The Knickerbockers held elections annually to determine who would serve as officials. At the club’s second election, held on May 5, 1846, Adams was named the Knickerbockers’ vice president. At an April 1847 meeting, he became the president of the team, and was re-elected in 1848 and 1849. He was the leader of a “Committee to Revive the Constitution and By-Laws” of baseball in 1848.
Continue reading →An article on the “Origin of Base Ball” appeared on May 4, 1905, in the Long Beach Evening Tribune. The right questions were being asked back then; however, it wasn’t as easy to find the answers. Had the information available today been accessible, Doc Adams would probably already be in the Hall of Fame. It’s not too late. Hopefully this will be rectified with Doc Adams’ election at the 2021 Winter Meetings and induction as a member of the Class of 2022. Read the full article here.
Continue reading →I stumbled across this article in Reddit and found it interesting. In honor of our hard-working doctors keeping us safe during this pandemic, it lists an All-Physician Team! Actually, it lists 40 players who earned a real medical degree, either before, during, or after their baseball careers. It includes some that are very familiar, more recent players such as Dr. Ron Taylor of the 1969 Miracle Mets, and Dr. Bobby Brown (3B) and Doc Medich (P), both former Yankees. It also includes the likes of Right Fielder Moonlight Graham (Dr. Archibald Graham), made famous in ‘The Field of Dreams’. But … Continue reading →
The fifth annual meeting was held at Abell’s, 474 Broadway, on the 7th of April, 1849. The officers elected for the year, were : D. L. Adams, President ; Ed. W. Talman, Vice-President; Eugene Plunkett, Secretary; F. C. Niebuhr, Treasurer. Directors—E. E. Dupignac, A. H. Drummond, B. C. Lee. At a meeting held April 24, 1849, a uniform was adopted for the club, viz. blue woolen pantaloons, white flannel shirt, chip (straw) hats ; and it may here be mentioned that the blue and white has ever since remained the costume of the club. The straw hats were abolished some … Continue reading →
Two uniform buttons from Doc Adams’ Knickerbocker Base Ball Club (ca. 1855). These buttons currently reside in a private collection. They are likely the oldest known surviving piece of baseball uniform with provenance.
Continue reading →On April 24, 2016, the last hours of the auction for the “Laws of Base Ball” authored by Doc Adams lived up to its billing and did not disappoint as the closing bid came in at $3,263,246 setting a new record for the highest priced baseball document. “Adams’s hand in the sport’s early rule-making is not a revelation; instead, it is the physical record of his central role memorialized in the three surviving pages of his document.” This compelling artifact surely establishes that Daniel Lucius ‘Doc’ Adams is unequivocally a key Founding Father of baseball and deserves to be enshrined … Continue reading →
Jay Jaffe of Fan Graphs has expressed his support several times for the induction of Doc Adams into the National Hall of Fame. He made a good point back in January 2020. Here’s some thoughts from Jay Jaffe in Sports Illustrated back in December 2015: Doc Adams, pioneer Roll over, Abner Doubleday, and tell Alexander Cartwright the news. No less an authority than MLB official historian John Thorn called Daniel Lucius Adams “first among the Fathers of Baseball” in a 1993 essay for Total Baseball and “the most significant figure in the early history of baseball” in his 2011 book … Continue reading →
Here’s a sampling of Doc Adam’s executive history with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club from the point of view of the annual meetings. Extracts from “Book of American Pastimes, Containing a History of the Principal Base Ball, Cricket, Rowing and Yachting Clubs of the United States”, Charles A. Peverelly, 1866
Continue reading →A couple of weeks ago, we shared some information on Dr. Daniel Lucius Adams (Doc Adams) contributions during the New York Cholera epidemic of 1854. In his Our Game Blog, John Thorn (the official historian for MLB) provided context of the mid-1800s, New York epidemics on March 22 in “Baseball in the Time of Cholera“.
Continue reading →The Vintage Base Ball Association (VBBA) will hold their 2021 Conference on Saturday, April 17. This year’s conference will be held virtually. The conference boasts an impressive list of presentations. There’s one presentation in particular that we are looking forward to. Corky Gaskell will present the argument for Doc Adams election by the Early Baseball Era (1950 and prior) Committee to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Gaskell will present “The Case For Doc Adams Election to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, December 2021” at 4:30 pm Central Time via Zoom.
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