As major league baseball's first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866-1944) cleaned up a sport that had been almost fatally corrupted by ties to organized gambling. Ruling with an autocratic hand, Landis saved baseball from squabbling owners and miscreant players and presided over the sport's ascendancy into American's undisputed national pastime during the era between the two World Wars.

A Self-Promoter

During the U.S. Civil War, Abraham H. Landis was a surgeon with the 35th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. On General William Sherman's famous march through Georgia in 1864, Landis nearly lost a leg to a Confederate cannonball at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Two years later, he insisted on naming the sixth of his seven children after that battle, though he misspelled the mountain's name, dropping one "n."

Many of his friends called Kenesaw Mountain Landis by the nickname Kennie. His older brothers and sisters called him...