Background
Born in Freiburg, Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1881 and settled in Paducah, Kentucky.
Born in Freiburg, Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1881 and settled in Paducah, Kentucky.
He worked in a whiskey distillery and joined the local baseball club.
His interest in baseball heightened in 1888 when he and the distillery moved to Louisville, Kentucky. He became a stockholder in the Louisville Colonels of the National League and by 1899 was the club’s president.
With the close of the 1899 season Dreyfuss was out of a job. The National League announced that four of its twelve teams would be eliminated, one of them being Louisville. Determined to remain in major-league baseball, Dreyfuss quickly acquired an interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates. His new club was placed second in the 1900 championship race. The following year Dreyfuss took over as president and the Pirates won three consecutive pennants.
In 1903 Dreyfuss proposed to the owner of the American League’s leading Boston team that the clubs meet in a best-of-nine series in the fall. The two shook hands on it. The meeting had taken place despite a simmering feud between the owners of the established National League, and their three-year-old rival, the American League. The teams played and Boston won, five games to three. This interleague contest evolved into the modern World Series.
An oddity of the first series was that the losers earned more money than the winners. Boston players received 75 percent of the proceeds, the rest going to the team owner, while Dreyfuss turned over all of the Pirates’ share of the proceeds to his players.
For a club with limited resources, Pittsburgh enjoyed an outstanding record of success during the Dreyfuss era. Between 1900 and 1931 the Pirates won two World Series(1909,1925) and six pennants, and were out of the first division only six times.
Off the playing field Pittsburgh was a one-man operation. Dreyfuss did everything. He was an outstanding appraiser of baseball talent and was constantly on the lookout for good young players. Many of those he discovered are in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
