“Baseball: An Illustrated History”, is a companion to Ken Burns’ ground-breaking Baseball documentary. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns mention Doc Adams several times, as well as quote from the seminal 1896 Sporting News interview. They played for “health and recreation merely,” but they also showed a lively interest in improving the game. Cartwright, along with the Knickerbockers’ president, a physician from New Hampshire named Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, would help draw up a set of new rules that changed baseball forever.The Knickerbockers decreed that the infield be diamond-shaped, rather than square. First and third bases were set forty-two paces … Continue reading →

Peter Morris highlights how Doc Adams’ passion for baseball was critical to game’s early survival in his book, But Didn’t We Have Fun?, .  Mr. Morris retrieves a lost era and a lost way of life. Offering a challenging new perspective on baseball’s earliest years, and conveying the sense of delight that once pervaded the game and its players, Mr. Morris supplants old myths with a story just as marvelous-but one that really happened “We have already seen that the Knickerbockers became so apathetic about the game that Daniel Adams claimed to ‘have to employ all my rhetoric to induce … Continue reading →