Fred Saigh

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fred Saigh Jr. (1905 – 1999) was the part-owner, then sole owner, of the St. Louis Cardinals of American Major League Baseball from 1948 through 1953.

A native of Kewanee, Illinois, Saigh became a highly successful tax and corporate lawyer and investor based in St. Louis. At the end of the 1947 baseball season, he and Robert Hannegan, a prominent St. Louis businessman and politician, purchased the Cardinals from longtime owner Sam Breadon, who was ill with prostate cancer.

But the Cardinals, then just one year removed from their ninth National League pennant and sixth World Series championship since 1926, had begun to decay as an organization -- finally feeling the effects of the loss, five years before, of legendary general manager Branch Rickey, who had moved on to run their arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Hannegan, a former Postmaster General and confidante of President Harry Truman’s, suffered from poor health and sold his share of the team to Saigh in January 1949. And, ironically, Saigh became embroiled in tax troubles in the early 1950s. He was convicted in 1953 of owing over $19,000 in back taxes and sentenced to 15 months in prison (serving five months at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana).

These misfortunes spelled the end of Saigh’s term as owner of the Cardinals, and he put the team up for sale. While the Redbirds were clearly the more beloved of St. Louis’s two MLB clubs, Saigh’s financial problems – and the fact that the Cardinals were still tenants of the lowly American League Browns at Sportsman's Park – made their future in the Mound City seem tenuous.

But Saigh accepted less money ($3.75 million) from Anheuser-Busch, the brewery, than from out-of-town suitors and the Cardinals remained in St. Louis. By the end of 1953, the Browns had been driven out of town, to become the Baltimore Orioles. The Cardinals bought Sportsman’s Park, and have ruled St. Louis’s baseball world since.

After his release from prison, Saigh resumed his career in private business, amassing a large amount of stock in Anheuser-Busch – the largest shareholder outside the Busch family itself. He died a wealthy man, in St. Louis, at the age of 94. Saigh left $70 million to charity in his will, establishing the Fred Saigh Foundation.^[1]

[edit] References