Barney Dreyfuss Marquee Hall of Fame 2008

Barney Dreyfuss owned the Pittsburgh Pirates for more than three decades and helped create the modern World Series. Born in February 1865 and dead in February 1932, he appeared on nine Hall of Fame ballots before the executives committee elected him in 2008.

He came from Germany at seventeen to work in a Kentucky distillery and bought into the Louisville club for his health, on a doctor's advice to spend time outdoors. When Louisville folded he moved its best players, Honus Wagner among them, to Pittsburgh, and owned the Pirates for the rest of his life.

In 1903, with the two leagues barely speaking, he wrote to the Boston owner proposing that their champions play each other. That series is the first of the modern ones. Forbes Field opened in 1909, steel and concrete where every other park was wood, and stood for sixty-one years.