Samuel Wilson Breadon[1] (/ˈbreɪdən/; BRAY-din) (July 26, 1876 – May 8, 1949) was an American executive who served as the president and principal owner of the St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball (MLB) from 1920 through 1947.

During that time, the Cardinals rose from languishing as one of the National League's doormats to a premier power in baseball, winning nine NL pennants and six World Series championships.

Rickey would forge a Baseball Hall of Fame career as a general manager, while, in 1926, Hornsby's Redbirds won the franchise's first-ever National League pennant and World Series championship, a seven-game triumph over the New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

But during the offseason, Breadon traded Hornsby to the New York Giants, the result of a heated confrontation between owner and player-manager in September 1926 over the playing of exhibition games during the late-season pennant race.

(Hornsby and Frisch were elected to the Hall on the strength of their brilliant playing careers, and in 2008 Southworth would enter the Cooperstown shrine posthumously for his managerial success.)

In addition to Hornsby and Frisch, they would feature such standout players as Jim Bottomley, Harry Brecheen, Mort and Walker Cooper, Dizzy Dean, Murry Dickson, Chick Hafey, Whitey Kurowski, Marty Marion, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Johnny Mize, Terry Moore, Stan Musial, Howie Pollet, Red Schoendienst, and Enos Slaughter.

[9][10] Both ideas came to nothing, however; the team remained in St. Louis and continued to struggle at the turnstiles, drawing only 291,000 fans in 1938 during a rare losing season,[8] and not reaching pre-Depression attendance levels until the pennant-contending 1941 edition.

However, with their on-field success and the advent of radio in the 1930s, they would develop a fanatical regional following, their appeal extending beyond Missouri and throughout the lower Midwest, Arkansas, Louisiana, the Great Plains states and much of the Southwest.

After Rickey's departure, Breadon played an active role in the Cardinals' baseball operations through World War II and into the postwar era.

Attendance was about to spike in 1946 with another championship team and the postwar baseball boom, but the Cardinals maintained their reputation for a tight-fisted control on player salaries.

[11][12] That season, the "outlaw" Mexican League, operating outside the "Organized Baseball" structure and its reserve clause, signed away three important Cardinal players: starting pitcher Max Lanier, swingman Fred Martin and second baseman Lou Klein.

Then, in 1947, Breadon learned that some of his players planned to strike rather than take the field against Jackie Robinson of Rickey's Dodgers, the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball since the 1880s.