Branch Rickey in Pittsburgh

Branch Rickey was one of the most important and charismatic figures in all of baseball, the archetype for all general managers who would follow. His contributions to the game were both numerous and highly significant; they include the desegregation of the majors, airline travel to road games, and the innovation of the minor league “farm” system.
This work focuses on Rickey’s tenure as the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, from 1950 through 1955. In addition to contemporary accounts, Rickey’s personal correspondence and interoffice memorandums are used to document his struggle to revamp the fate of a small-market team.

Andrew O’Toole has written cover stories for Pittsburgh History Magazine and Elysian Fields Quarterly. His article “Clemente’s First Spring” won the 1998 Macmillan–SABR Baseball Research Award. He lives in Maineville, Ohio.

Andrew O’Toole
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 223
Bibliographic Info: photos, appendix, notes, index
Copyright Date: 2000
pISBN: 978-0-7864-0839-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-0595-1
Imprint: McFarland

“highly focused…interesting…fascinating…valuable”—SABR Bibliography Committee Newsletter; “a…solid account of Rickey’s five-year tenure with the Pirates…details the frustrations surrounding Rickey’s peripatetic, almost frantic efforts to revive the Pirates”—The International Journal of the History of Sport; “the first book chronicling [Rickey’s] final (but still impacting) years as an executive with the Bucs”—USA Today Sports Weekly.