With a legacy that spans two fiercely loyal baseball towns a half-nation apart, the Baltimore Orioles—originally the St. Louis Browns—rank among baseball’s most storied teams. One of the fifteen celebrated team histories commissioned by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, The Baltimore Orioles: The History of a Colorful Team in Baltimore and St. Louis chronicles the club’s early history and is reissued on the fiftieth anniversary of their first season in Baltimore.

Hall of Fame sportswriter Frederick G. Lieb begins with the history of baseball in Baltimore from its pre-Civil War beginnings and its major-league debut as the Lord Baltimores in 1872 to the championship seasons of the National League Orioles in 1894, ’95, and ’96 when the roster included Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Kid Gleason, Roger Bresnahan, Joe McGinnity, and John McGraw. After the turn of the century, Baltimore was briefly home to the Orioles of the American League in 1901-02, then, after losing its franchise to New York, had to settle for the AAA International League Orioles until 1954. Under the leadership of Jack Dunn, the minor-league Orioles, while developing the talents of Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, and other future major-league stars, won seven straight International League pennants from 1919 to 1926.

Here, too, is the colorful history of the precursors to the current Orioles, the lovable and luckless St. Louis Browns, augmented for this edition with a new foreword from St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg on the escapades of the Brownies. Though they lost more than a thousand games and captured only a single pennant in fifty-three seasons, the Browns remain a legendary part of national lore. Taking their lead in different eras from larger-than-life figures such as Branch Rickey, Rogers Hornsby, Urban Shocker, and the Barnum of Baseball, Bill Veeck, the Browns “boasted a one-armed outfielder, a hired hypnotist, the mighty midget [Eddie Gaedel] and—even the best ballplayer in the land—George Sisler,” as Broeg recalls in his foreword. In 1944, the Browns also played in the only all-St. Louis World Series, losing to the Cardinals.

Originally published in 1955 and featuring twenty-two photographs, The Baltimore Orioles history concludes with the new American League team’s first season in Baltimore, finishing seventh in the league but garnering the lasting adoration of their new hometown.

An admirer of Pirate president Barney Dreyfuss, prolific baseball writer Frederick G. Lieb consorted with the club’s biggest stars, christened the legendary Dreyfuss “the first-division man,” and produced The Pittsburgh Pirates, one of the fifteen celebrated histories of major league teams commissioned by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s. Originally published in 1948, Lieb’s history ranges from the ball club’s earliest professional days in the late nineteenth century as the Pittsburgh Alleghenies to its spring training session in preparation for the 1948 season, a span that included six National League pennants and two World Series championships, as well as a loss to the Boston Red Sox, then the Pilgrims, at the inaugural World Series a century ago.

“This reprint of Fred Lieb’s The Pittsburgh Pirates is an invitation for baseball readers to enjoy Lieb’s wonderful stories of the great Pirate teams of the first half of the twentieth century,” writes Richard “Pete” Peterson in the new foreword to this edition. “Lieb’s book is rich with accounts of World Series triumphs and disappointments, of epic encounters on the playing field, like that between Wagner and Cobb, of mutinies in the clubhouse, of courageous comebacks, and of devastating defeats, including the infamous ‘homer in the gloaming.’”

In Lieb’s personable and anecdotal prose, honed over the course of his sustained sportswriting career, the book conveys “baseball drama of the highest order,” including the pre-Dreyfuss days of Captain Kerr, Ned Hanlon, and Connie Mack; Dreyfuss’s dynasty in the early twentieth century; the dramatic World Series triumphs of 1909 and 1925; the end of the Dreyfuss era and the sale of the club to a syndicate headed by John Galbreath and Bing Crosby; and the purchase of Hank Greenberg and the emergence of slugger Ralph Kiner. Aided by twenty-five black-and-white photographs, this rare history revisits the glories and stories of “fabulous old Pirates” such as Honus Wagner, Tommy Leach, Fred Clarke, Babe Adams, Max Carey, Kiki Cuyler, Pie Traynor, Paul and Lloyd Waner, and Arky Vaughan.