "Tigers great Ty Cobb 'slides' into an opposing catcher, 1912."
"Tad Dorgan (perhaps the greatest sports cartoonist) invented the expression “gets my goat” early in the century (before 1905) in the San Francisco Bulletin. The phrase spread like wildfire, and the cartoonists liked to depict the actual goat they were getting, usually with the owner’s name on a label tied to the tail. My book has a great little clipping about the Philadelphia Inquirer getting Ty Cobb‘s goat. Here’s a picture of Ty with his (metaphorical) goat":