John Adams, 1951-2023

I am a baseball fan. Perhaps not a prominent one. But when a prominent baseball fan leaves this mortal plane for that great ballpark in the sky, proper attention must be paid, and respect must be given.

John Joseph Adams was born on October 9, 1951 -- 6 days after the Bobby Thomson Game, and 1 day before Joe DiMaggio's last game -- in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended his 1st Cleveland Indians game in 1954, which would be the last season in which they won the American League Pennant for 41 years, not that he remembered.

At the age of 9, he began playing the drums. In 1975, he graduated from Cleveland State University with a bachelor's degree in English. By that point, he had already begun the activity by which he would be known away from the shore of Lake Erie.

On August 24, 1973, he asked the Indians for permission to bring a bass drum to Cleveland Municipal Stadium. He was told not to disturb anyone with it. He later told an interviewer, "The first time, I got a lot of stares, and a few comments, like, 'You're not going to play that thing, are you?'" But a drunken fan grabbed his arm and said, "You gonna bang on that drum? Well, then start hitting it."

He did. As he recalled, "Suddenly, I saw people clapping to the beat. When the game was over, people stopped me outside the stadium. They told me I had the opposing pitcher so rattled, that guys from the other team were looking all over for me." The Indians beat the Texas Rangers, 11-5. (It is not known whether he was there on June 4, 1974, when the Indians played the Rangers again, in an event remembered as Ten Cent Beer Night.)

The Indians' promotions director at the time, Jackie York, approached him and asked him to play at every game. He continued to do so, and as the Indians continued to play poorly, often filling fewer than 10,000 seats at the 85,000-seat stadium, Adams' drumming would echo from his seat, at the back of the center field bleachers, 513 feet from home plate, all around the stadium. It was easily heard on television broadcasts as well.

The players took notice. Boston Red Sox Hall-of-Famer Carl Yastrzemski said, "Every time we're here, all I hear is that damned pounding drum." Adams said, "Since then, when Boston's in, I play a little louder."

One Red Sox fan who took notice was Bob Wood. In 1985, he visited all 26 stadiums then in Major League Baseball. When he got to Municipal Stadium, he sought Adams out, and interviewed him for what became the book Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks. He quoted Adams as saying, "I love this place, all of it, the city, the ballpark, the Indians. Haven't missed a game in 13 years."

Wood noted that Kathleen Murray, whom he met in the bleachers and married in 1978, reminded him that there were a few games he didn't get to. "Oh yeah," he corrected himself, "a couple of early season day games, when I couldn't get off work. Not many, though, only 9 or 10."

The marriage ended in divorce, and he had no children. But he did have a good job with AT&T, working for 40 years until his retirement in 2016. In 1994, the Indians moved from the lakefront Municipal Stadium to the downtown Jacobs Field, which was renamed Progressive Field in 2007. He still sat at the back of the bleachers, this time in left field under an enormous scoreboard.

In 1995, they won the American League Pennant for the 1st time in his drumming experience, and he got to drum at the World Series. He got another chance in 1997, and another in 2016. But the Indians all 3 Series, the last 2 in extra innings of Game 7, and the last one at home.

His status as a superfan was acknowledged when the team gave away bobblehead figures of him with a drum and movable arms at a home game in 2006. Six years later, the local brewery Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor.

In 2021, the Indians changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians. If anybody ever connected his drumming with Native American war drums, that connection was now gone. In 2022, on the 49th anniversary of Mr. Adams’s first performance at a game, he was inducted into the Guardians' Distinguished Hall of Fame, as a "nonuniformed contributor." A sculptor created a bronze replica of the drum, which was affixed to Mr. Adams’s bleacher bench, and installed in the team's two-level Hall of Fame area beyond center field at Progressive Field. (The bleacher section was replaced.)

But John Adams never drummed for the Cleveland Guardians. Over the 2010s, he had undergone heart surgery and experienced broken ribs, a broken hip and other ailments, which, along with the COVID pandemic that shut baseball down for the 1st 2/3rds of the 2020 season, prevented him from thumping his drum at Progressive Field after the 2019 season. His last game, after about 3,700 of them, was the Indians' home finale on September 22, 2019. He died on January 30, 2023. He was 71 years old.

"There's nothing like being down at the ballpark," he once told mlb.com. "Because it's more than just the game: It's all the people around you, and all the people you see. It makes the experience of a baseball game way above just sitting at home."