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“Baseball must always keep pace with the times,” Warren Giles said upon retiring after 18 years as National League president.
Although he respected tradition, Giles refused to be bound by old practices. Leading the NL from 1952 to 1969, Giles oversaw one of the most significant and dynamic eras in league history.
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Through an unlikely path from Colorado sportswriter to commissioner of baseball, Ford C. Frick oversaw monumental changes and achievements during his 31 years of leadership in the game.
He also helped ensure those achievements would be preserved forever in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Frick was a sportswriter and high school English teacher in Colorado Springs when he was invited to join the staff of the New York American in 1922. It was the first of a series of historic events in Frick’s life when he was, as he put it, in “the right place at the right time.”
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Few men have dominant careers as baseball players. Even fewer have success as a manager.
But Rube Foster excelled on the diamond as a manager and as an executive, earning him the recognition as the “father of black baseball.”
Born on Sept. 17, 1879 in Calvert, Texas, Foster began his playing career pitching for the Fort Worth Yellow Jackets in 1897. By 1902, he was hurling for the Giants in Chicago, then jumped to the Otsego, Mich., semi-pro white team and before heading to the Philadelphia Cuban X Giants. That season he won 44 games in a row.
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The greatest sports dynasty in American history began with a second-division team in the country’s premier city.
Jacob Ruppert changed all that when he bought the New York Yankees in 1915. Baseball has never been the same.
“For $450,000, we got an orphan ballclub,” said Ruppert, who purchased the team with Tillinghast Huston. “(The club was) without a home of its own, without players of outstanding ability, without prestige.”
Within a decade, Ruppert had built Yankee Stadium, acquired Babe Ruth and won the first of the franchise’s World Series titles.
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In so many ways, baseball is one of the few sports where physical size is not an automatic benefit or detriment. In basketball, height is a tangible that leads to success. In football, size is often viewed as a virtue. But in baseball, greatness comes in all sizes and packages.
With this in mind, perhaps no Hall of Famer is larger in stature than Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss.
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Though he served just one six-year term as commissioner of Major League Baseball, Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler oversaw significant changes in the game.
A U.S. Senator and former governor of Kentucky, Chandler succeeded Kennesaw Mountain Landis as baseball’s second commissioner in 1945. Chandler became a leading candidate for the job after advocating for the continuation of play during World War II.
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An Englishman whose skill lay in his pen instead of a bat, Henry Chadwick was instrumental in cultivating interest in the new game of baseball among the American people.
As the preeminent writer on baseball for more than half a century, Chadwick developed many of the standards by which we evaluate players and teams today. Most importantly, he translated his passionate love for baseball to the working class population that would go on to play and watch the game.
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With 145 wins to his credit and an early retirement from professional baseball at age 28, William Arthur “Candy” Cummings does not possess a typical Hall of Fame resume for a pitcher.
However, despite Cummings’ short career, he is often cited with the invention of a new pitch called the “curveball” that made him one of the most influential pitchers in baseball history.
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In his five-plus decades in the game, Charlie Comiskey found success as a player, manager and owner at the big league level.
Comiskey’s baseball career began as a talented pitcher for amateur ball clubs in Chicago. Despite his father’s objections, Comiskey jumped to a team in Dubuque, Iowa, where arm troubles forced him to switch to first base. Comiskey was one of the original first basemen who did not “hug the line” and played closer to second base to cut off grounders hit toward right field.
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Often cited as a major contributor to the origins of modern American baseball, Alexander Cartwright was an influential member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City. With the Knickerbockers, Cartwright was a respected voice who helped guide one of the more renowned clubs in New York’s burgeoning baseball scene in the mid-1800s.
