Back in 2016, The Sporting News celebrated the start of the 2016 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.

The subsequent re-discovery of Doc Adams’ handwritten “Laws of Base Ball”, will hopefully provide Doc Adams the boost necessary to get him over the top and he will be celebrated as a member of the Class of 2022.

If you are interested in the early history of baseball “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” is a must. If you haven’t read it yet, why not, what are you waiting for? It definitely should be on your reading list.

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.