Ofgang: Renewed support for Doc Adams’ Hall of Fame bid
From Erik Ofgang at Connecticut Magazine on March 6, 2015, with mention of SABR members Marjorie Adams and Gary Goldberg-O’Maxfield:
It wasn’t the pitch she was expecting.
A few years ago Marjorie Adams of Mystic attended a lecture in Simsbury on the pre-Civil War history of baseball when the speaker, Gary Goldberg-O’Maxfield threw the baseball history equivalent of a curveball—he discussed Doc Adams, and hailed him as a forgotten founding father of America’s pastime. Adams is Marjorie’s great grandfather and she was shocked to hear him included in the talk.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. Marjorie knew her great grandfather had been an early baseball enthusiast and had pioneered some practices, but she was unaware of the extent of his contributions to the game—few people were or are.
Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, who lived in Ridgefield for the last three-and-a-half decades of his life, was a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club (an early New York baseball team that played its games in New Jersey). While with the team, Adams invented the position that ultimately became shortstop, set the distance between the bases at 90 feet apart and fixed the pitching distance at 45 feet (the distance has since been moved to 60 feet). He was also an early advocate of several other rules that helped make baseball the game it is today.
Read the full article here: http://www.connecticutmag.com/Blog/History/March-2015/Efforts-Ramp-Up-to-Get-CT-Baseball-Legend-Into-Hall-of-Fame/
Originally published: March 6, 2015. Last Updated: March 6, 2015.