The Pirates Unraveled: Pittsburgh’s 1926 Season

With virtually the same lineup 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
ABC Affair,
the alleged dissension between vice president and assistant to the manager Fred Clarke and several players who attempted to remove him. This retelling of the story shows that the blame assigned to Clarke has mostly been misplaced and that the reasons for the Bucs’ 1926 failure were far more complex.