Doc Adams – SABR’s Overlooked 19th Century Baseball Legend
On July 31, 2014, Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams (1814 – 1899) was selected as the 19th Century Overlooked Baseball Legend by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). This recognition came in the bi-centennial of his birth.
Each year SABR honors a 19th century player, manager, executive or other baseball personality not yet inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Adams joined the New York Base Ball Club in 1840. By 1845, he became a member of the famed Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and was elected as its president two years later. In 1848, he led the committee to revise the rules and by-laws of the Knickerbockers.
The efforts to have the contributions of Doc Adams recognized by baseball have been led by his great granddaughters, Marjorie Adams of Connecticut, and Nancy Downey of New York City.
The family is very honored and excited about our great-grandfather’s recognition by an organization (SABR) that has a long tradition of pursuing historical truth and accuracy about our national pastime”, said Marjorie Adams.
Other than baseball historians, not many are aware of Doc Adams’ important contributions to the development of baseball at a seminal time in its history. Selection as SABR’s 2014 Overlooked Baseball Legend is a prestigious acknowledgement of Adams as one of baseball’s true founding fathers. It also represents an important step in the journey to have Adams’ role in the early development of the game recognized with enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Congratulations !!! Well deserved and hopefully a pathway to HoF induction next year !!!
Getting history right is an on going process. Figuring out things as recently as nineteenth century America is frustrating (thank goodness we have so many people that can look at the written record with the help of the internet in every imaginable nook and cranny) With so many baby boomers now retiring in a population of 330 million we should have a big bump up in the number of people who have time to explore history as a hobby. I was happy a few years ago when I satisfied an item of curiosity I had been trying for fifteen years to find out about in ten minutes with the internet. Learning about Doc Adam’s has been fun and it allows me to update information that was wrong. I always say to people “to the the best of my knowledge such and such is the case if I find out differently I will adjust what I had believed to be the case and try to let you know”. Not everyone wants to hear that something they had been told about history and other matters should always be taken with a grain of salt in case new data should be forthcoming to supplant a previous error or misconception. LOL.