The Shortstop Was Invented Because the Ball Was Too Light

The shortstop is the position most teams hand to their best infielder. It began as a workaround for a ball that would not fly.

A Ball That Would Not Carry

The first Knickerbocker baseballs were made by hand, and they were light. Baseball's official historian, John Thorn, puts the problem plainly: the early ball could not be thrown even two hundred feet.

An outfielder who chased a hit into the far grass had no way to get the ball back to the pitcher's point in time to stop a runner.

The fix was a man in between. He stood out in the shallow grass, took the outfielder's throw, and relayed it in.

They called him the short fielder.

The Man Who Stood There

Daniel Lucius Adams was a New York physician who joined the Knickerbocker club in 1845. Everyone called him Doc.

Historians credit him with taking up that in-between spot himself.

In February 1896, at the age of 81, he told The Sporting News how it had worked.

"I used to play shortstop, and I believe I was the first one to occupy that place, as it had formerly been left uncovered."

The Walk Into the Infield

Then the equipment changed. Balls were wound harder and livelier, and an outfielder could reach the pitcher on his own.

The relay man was no longer needed out on the grass.

Instead of disappearing, he walked forward into the dirt and took up station between second base and third.

The job vanished. The position stayed.

Thirty Yards

Adams did something else that outlasted him. In 1857 he was the presiding officer at a convention of fourteen New York area clubs, called to settle one set of rules for everybody.

The old wording had measured the diamond in paces, which left every field a slightly different size.

"The distance between bases I fixed at 30 yards."

Thirty yards is 90 feet. In the same 1896 memoir he gave the other distance he had settled.

"The distance from home to pitcher's base I made 45 feet."

The same convention settled nine men to a side and nine innings to a game.

A handwritten document he drafted for that convention survives. It surfaced publicly in 2016, and it is written in his own hand.

He Made the Balls Himself

Before any of it, there was the problem of getting a ball at all. Nobody in New York was manufacturing them.

"We had a great deal of trouble in getting balls made, and for six or seven years I made all the balls myself, not only for our club but also for other clubs when they were organized."

So the man who decided where the shortstop should stand also wound, by hand, the ball that put him there.

Adams died in 1899. The light ball that made his job necessary is long gone.

Every team still fields a shortstop.