Back in 2016, The Sporting News celebrated the start of the baseball season by listing the best books ever written about the National Pastime. In “The 25 best baseball books of all time, ranked“, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” by John Thorn was listed in the Top 10, crediting it with almost getting Doc Adams inducted into the Hall of Fame Class of 2016. The vote of the Pre-integration Era Committee came up just 2 votes short of the number required for Doc’s election.

If you are interested in the early history of baseball “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” is an essential read (there is also a great audio version available). If you’re interested in the early history of baseball and haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for? It definitely should be on your must-read list. Now that the hot stove season has officially kicked off, what better time.

Among those lost in the shuffle of Cartwright and Doubleday and Chadwick and Spalding in the first decade of the twentieth century were four other men, each of whom had a superior claim to “inventing” the game than any of those named. Of these little known four fathers only one, a mysterious Mr. Wadsworth, was accorded even a bit part in the drama of the Special Commission’s findings. We will soon enough catch up with him and with the others — Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and William H. Tucker.

“Baseball in the Garden of Eden, The Secret History of the Early Game: Introduction”, John Thorn, Our Game

From Simon & Schuster: Who really invented baseball? Forget Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown and Alexander Cartwright. Meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and other fascinating figures buried beneath the falsehoods that have accrued around baseball’s origins. This is the true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped the game from its earliest days, and how it became our national pastime and our national mirror.

Thorn credits three others who should share the title “Father of Modern Base Ball” instead of Cartwright. Their names are William Rufus Wheaton, Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth. Wheaton was an attorney who may have written the first set of rules in 1837 for the Gotham Base Ball Club. Along with William H. Tucker, he was on the Knickerbockers’ Committee on By-Laws that wrote the rules that were adopted in 1845. Wheaton had stated that there were few differences in the rules of the Gotham club and the rules the Knicks adopted.

“John Thorn and Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game”, Joe Williams, Seamheads

Although the subsequent re-discovery of Doc Adams’ handwritten “Laws of Base Ball” did not help Adams even get on the 2022 Early Baseball Era ballot, we can only hope that it will provide Doc Adams the boost necessary to get him over the top and he will be celebrated as a member of the Class of 2025.