As a historian, I care about accuracy and preserving what really happened in baseball’s history. Enshrining Doc Adams in the Hall of Fame would be a great way to honor this.

The creator of this website, Roger J. Ratzenberger, Jr. does a nice job of summing up Adams’ accomplishments. I’ll offer them here for anyone who hasn’t read that post yet. Essentially, Adams, the president of New York City’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club led a committee that codified various rules for the game, including that bases were to be 90 feet apart, games were to last nine innings and teams were to have nine players. Adams even invented the position of shortstop.

Baseball, of course, went in a different direction a long time ago regarding who it identified as its pioneers. A commission led by Abraham Mills in the early 20th century wrongfully propagated the idea that a Civil War veteran named Abrner Doubleday invented the game at Cooperstown, N.Y. It’s why the Hall of Fame is there today.

The game attempted to correct its record in the 1930s by enshrining Alexander Cartwright, but this isn’t much better. While Cartwright had some role in baseball’s early development, his contributions have likely been exaggerated. As longtime baseball author and historian John Thorn wrote in Adams’ SABR bio, “The conventional tale of the game’s birth is substantially incorrect — not just the Doubleday fable, pointless to attack, but even the scarcely less legendary development of the Knickerbocker game, ostensibly sired by Alexander Cartwright.”

Adams died in 1899 and had been long forgotten before Thorn’s research and his seminal book on the game’s early history, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” helped make Adams a name again. He came within two votes of Hall of Fame induction in December 2015, thanks in part to efforts by his great-granddaughter Marjorie Adams to promote his candidacy. Sadly, Marjorie has since died. Momentum for Doc’s induction has, understandably, cooled since then, though these things can ebb and flow. I’ve spent a lot of time researching past Veterans or Era Committee candidates going back to 1953 and to my knowledge, Doc Adams had never made a ballot before the 2016 election cycle.

It’s hard to know who deserves the most credit for pioneering baseball, with legendary statistician Henry Chadwick having said, according to Thorn, “Like Topsy, baseball never had no ‘fadder’; it jest growed.”

Near the end of the SABR bio he wrote on Adams, Thorn writes, “For his role in making baseball the success it is, Doc Adams may be counted as first among the Fathers of Baseball.” While Adams would be far from the first Father of Baseball in Cooperstown it’s, as the Berenstain Bears would say, never too late to correct a mistake. Here’s hoping that Adams gets his Hall of Fame plaque in the foreseeable future and that the story of his contributions to baseball continues to become more widely known.

Graham Womack is a writer and baseball historian, with a particular interest in the Hall of Fame. Email him at thewomack@gmail.com.

This is part of our “Speaking of Doc” series.