The Pirates Unraveled

Book excerpt: With virtually the same personnel that had won both the National League pennant and the World Series the previous season, the 1926 Pittsburgh Pirates were favored by the majority of preseason prognosticators to capture the pennant for the second year in a row. But they finished in third place, four and a half games behind the St. Louis Cardinals. That failure has largely been attributed to the alleged dissension caused by the presence of vice president and assistant to the manager Fred Clarke on the Pirate bench and to the ramifications of an attempt by several players to remove him, known as the "ABC Affair." This book chronicles the '26 Pirates, showing that the blame assigned to Clarke has been mostly misplaced and that the reasons for the Bucs' failure were far more complex.