Thorn: Doc Adams remembers, an 1896 interview
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on November 14, 2012:
Twenty years ago I “rediscovered” Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams with the publication in the debut issue of the Elysian Fields Quarterly of my article “The True Father of Baseball.” I expanded upon this offering several times over the ensuing years, notably in Total Baseball; it appears in its latest incarnation at the SABR Biproject site: http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/14ec7492. I also wrote about Adams and his key innovations–setting the basepaths at ninety feet and inventing the position of shortstop–in my most recent book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. I have spoken about Adams at the Smithsonian.
What I have not done, however, is to present to my readers the complete article that started my enduring fascination with this character. I stumbled upon it in the late 1980s in a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown and retyped it on site with the aid of a lightweight electronic typewriter (I had not brought my “portable,” or rather luggable, Kaypro computer with me). This fundamentally important story appeared in The Sporting News, February 29, 1896.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2012/11/14/doc-adams-remembers/
Originally published: November 14, 2012. Last Updated: November 14, 2012.