Fred Lieb

Frederick Lieb (March 5, 1888 – June 3, 1980) was an American sportswriter and baseball historian. In 1977, when he was 89 years old, Lieb published his memoirs, which documented his nearly 70 years as a baseball reporter. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lieb died at age 92 in Houston, Texas.

Lieb was born on March 5, 1888, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his favorite team growing up as a child was the Philadelphia Athletics. His sportswriting career began in 1909, when while working as a clerk for the Norfolk & Western Railroad he began submitting biographies of players to Baseball magazine. That led to a job with the Philadelphia news bureau; in 1911 he moved to New York where he joined the new Base Ball Writers Association. For the next 20 years, Lieb wrote for the New York Sun, Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, and New York Post, surrounded by sportswriting legends such as Damon Runyon, Heywood Broun, and Grantland Rice.

Lieb is credited with coining the term "The House that Ruth Built," referring to the New York Yankees' brand new stadium that was christened by a Babe Ruth home run on their opening day, April 18, 1923. He and his wife Mary were especially close to Ruth's teammate Lou Gehrig; Walter Brennan's character in the movie The Pride of the Yankees was loosely based on him. In October 1931, Fred Lieb took a team, headlined by Gehrig, Lefty Grove, Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons, and Lefty O'Doul, to Hawaii and Japan for a profitable exhibition tour. This and many other profitable investments along the way allowed Lieb to retire in 1934 from the "real work" of daily reporting to focus solely on writing about baseball. In 1935, Taylor Spink convinced Lieb to write a regular weekly column and select obituaries for The Sporting News; Lieb did this at his leisure from his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, for 35 years. At the peak of their circulation, his syndicated columns reached more than 100 newspapers.

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