Larry MacPhail

October 6, 1947. The Yankees had just beaten Brooklyn in seven games, their 11th championship, their first in four years. On the field, club president Larry MacPhail caught up with a disconsolate Branch Rickey to offer his hand and a word of respect for the season the Dodgers had given him. Rickey took the hand, barely. "I am taking your hand only because people are watching us," he said. Then: "Don't you ever speak to me again." By the time MacPhail reached his own clubhouse, something had snapped. He was drunk, he was shouting, and he punched a sportswriter before announcing -- for the first of two times that night -- that he was through. The next morning his partners bought him out for $2 million. He never worked in baseball again.

That's how it ended. How it started is just as strange, and it's the two and a half years in between that turned a fourth-place wartime roster into the launching pad for the greatest dynasty the sport has ever seen.

The Man Before the Yankees

Leland Stanford MacPhail Sr. was born February 3, 1890, in Cass City, Michigan, and by the time he bought a piece of the Yankees at age 54, he'd already lived several careers' worth of chaos. He enlisted as an Army private in 1917 and came out of World War I an artillery captain, wounded in France and Belgium. In January 1919, he joined a Nashville colonel named Luke Lea on an unauthorized scheme to sneak into the Netherlands and personally arrest the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II, deliver him to the Paris Peace Conference, and let the world put him on trial. Dutch troops surrounded the party before they got that far. MacPhail came home without the Kaiser -- but with an ashtray he'd swiped off the man's desk, which he displayed in his office for the rest of his life.

That was MacPhail's whole operating style, on the record before he ever ran a baseball team: aim big, act first, worry about the consequences later.

He ran the Columbus Red Birds in the American Association starting in 1930, tripled attendance, and brokered the club's sale to Branch Rickey's Cardinals -- the same Rickey who'd refuse to shake his hand seventeen years later (some grudges just take that long to ripen). He took over as Cincinnati Reds general manager in 1933 and installed floodlights at Crosley Field, running Major League Baseball's first-ever night game on May 24, 1935. President Franklin Roosevelt threw a switch in the White House, an electric pulse traveled 500 miles down a wire, and 632 lamps turned a Friday night in Cincinnati into daylight. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1 in front of 20,422 fans who'd never seen anything like it. Baseball people had told MacPhail for years that night ball was a gimmick. He'd just proven it was the future.

He ran the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1938 to 1942 and did it again, lighting up Ebbets Field on June 15, 1938 -- a night that also happened to be the one where Johnny Vander Meer threw his second consecutive no-hitter. MacPhail resigned from Brooklyn on September 23, 1942, to take an Army commission, eventually rising to lieutenant colonel and serving as an aide to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson. He spent the rest of the war handling communications work in Washington. He was 55 when the fighting ended, with no baseball job waiting and no obvious next act.

Buying a Franchise He Couldn't Yet Afford

The Yankees were available because Jacob Ruppert had died in January 1939 and left the club to an estate that had no interest in running it. Ed Barrow, Yankees president since 1920, kept the operation upright through a wartime championship in 1943, but an estate isn't an owner. By late 1944 it was ready to sell.

On January 25, 1945, MacPhail teamed with tin-plate heir Dan Topping and Arizona construction magnate Del Webb to buy the franchise for $2.8 million -- an equal three-way split, with MacPhail installed as club president and general manager, part of the Topping-Webb-MacPhail purchase that ended the Ruppert estate's ownership. He later admitted that after signing the papers, he walked around a corner by himself and thought: I own the Yankees and I have no idea how I'm going to pay for them. Barrow, the man who'd built 14 pennants and 10 championships, was pushed aside within weeks.

MacPhail didn't waste time proving what kind of owner he'd be. Within the year he'd ordered lights installed at Yankee Stadium -- a $250,000 system with six towers and 1,409 floodlights throwing more than two million watts across the field, the most famous ballpark in the country finally catching up to a trend MacPhail himself had started a decade earlier in Cincinnati (he'd spent ten years insisting the rest of baseball was slow to catch on, and now his own ballpark was proof of it too). The first night game came May 28, 1946, a rain-delayed 2-1 loss to Washington in front of 49,917 fans, Joe DiMaggio's lone RBI single not nearly enough against Dutch Leonard's knuckleball. MacPhail didn't care about the score. He cared that the Stadium could finally host baseball after the sun went down, and that working fans could finally show up on a Tuesday night.

The Borowy Gamble

MacPhail's boldest -- and most second-guessed -- move of the 1945 season came on July 27, when he sold right-hander Hank Borowy, an All-Star with a 10-5 record and the best arm on a fourth-place staff, to the Chicago Cubs on outright waivers for $97,000. Not one American League club claimed him. MacPhail shrugged off the criticism, noting publicly that Borowy had completed just 7 of 18 starts that year, and moved on.

Borowy went 11-2 down the stretch in Chicago, finished as a 20-game winner across both stops, and started Game 1 of the 1945 World Series for the Cubs. Selling a contender's best starter mid-pennant-race is the kind of move that gets an executive run out of town. The Yankees weren't really in the race that year anyway, but the deal still stung -- a preview of the instinct that would define MacPhail's whole tenure: act first, defend it later, and never apologize for being right.

Bringing the Stars Home

The real work of MacPhail's Yankees tenure wasn't the lights or the Borowy sale. It was rebuilding a roster that had spent three seasons hollowed out by military service. By 1946, DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Tommy Henrich, and the rest of the wartime absentees were back in pinstripes. Joe McCarthy resigned that May, worn down by health problems and a club president who ran hot where McCarthy ran cold. Bill Dickey and Johnny Neun each took a turn in the dugout before the season was out.

On November 5, 1946, MacPhail floated Brooklyn's Leo Durocher for the vacant manager's job, talked himself out of it -- "I don't think Leo would have been the logical choice for this job," he said. "There were other angles involved" -- and hired Bucky Harris instead. Harris had already won a championship once, twenty-three years earlier as Washington's 27-year-old "Boy Wonder." He delivered a second one in his first season back in the dugout.

The 1947 Yankees won the pennant by 12 games and beat Brooklyn in seven, the franchise's 11th title. MacPhail had bought a fourth-place team at the tail end of the war and turned it into a champion in less than three years. It should have been the best night of his professional life.

The Battle of the Biltmore

It wasn't. What happened in the hours after Game 7 has been told the same way by nearly every account that's tried to tell it. MacPhail approached Rickey on the field to shake hands -- Rickey barely obliged, then told him never to speak to him again. Something in MacPhail broke loose after that. He walked into his own clubhouse drunk, tore into the room with insults, and threw a punch at a sportswriter before announcing his resignation on the spot.

The outburst didn't stop there. At the victory dinner at the Biltmore Hotel, MacPhail turned on his own farm director, George Weiss -- berating him, firing him on the spot, and, by multiple accounts, coming to blows with both Weiss and his own partner Dan Topping in the brawl that's gone down in Yankees lore as the Battle of the Biltmore. Somewhere in the middle of it, MacPhail announced his retirement a second time that night, this one delivered through tears.

The next morning, October 7, 1947, Topping and Webb bought out his one-third stake for a reported $2 million, paid out of the club's own treasury. MacPhail was 57 years old, a World Series champion less than a day earlier, and he was done. He never worked in baseball again. The man he'd tried to fire hours earlier got the last laugh: that same day, Topping and Webb made Weiss general manager, handing the farm director he'd just tried to run off the front office that would win the next decade and a half almost without interruption.

Not to Be Confused With His Son

Any MacPhail search on this site turns up two men, and they are not the same person. Larry MacPhail is the one in this article -- Yankees president and co-owner from 1945 to 1947, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1978. His son, Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr., better known as Lee, is a different Yankees executive entirely (same last name, same franchise, four decades and a considerably calmer temperament apart): general manager from 1966 to 1973, and later American League president from 1974 to 1983. Lee MacPhail followed his father into the Hall of Fame in 1998. Larry and Lee remain the only father-son pair in Cooperstown -- a strange bookend to a career that started with a stolen ashtray and ended with a punch thrown in a championship clubhouse.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Larry MacPhail and what did he do for the Yankees?

Larry MacPhail was a baseball executive who bought the New York Yankees with Dan Topping and Del Webb for $2.8 million on January 25, 1945, serving as club president and general manager through October 1947. He installed lights at Yankee Stadium, sold pitcher Hank Borowy in a controversial 1945 waiver deal, hired manager Bucky Harris, and oversaw the 1947 World Series championship before being bought out for $2 million the day after that title.

Is Larry MacPhail the same person as Lee MacPhail?

No. Larry MacPhail (1890-1975) was Yankees president and co-owner from 1945 to 1947. His son, Lee MacPhail (1917-2012), was a different Yankees executive who served as general manager from 1966 to 1973 and later as American League president from 1974 to 1983. Larry and Lee are the only father-son pair inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame -- Larry in 1978, Lee in 1998.

Why did Larry MacPhail leave the Yankees after the 1947 World Series?

MacPhail had a drunken, chaotic outburst hours after the Yankees beat Brooklyn in the 1947 World Series -- punching a sportswriter in the clubhouse, then clashing with farm director George Weiss and partner Dan Topping at the Biltmore Hotel victory dinner in a brawl remembered as the Battle of the Biltmore, all while tearfully announcing his resignation. His partners bought out his one-third ownership stake for a reported $2 million the following morning, October 7, 1947. He never worked in baseball again.

Did Larry MacPhail really introduce night baseball to the majors?

Yes. As Cincinnati Reds general manager, MacPhail ran Major League Baseball's first-ever night game on May 24, 1935, at Crosley Field. He later brought lights to Ebbets Field with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938 and to Yankee Stadium in 1946, making him the driving force behind night baseball's spread across three different franchises.

The ashtray stayed on his desk until the day he died in 1975. So did the instinct that got it there in the first place -- MacPhail never once in his career waited for permission to do something enormous, and he never once managed to walk away from the fallout gracefully. He introduced night baseball to a sport that thought it was a stunt. He bought a fourth-place team and built a champion in under three years. And then he punched his way out of the party celebrating it, gone from baseball for good before the champagne went flat.