Former Major League pitcher has strong family ties to Conecuh County

Terry Coleman came by the newspaper office on Monday morning with an interesting sports-related item that I think many readers will be interested in hearing about.

Coleman, who was an outstanding baseball player in his heyday, stopped by the office to let us know that former Major League Baseball pitcher Terry Adams of Mobile has close ties to Conecuh County and is interested in learning more about the community baseball teams that played in and around our area in the 1940s and 1950s.

Coleman said that Adams’ mother, grandmother and pretty much his whole family grew up in the Flat Rock community. Adams grew up in Mobile, but he is very interested in learning more about his great-grandfather Houston Barlow playing baseball for the Flat Rock community team in the 40s and 50s. Some of Adams’ other relatives included James Barlow and a great-uncle Hubert Barlow.

“Maybe that’s where (Adams) got some of his talent,” Coleman said.

It’s very possible, because, as it’s often said, the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” There is no doubt that Adams was a very talented pitcher in his own right. Born in Mobile on March 6, 1973, Adams went on to star at Mary G. Montgomery High School, where he was the Alabama High School Player of the Year in 1991.

Adams was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the 1991 draft and he bounced around the minors before eventually making his Major League debut for the Cubs on Aug. 10, 1995. Adams, who threw right-handed, pitched for the Cubs through the 1999 season, when he got traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. He pitched there during the 2000 and 2001 seasons.

After that, Adams signed with the Philadelphia Phillies and pitched for them in 2002 and 2003. In 2004, Adams signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and got traded to the Boston Red Sox later that same season. As many of you will remember, Boston won the World Series in 2004 for the first time in 86 years with Adams on the team.

In 2005, Adams returned to the Phillies and made his final Big League pitching appearance on May 23 when he took the mound against the Florida Marlins. He finished his career with an impressive 691 strikeouts.

As mentioned above, Adams is especially interested in learning more about the baseball playing days of his great-grandfather and other relatives and the exploits of the old Flat Rock community baseball team. In the days before the advent of television, most communities the size of Flat Rock had a community baseball team, and these teams often played in highly competitive leagues with teams inside Conecuh County and in adjacent counties.

I plan to do a little research on Adams’ relatives and the old Flat Rock team to see what I can find out, but in the meantime if anyone in the reading audience has any information they’d like to share, please let me know.