The Ultimate Base Stealer

Sent in by Jeremy Puckett

Many of you are familiar with Adam’s accomplishments in Soccer, Water sports, basketball, and the many other sports he played. One that is seldom talked about is his success in baseball. I can remember going to his games and watching him do things that other kids on the team just couldn’t physically do. Adam wasn’t the greatest hitter in the game, but he was exceptional at getting on base. He was quite a bit smaller at that stage in his life than most of the other kids but that worked to his advantage in many ways. The speed he developed playing soccer took a lot of coaches and players by surprise when he started playing baseball. More than half of the time when he got up to bat, he tried to draw a walk or would bunt just so he could embarrass the other team by stealing bases. His speed at that age greatly outweighed a 12 to 14 year old’s reaction time when they would try to throw him out. I can remember multiple times that Adam would purposely lead off of a base too much so he would draw the pitcher to throw to the baseman and have them either try to run him down or to throw him out. Adam would actually ignore his base coaches when they would tell him to hold up on a base and would just keep going because he knew the other team had no way of tagging him out. He even stole home plate on multiple occasions by leading off 3^rd base and out running the person trying to tag him. He made fools out of people on that baseball field and brought an energy to the crowd and game which actually made baseball an exciting sport to watch. Good times.