While we’re rooting for our favorite teams in the playoffs to advance to the World Series, let’s take a look at the origin of the Fall Classic – which was born in 1903 and had a Jewish father.
Barney Dreyfuss owned the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates, considered by most observers at the time to be the best team in either league. The Pirates had topped the National League in 1901 and 1902. Dreyfuss had the best player in baseball – shortstop Honus Wagner.
As the Pirates were on their way to topping the National League again in ’03 and the Boston club marched on to clinch first place in the American League, Dreyfuss wrote his Boston counterpart trumpeting the merits of a series of games between the league’s best teams.
“The times has come for the National League and American League to organize a World Series,” Dreyfuss wrote. “It is my belief that if our clubs played a series on a best-of-nine basis, we would create great interest in baseball in our leagues and in our players. I also believe it would be a financial success.”
An agreement was reached and the first game of the first World Series took place on Thursday, October 1 in Boston. An overflow crowd of 16,242 packed Boston’s Huntington Avenue Grounds, but Dreyfuss didn’t see his Pirates win, 7-3. It was Yom Kippur.
Dreyfuss watched the second game with two guests, the rabbi from Boston’s oldest congregation and the rabbi from Dreyfuss’s Pittsburgh congregation. The rabbis saw Boston shut out the Pirates 3-0 to even the Series. Pittsburgh managed to win only two more games, though, and lost that first World Series five games to three.
Dreyfuss exemplified the great American success story of an immigrant rising from rags to riches.
The only son among Samuel and Fanny Goldschmidt Dreyfuss’s four children, Bernard was born and educated in Germany. He apprenticed as a bank clerk before arriving in America in 1882 at age 17.
A smallish fellow with a thick German accent, Barney, as he became known, made his way to Paducah, Kentucky, to take a job at a distillery owned by relatives.
As he worked his way up from barrel scrubber to assistant bookkeeper, a bout with illness led a doctor to advise Dreyfuss to get more exercise by playing the popular American game of baseball.
Dreyfuss followed the doctor’s advice, and enjoyed playing so much that he decided to invest in the game by operating a semipro team. In 1888, the 23-year-old Dreyfuss became a naturalized citizen and the distillery relocated to Louisville. Dreyfuss bought a piece of the Louisville ballclub, then in the American Association.
Dreyfuss met Florence Wolf in Louisville and the pair hit it off as she also loved baseball. They married in 1894 and five years later were the major owners of the Louisville club, which was a member of the National League at the time.
The 12-team National League wanted to contract to eight teams and the Louisville club was targeted for extinction. A deal was engineered to allow Dreyfuss to purchase a half interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates and to take 14 of his Louisville players with him. By the time the American League was born in 1901, Dreyfuss was the major owner of the Pirates.
Dreyfuss, who built baseball’s first steel and concrete ballpark in 1909 in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, owned the Pirates until his passing in 1932, a few weeks shy of his 67th birthday.
Florence Dreyfuss, who shared a keen interest in all facets of management with her husband, assumed ownership and left the day-to-day operations of the franchise to her son-in-law, Bill Benswanger.
Fourteen years later Benswanger engineered the sale of the Pirates to a group that included entertainer Bing Crosby. The new group scored big in its first season, 1947, by purchasing Hank Greenberg from the Tigers. Alas, it was a last place finish for the Pirates as Greenberg finished his illustrious playing career.