The Original Laws of Baseball — Primary Source Documents, 1857

The complete Laws of Baseball as presented by Daniel Lucius Adams at the 1857 Baseball Convention in New York City. These eighteen pages constitute the foundational document of the modern game — adopted by fourteen clubs without significant amendment.

Adams' own working draft of the Laws — the handwritten pages he prepared before the 1857 Convention. These three pages show the Laws in Adams' own hand, and were the primary evidence used in the 2015 identification of his authorship.

In 2015, after the researcher received the documents he met with MLB historian John Thorn who has forgotten more than the researcher knows about the history of baseball. In 1991 Thorn was the first accredited historian to recognize the importance of Adams to the history of baseball. While Thorn had written broadly about the history of baseball and Adams' role in trade journals, all such writings were seemingly ignored by the Hall of Fame and people with general knowledge of baseball history. The meeting was insightful. While baseball has a long and complex history tracking back to many ball-and-bat games, the modern game of baseball has a clearer path. The Laws of Baseball documents painted a clear fact-based analysis, using original documents, of the role that Adams played in the history of modern baseball contradicting the information widely disseminated to the public and at the Hall of Fame.

A twenty-one-page scholarly analysis of the Laws of Baseball — examining each provision in historical context, tracing the development of the rules from the Knickerbocker Club's early experiments to the 1857 Convention, and establishing Adams' authorship through documentary evidence.