In 2020, Jay Jaffe of FanGraphs again showed support for Doc Adams’ inclusion in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Hopefully, the committee does better homework than it did last time when Doc came up 2 votes short for election.

Since the last time Doc was eligible, the discovery of his handwritten “Laws of Base Ball” was announced. This document sold at auction for $3,263,246, setting a new record for the highest priced baseball document. It was also featured in the Baseball Americana exhibit at the library of Congress.

“Adams’s hand in the sport’s early rule-making is not a revelation; instead, it is the physical record of his central role memorialized in the three surviving pages of his document.”

This compelling artifact surely establishes that Daniel Lucius ‘Doc’ Adams as a key Founding Father of baseball deserving to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Having come up merely 2 votes short of election in 2016, it seemed that this evidence, written in Doc’s own hand, would convince ALL the members of the Early Baseball Era Committee to elect Doc Adams to the Hall of Fame Class of 2022. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, Adams wasn’t even named to the ballot. Hopefully, the Classic Baseball Era Commitee will see the error of the previous Committee’s ways and not only name Adams to the 2025 Classic Baseball Era ballot but will finally acknowledge his place in baseball history by electing him to the Hall of Fame.

To find out more on the ‘Laws’, check out the following link:

The Laws of Base Ball