As the Baseball season came to a close and fans and families alike await for the War in Europe to come to an end, the winds of change had blown through the Allegheny. Chester Colfax, who had been the Owner and Founder of the Pittsburgh Oilers since the Inception of the LBL in 1894 who had found a new purpose in the boys’ game of Baseball after he had became a Widower, who since saw his team through years of Mediocrity and a brief gasp of Greatness after a new General Manager hired around 1910. The Oilers were rarely counted among the league’s elite, Colfax’s passion for the game endeared him to Pittsburghers of every stripe. But time, and Chester’s own declining health, brought about an inevitable change.
John Warner, a well-known business tycoon of nearby Upper St. Clair Township. Born on February 21, 1863, Warner grew up just south of the city, his family prospering in the shadow of Pittsburgh’s steel empire. A keen mind for numbers and a shrewd eye for opportunity allowed Warner to carve out a reputation as one of Allegheny County’s most respected financiers. Unlike many of his peers, however, Warner was noted not for ruthlessness, but for his generosity and patience. His employees spoke of him as a fair man who demanded excellence but gave as much as he received.
When word spread that Colfax was stepping aside from his duties as owner, Warner emerged as the natural successor. His purchase of the Oilers was met with curiosity in the papers: would Warner, a man better known for rail ventures and banking, take the same personal delight in baseball that Colfax had?
Warner’s early tenure quickly revealed his philosophy. Neither a miser counting every coin nor a reckless spender chasing championships at any cost, Warner charted a middle course. He gave his general managers freedom to work but was never so detached as to be considered absent. “My task,” he told one Pittsburgh Gazette reporter around the sale made official, “is not to play the game, nor even to manage it — but to keep the Oilers strong enough that they may be played and managed well.”
Generous with funds when the cause was sound, yet cautious not to endanger the club’s long-term stability, Warner represented a new era for the Oilers. If Chester Colfax embodied the sentimental spirit of baseball as redemption, Warner embodied the balance of business and sport, civic pride and private enterprise.
For the fans, the transition was bittersweet. The Oilers had lost their kindly founder, a man who spoke to photographs of his late wife before walking to the ballpark. But in Warner, they gained a steady hand — a tolerant, fair-minded owner who would ensure that Pittsburgh baseball endured into the roaring decades to come.