Doc Adams Honored in Hartford as a Founder of Baseball
From Don Amore at The Hartford Courant on September 10, 2011, with mention of SABR members Gary O’Maxfield and John Thorn:
If Doc Adams was looking down on Hartford Saturday, he was probably blushing. He was that type.
To hear his accomplishments recited, his virtues extolled and see the pride in the faces of his great, great-great and great-great-great grandchildren, the old Doc might well have been embarrassed by it all.
“Alexander Cartwright liked to toot his own horn,” Gary O’Maxfield, commissioner of Friends of Vintage Base Ball, told gathered listeners, devotees of 19th century baseball. “Doc Adams didn’t like to brag.”
In fact, when Daniel Lucius Adams retired as president of the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in New York, he moved with his family to Ridgefield, then to New Haven, and largely forgot about the game he had played a major role in inventing and organizing, never campaigning for credit. By the time of his death in 1899 — he is buried in New Haven — he was amazed to see it had grown into a big business.
“To him, it was just for fun,” O’Maxfield said.
The Friends of Vintage Base Ball honored Doc Adams on a glorious Saturday morning at Colt Park, between games of a doubleheader between the Nutmegs and Charter Oaks, playing in the clothing and by the rules of roughly 1865.
Read the full article here: http://www.courant.com/sports/baseball/hc-dom-amore-baseball-column-911-20110910,0,1824500.story
Originally published: September 12, 2011. Last Updated: September 12, 2011.