On January 31, 1899, Henry Chadwick wrote to the editor of Sporting Life with reminiscences of his late friend and baseball pioneer, Dr. Daniel Lucius ‘Doc’ Adams. The letter was published on the front page of the February 4, 1899 edition. On that same day, Doc Adams was also remembered by Mr Chadwick in The Sporting News.
Continue reading →The Wilton Kiwanis, the 2nd largest club in New England, demonstrated support for Doc Adams by promoting our Doc Adams awareness campaign in their August 31, 2021, newsletter. Wilton is located right next to Ridgefield, CT where Doc lived from 1865 to 1888. Wilton Kiwanis is the longest serving volunteer organization in Wilton. They support individuals and organizations in need, with an emphasis on kids, raising funds, distributing contributions, and performing physical work to enhance Wilton and surrounding areas. The purpose of our campaign is to advance the truth of the origins of the game of baseball and ensure that … Continue reading →
Andrew Forbes, the author of The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays released an updated version with a “minor” correction. ” if you were to open both of those hypothetical copies of the book to the essay entitled “Madison Bumgarner and the Beautiful Lie,” and more specifically to pages 50 and 51, you would find that I, with the full backing of Team Invisible, have made a minor change to the text. “… … “More recent scholarship, though, has clarified things, and ousted Cartwright from the founder’s role. Most notably, the excellent John Thorn – who, as the Official Historian of … Continue reading →
Jay Jaffe of FanGraphs made a great point prior to the last time Doc Adams was eligible for a Hall of Fame ballot, in 2020. Unfortunately, the homework wasn’t done, and Adams astonishingly did not appear on the ballot. We hope that his words are heeded this year, and the latest oversight is corrected. Subsequent to the vote, his “Laws of Base Ball” resurfaced and sold for over $3/25 million. This compelling artifact surely establishes that Daniel Lucius ‘Doc’ Adams is unequivocally a key Founding Father of baseball. Coming up merely 2 votes short of election in the 2015 Pre-Integration Era … Continue reading →
Marjorie Adams was interviewed on January 26, 2020 by Claire Hall on the Ask Claire podcast on the Comfortably Zoned Radio Network. Note that this recording only has the 1st half of the podcast (about 14 minutes). Apparently, they had technical difficulties when making it and lost the second half. A shame, but still worth a listen.
Continue reading →In 1871, Doc Adams became the first President of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now the Fairfield County Bank), a position he would hold in two separate terms for ten of the next fifteen years. His photo still hangs downstairs at the main branch alongside portraits of the bank’s other presidents.
Continue reading →The 1857 Convention of Base Ball Players met for the first time on January 22 at Smith’s Hotel, the headquarters of the Knickerbocker Club, with the following clubs represented: Knickerbocker, Gotham, Eagle, Empire, Putnam, Baltic, Excelsior, Atlantic, Harmony, Harlem, Eckford, Bedford, Narrau, and Continental. The clubs elected Daniel Adams of the Knickerbockers as president of the convention and then appointed a rules committee, made up of one member of each represented club. This was perhaps the most important meeting in the history of baseball. It was a meeting of the baseball clubs of New York City, and unlike the previous … Continue reading →
Lawrence Baldassaro’s 2002 book, The American Game, included a chapter by Frederick Ivor-Campbell titled “The Many Fathers of Baseball: Anglo-Americans and the Early Game”. In it, Ivor-Campbell wrote about the previously most overlooked “father” of baseball, Doc Adams. SABR’s Nineteenth Century Base Ball Conference was named in Ivor-Campbell’s honor after he passed in a tragic car accident just a few months after the first 19th Century Base Ball Conference. It was fitting that the conference was named after him since he was among the historians and researchers that began the 19th Century base ball research renaissance that is still going … Continue reading →
Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella in their book, “The New Biographical History of Baseball: The Classic—Completely Revised” refer to Doc Adams as one of the “candidates for the honorific title of Father of Baseball”.
Continue reading →What may you ask does a book titled “Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography” by Colleen Skidmore have to do with Doc Adams? The description of the book is as follows: Mary Schäffer was a photographer, writer, botanical painter, and mapmaker from Philadelphia, well known for her travels in the Canadian Rockies and Jasper at the turn of the twentieth century. In Searching for Mary Schäffer, Colleen Skidmore takes up Schäffer’s own resonant themes—women and wilderness, travel and science—to ask new questions, tell new stories, and reassess the persona of Mary Schäffer imagined in more recent times. Public and private … Continue reading →