Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr. was born on Oct. 25, 1917, in Nashville. He
graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he played
baseball and football. In 1941 he became the business manager of the
Dodgers’ Interstate League farm team in Reading, Pa., while his father
was bringing a pennant to Brooklyn for the first time in 21 years as the
Dodgers’ general manager.
Except for teaching history at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and
serving in the Navy during World War II, Mr. MacPhail said, “my whole
working life was baseball.”
In his autobiography, “My 9 Innings,” published in 1989, Mr. MacPhail
was self-effacing in describing the scene when he would go home after a
day at the ballpark.
“When I came out after a game, there were a gang of kids waiting to get
the players’ autographs, and especially in my younger days I would be
mobbed,” he wrote. “Someone at the back of the group would yell, ‘Who is
it?’ and then one of the kids who had gotten my autograph would exclaim
in disgust, ‘Oh, he’s nobody.’ But you couldn’t not sign; they wouldn’t
believe it if you tried to tell them you were nobody.”
In 1998, 20 years after his father was inducted, Lee MacPhail was enshrined at Cooperstown.
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