Baseball’s early days on Kauai

There was only one baseball league on Kauai in the early 1900s, a men’s league that in 1911 was comprised of six teams: Lihue, KAA (Kauai Athletic Association), Kilauea, Makaweli, Eleele and Homestead.

The league’s playing season ran from April to Oct. 15, during which each team played two rounds, with the championship teams from each round then playing for the league championship.

Sugar plantation managers prized their players and consequently allowed them the special privilege of leaving their regular jobs an hour or two before their usual pau hana time to practice baseball.

Games attracted crowds in the several hundreds from all over Kauai. One Sunday, 20 cars filled with drivers and passengers traveled all the way from Kekaha to watch a game at Kilauea — home of the perennial league champion Kilauea team — but were stopped by deep mud on the unpaved highway of the time, two miles short of their destination.   

On another occasion, Makaweli team backers booked rooms for Saturday night at the Lihue Hotel — located about where the banyan trees now stand at Kalapaki Villas on Rice Street — to help ensure that their players would get a good night’s rest prior to playing the Lihue team the next day.  However, the Makaweli ball players had no rest that evening, since Lihu‘e supporters organized a brass band to serenade them all night long. It’s unknown which team won.

Kauai Railway Co., which serviced McBryde Sugar Co., Makaweli Plantation, Kaua‘i Fruit and Land Co. and Koloa Sugar Co., would regularly transport Makaweli Plantation’s baseball fans from Makaweli all the way to Koloa, and back, to watch their team play away games against Koloa.  

League rosters included the names of many outstanding, very tough, baseball players. One of them, Benjamin Tashiro, a star short stop for the McBryde team, would later become Judge of the Fifth Circuit Court on Kauai.