Lee MacPhail

October 14, 1966. The Yankees were one year removed from finishing last in the American League for the first time since 1912, a fall so complete that CBS -- the network that owned the club -- had already installed a new club president just to stop the bleeding. That president, Mike Burke, needed a baseball man willing to run an organization with a gutted farm system and a fan base that had stopped showing up. He found one in Lee MacPhail, who'd spent the previous eleven months as a commissioner's aide and, before that, had already run two other organizations' baseball operations well enough that nobody questioned the hire. MacPhail took the Yankees' general manager job that day. His father had walked away from the same title, in the same city, twenty-one years earlier, in considerably louder fashion.

Lee's version of running the Yankees looked nothing like Larry's. No lights, no waiver-wire gambles, no drunken blowup at a championship dinner (there wasn't a championship to celebrate, for one thing). Just seven years of methodical rebuilding, a couple of trades that turned into pennant-winning cornerstones a few seasons after he'd already left the job, and a second act running the American League that outlasted his first act by nearly three years.

The Long Way to the Big Chair

Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr. was born October 25, 1917, in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up watching his father run three different franchises with all the subtlety of a car crash. Lee went to Swarthmore College, then joined the Navy when the country needed him -- sworn in on May 25, 1944, he spent most of the next two years aboard the USS Turner, a radar picket ship that never saw combat. He came home in April 1946 to find a job already waiting for him, because that's what happens when your father owns a piece of a major league franchise. Larry put him in charge of the Kansas City Blues, the Yankees' top farm club in the American Association.

Lee ran the Blues for three seasons and won the pennant in 1947, a real accomplishment even if it's fair to admit the family connections didn't hurt (they rarely do). George Weiss brought him to New York in 1949 as a regional farm director, and MacPhail spent the next nine years inside an operation that won seven World Series titles between 1949 and 1958. He learned the family business from the only teacher who mattered: the Yankees' own dynasty, still running at full strength.

In 1958, MacPhail left to run the Baltimore Orioles, first as general manager and later as club president, building a farm system from scratch instead of inheriting one already running. He picked up shortstop Luis Aparicio from the White Sox in a four-for-one deal in January 1963, watched Brooks Robinson win the American League MVP in 1964, and watched that Orioles team finish two games behind the Yankees for the pennant. As his last real act in Baltimore, at the 1965 winter meetings, he opened the trade talks that became the Frank Robinson deal -- completed after he'd left, by his successor Harry Dalton, but built on groundwork MacPhail had already laid. The Orioles won the World Series the next year. MacPhail wasn't there to see it. He'd already moved on to Commissioner William Eckert's front office, a job that mostly involved teaching a retired Air Force general how professional baseball actually worked.

Rebuilding a Farm System CBS Had Let Die

CBS had bought the Yankees in 1964 for $11.2 million, right as the old dynasty ran out of gas, and treated the operation the way a network treats an underperforming show -- cut the budget, cut the scouts, hope it fixes itself. It didn't fix itself. MacPhail's job wasn't to win right away; nobody with a working knowledge of the roster expected that. His job was to find players who could win in five years, on whatever money CBS was willing to spend, which usually wasn't much.

He drafted well. Really well. The Yankees took catcher Thurman Munson fourth overall out of Kent State in the 1968 draft, and three years later they grabbed a skinny left-hander named Ron Guidry in the third round out of the University of Southwestern Louisiana -- a pitcher the organization spent years unsure what to do with, mostly because he didn't look like a power arm and threw like one anyway (a scouting blind spot that eventually cost the Yankees nothing, since he stayed in the system either way). Munson became AL Rookie of the Year in 1970 and team captain by the end of the decade. Guidry became a Cy Young winner. Neither breakthrough happened on MacPhail's watch. Both players were already in the organization because of it.

He traded well too, and did it twice in the same calendar year. On March 22, 1972, MacPhail sent first baseman Danny Cater and a minor-league infielder to Boston for a left-handed reliever named Sparky Lyle. Lyle saved 35 games that season, an American League record, with a 1.92 ERA. Red Sox fans still call it one of the worst trades in their franchise's history, and they're not wrong to. Eight months later, on November 27, 1972, MacPhail shipped four young players to Cleveland for a scowling, sure-handed third baseman named Graig Nettles. Nettles spent eleven years anchoring the left side of the Yankees infield and became team captain a decade later. Cleveland got four players who mostly disappeared.

None of it produced a pennant. The Yankees went 569-557 across MacPhail's seven seasons running the front office, with a single second-place finish in 1970 -- 93 wins, still 15 games behind a Baltimore club that won 108. The postseason drought that started under Ralph Houk kept running straight through MacPhail's tenure and beyond it. That's the frustrating math of a good rebuild: most of the credit shows up in somebody else's box score.

Gone Before Anybody Noticed He Was Gone

Steinbrenner's ownership group bought the Yankees from CBS for $10 million on January 3, 1973, a million-plus less than CBS had paid nine years earlier -- proof of how far the operation had fallen. MacPhail stayed on as GM through that ownership change and through one more losing season. On September 30, 1973, the Yankees played their final game at the original Yankee Stadium before a two-year renovation sent them to Shea. Houk resigned as manager that same day, unwilling to work under the new owner's style. MacPhail left too, on his way to a bigger job. Gabe Paul took over the GM chair MacPhail had held for seven years, and within three seasons Paul's trades turned MacPhail's foundation into pennants.

MacPhail never saw the Bronx Zoo championships up close. He'd already left for a job that outranked anything he'd done in New York.

Running the Whole League

In October 1973, the American League's owners elected MacPhail their fifth president, replacing Joe Cronin. He took office January 1, 1974, moved the league's headquarters from Boston to New York, and spent the next decade doing something considerably less glamorous than drafting future Hall of Famers: keeping team owners from strangling each other. He oversaw the league's 1977 expansion, which added the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners and pushed the American League to fourteen clubs. He stepped in during the 1981 players' strike, negotiating on the owners' side when talks had stalled for weeks, and helped get the game back on the field for a split season fans still argue about.

The Bat

MacPhail's most famous ruling came in the final year of his decade running the league, and it had nothing to do with expansion committees or labor talks. On July 24, 1983, George Brett hit a go-ahead two-run homer off Rich "Goose" Gossage in the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium. Billy Martin had noticed pine tar creeping past the legal limit on Brett's bat innings earlier and said nothing about it until the home run actually mattered -- then he asked the umpires to check it. They did. They called Brett out, nullified the homer, and handed the Yankees a 4-3 win as the final score. Brett came out of the dugout looking like a man who'd just been robbed at gunpoint, because in his mind, he had been (the footage still circulates every summer, and it never gets less funny).

Kansas City protested to the league office, and four days later, on July 28, 1983, MacPhail overturned the call. His ruling drew a distinction nobody on the field had bothered to make: the umpires' interpretation was, in his own words, "technically defensible" but "not in accord with the intent or spirit of the rules." The pine tar limit existed to keep baseballs clean, not to erase go-ahead home runs on a technicality. MacPhail ordered the homer reinstated and the game resumed from that point. On August 18, 1983, the two teams returned to the Bronx to play the final four outs. The Royals won, 5-4, the way they should have on July 24.

It's one of the odder legacies in franchise history: MacPhail spent seven years building up the Yankees' talent pipeline, then a decade later cost the same team a game by overruling its own home crowd's umpires. He didn't flinch either time.

Cooperstown, Twice

MacPhail left the AL presidency after the 1983 season and spent two more years running the owners' side of labor relations as head of the Major League Player Relations Committee, working through the short 1985 players' strike before finally stepping away from the game. He'd spent 45 years in professional baseball by then, in jobs that ranged from minor league GM to commissioner's aide to the man who ran an entire major league.

The Baseball Hall of Fame elected him in 1998, by way of the Veterans Committee, more than three decades after his father Larry MacPhail had been inducted for pioneering night baseball and building the 1947 Yankees champions. Larry and Lee remain the only father-son pair in Cooperstown -- a distinction that says as much about how different their careers actually were as it does about the family name they shared.

MacPhail died November 8, 2012, in Delray Beach, Florida, at 95 years old. He'd been the oldest living Hall of Famer at the time of his death, a title that passed to Bobby Doerr the same week. He outlived his father by 37 years and outlasted nearly everyone who'd been in the room for either of his biggest calls -- the Munson draft, the Nettles trade, the pine tar ruling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lee MacPhail the same person as Larry MacPhail?

No. They're father and son. Larry MacPhail was Yankees president and co-owner from 1945 to 1947, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1978. Lee MacPhail, his son, was a different Yankees executive entirely: general manager from 1966 to 1973, and later American League president from 1974 to 1983. Lee was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998, making them the only father-son pair in Cooperstown.

What did Lee MacPhail do as Yankees general manager?

MacPhail ran the Yankees front office from October 14, 1966, through the 1973 season, compiling a 569-557 record with a best finish of second place in 1970. He drafted Thurman Munson (1968) and Ron Guidry (1971) and traded for Sparky Lyle (1972) and Graig Nettles (1972) -- pieces that became cornerstones of the Yankees' late-1970s championship teams under his successor, Gabe Paul.

What was Lee MacPhail's ruling in the 1983 Pine Tar Incident?

As American League president, MacPhail overturned an umpire's call that had negated George Brett's go-ahead home run against the Yankees on July 24, 1983, because the pine tar on Brett's bat exceeded the legal limit. On July 28, 1983, MacPhail ruled that the violation didn't justify erasing the home run, reinstated it, and ordered the game resumed from that point. Kansas City won the completed game, 5-4, on August 18, 1983.

When was Lee MacPhail elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame?

The Veterans Committee inducted MacPhail in 1998, twenty years after his father Larry MacPhail's own induction in 1978. They remain the only father-son pair in the Hall of Fame. Lee MacPhail died November 8, 2012, in Delray Beach, Florida, at 95 -- at the time, the oldest living Hall of Famer.