Tom Fesolowich is the Coordinator of The Old Time Base Ball Program held at Old Bethpage Village Restoration. The village hosts the longest Vintage Base Ball Festival that had its inaugural event in 1997. In 2015, it was renamed in Doc Adams honor, the Doc Adams Old Time Base Ball Festival. Two years ago [2019], Tom did a live Facebook stream of talk with Marjorie Adams, the great-granddaughter of Doc Adams. Tom shared some of his thoughts on Doc. “Doc Adams is to the true Father of Baseball. The game is so perfectly arranged and would change dramatically if bases … Continue reading →

For many years, Doc Adams contribution to baseball was overlooked. That’s a shame, because without him, baseball would have been a vastly different game. There would be no shortstop because shortstop was Doc’s invention, redefining the geography of the game. And the distance between the bases wouldn’t have been 90 feet because that’s the distance Doc introduced to the game. There might not have been nine players to a team or nine innings to a game. Both were Doc’s ideas. Daniel Adams, equipped with degrees from Yale and Harvard, played baseball for exercise almost 200 years ago and refined the … Continue reading →

When I started playing vintage base ball in 2009, my baseball history knowledge didn’t go much further back than my youth.  Playing was a lot of fun, but a few years into it, I really wasn’t getting any education out of it. The year I was made captain of my Minnesota vintage club, we hosted annual Vintage Base Ball Association conference.  It was at that conference where I learned that we were not playing base ball by the New York rules and customs.  It was then that I started to really study base ball history. One of the things that … Continue reading →