Longtime general manager of the Pirates Joe L. Brown died yesterday at the age of 91. I’m sure some of you remember seeing him in the stands for the 50th anniversary of the 1960 World Series, when he incredulously laughed at Dan Potash for asking if he was still a Pirate fan after all these years. His response was something along the lines of, “Of course I’m still a Pirate fan! How could I root for anyone else?”
I’m far too young to have been alive for any of Brown’s World Series teams or any of his terms as GM, save one brief interim stint in 1985, but he played a prominent role in The Battlin’ Bucs: The First Hundred Years of the Pittsburgh Pirates VHS tape that I nearly wore out from constant use as a kid. That’s not only because he turned Branch Rickey’s jumble of a farm system into a World Series winner, but because he gave interviews talking about those teams and their manager, Danny Murtaugh, while sitting right next to a World Series trophpy that still stick in my head today. And as the Pirates were losing heart-breaking playoff series and slowly descending into obscurity, I still remember thinking to myself, “If only we could get someone like this back in charge of the team.”
If only that were easy.
Even given my relative youth, it makes me a little misty-eyed to type out, “rest in peace, Joe Brown.” The man not only loved the Pirates as much as every one of us fans does, but he built some of the teams that are the reason that we love the Pirates. And in an era when it’s easy to shrug being a Pirate fan off, Brown wouldn’t.
And this is all a round-about way of saying that I’m not sure that Brown ever gets the recognition or credit he deserves for those teams in the 60s and 70s, especially from people my age who lose him between Rickey and Murtaugh and the great, great players of that era. But that doesn’t make his contribution to the club any less meaningful. Rest in peace, Joe Brown, a true Pittsburgh Pirate to the very end.
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