What do you get when you cross historical reenactment with America’s favorite pastime? Vintage baseball — which a local artist hopes will take off in Hawaiʻi.
Waikīkī visual artist Matías Solario has been working with Old Queen Street Stadium, a sports museum and clothing store, to bring back old-school baseball. Through the “Aloha Vintage Base Ball Association," which Solario founded, he plans to create a baseball league.
The association will follow the 1886 rules set by "Spalding's Official Baseball Guide," which Solario said showcased the game's similarity to what we know it as now.
Solario said there are fun quirks in the 1886 rules — think top hats and tails, gloves that look like gardening mitts, and lots of old-timey lingo.
"It's a very accessible style of baseball to everybody because no matter how good you think you are, it kind of humbles everybody because it's really hard to throw off of lower mounds with a limited windup and a really heavy ball. And so it's just kind of all over the place in the best way," he said.
He said that there was baseball activity in Hawaiʻi before the U.S. West Coast that goes back the mid-1800s plantation era.
"There was plantation teams that would form, oftentimes segregated by ethnicity. So there was a Portuguese team, there was a Puerto Rican team, Filipino team, Japanese, Chinese," he said.
Solario also shared the 19th-century baseball figures who moved to Hawaiʻi, including Alexander Cartwright — credited with bringing baseball to Hawaiʻi. Lefty O'Doul, a member of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, spearheaded barnstorming teams made up of major leaguers on stopovers in Hawaiʻi as they made their way to Japan.
Barnstorming is when groups like teams and theater troupes travel to small towns to stage shows.
Through the association, Solario hopes to bring back barnstorming to vintage baseball. He said he plans to hold an annual preseason tournament called the Kalakaua Cup to kick off the season — he has two California teams on board arriving for the tournament next November.
He also said he has a goal of four teams to start in the league. Being an artist himself, he has designed all the uniforms for those teams. He plans to revive the older teams that played baseball during the Hawaiʻi plantation era.
"To be able to try to envision what these clubs might have looked like and bring them back from the dead is just beyond fun. It just brought me so much joy to put all that together and bring it back to life," he said.
Solario has been working on this association by himself for two years and hopes to entice players to join.
"If you're new to baseball, if you're semi-pro, if you played college, if you have never played baseball at all, come on by. Let's see how it works for you. It's a lot of fun," he said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Dec. 3, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Tori DeJournett adapted this story for the web.
