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Hall of Famer Henry Chadwick once wrote: “There is no doubt that Harry Wright is the father of professional base ball playing.”
Wright, who was born in England and raised as a cricket player, warrants credit for founding the first all-professional baseball team and serving as a major pioneer for the exponential growth of baseball during the 19th century.
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George Wright was baseball’s first superstar player – an extraordinary shortstop who excelled for the game’s first openly all-professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
Born Jan. 28, 1847 in New York City, Wright belonged to one of the city’s preeminent sporting families. His father, Samuel, was a top professional at Harlem’s St. George Cricket Club who sought to make cricket as popular in America as it was in his native England.
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The New York Yankees are the only team in history to win more than three World Series championships in a row – and the Yankees did it twice, with four in a row from 1936-39 and five more from 1949-53.
George Weiss was a driving force behind both.
Born June 23, 1894, in New Haven, Conn., and a product of Yale University, Weiss got into baseball in 1914 with a semipro team in his hometown that played exhibitions against big league teams, luring the likes of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth to his small ballpark.
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He was the man who brought a little person to home plate and explosives to the outfield of Comiskey Park. But beyond the flash, legendary owner Bill Veeck’s open-minded approach brought positive changes to the game of baseball.
Veeck was just four years old when his father, sportswriter William Veeck, Sr., was named president of the Chicago Cubs. As a teenager, the younger Veeck learned about team management while he worked as a vendor, ticket salesman and junior groundskeeper.
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In the wake of the Black Sox scandal, in which players of the Chicago White Sox were accused of fixing the 1919 World Series, baseball was in need of a leader who could regain the public’s faith in the game.
“We want a man as chairman who will rule with an iron hand,” said National League President John Heydler. “Baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever. Therefore, it is our object to appoint a big man to lead the new commission.”
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While the pyramids of Egypt would hardly qualify as “barns,” they did prove the setting of one of baseball's great barnstorming trips.
Albert Goodwill Spalding led the way.
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A lawyer by trade, Bowie Kuhn went from working the scoreboard at Washington's Griffith Stadium as a teenager to becoming Major League Baseball's fifth commissioner in 1969.
During his 15-year tenure, baseball experienced dramatic increases in attendance, salaries, revenue and franchise values.
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In a career that spanned multiple generations and multiple revolutionary changes in baseball, Branch Rickey was always looking to innovate.
A conservative and religious man who notably refused to participate in Sunday ball games as a player and a manager, Rickey was anything but traditional in the way he approached baseball as an executive. He invented the modern farm system and the batting helmet, was an advocate for expansion into new markets and most notably broke the color barrier when he brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
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Cumberland Posey, the principal owner of the Homestead Grays, spent 35 years (1911-1946) in baseball as a player, manager, owner and club official. He built the Grays into a perennially powerful and profitable team, one of the best in the East.
After starring in basketball in college, Posey began playing baseball for the semi-pro Grays in 1911. He soon ended his playing career to become field and business manager of the Pittsburgh-based team.
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An ambitious, driven leader, American League founder Ban Johnson was baseball’s most influential executive for more than a quarter of a century.
Johnson was a sportswriter for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette in the early 1890s who became an outspoken critic of the rowdy atmosphere in the National League. He also decried Cincinnati Red Stockings owner John T. Brush for being too interested in turning profits and acting as a “representative of interests best divorced from baseball.”
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