According to The Hollywood Reporter, Crosby played semipro baseball as a young man, and that enduring love of the game manifested as a $2.25 million buy-in for a 25% stake of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1946. (He likely would have become a baseball owner years earlier; 1944 marked the death of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who steadfastly refused to allow anyone from horse racing, which he considered shady, from getting involved.)
The biggest moment in Crosby's tenure: The Pirates played in the 1960 World Series, which they stretched to a seventh and decisive game. Crosby, who had a knack for attending games that the Pirates lost, considered himself something of a curse on the team, so he skipped Game Seven and asked an employee to make a kinescope (a pre-videotape recording method) of the game. The Pirates won when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run at the very end of what's been nicknamed "The Best Game Ever," and no recordings of it were thought to have survived ... until 2010, when that well-preserved kinescope was found in the wine cellar of Crosby's old estate...
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