1890-1975
Major League Baseball Owner

Businessman.

Often-fired Brooklyn Dodger manager Leo Durocher said of his boss, team owner Larry MacPhail, "There is a thin line between genius and insanity, and in Larry's case it was sometimes so thin you could see him drifting back and forth." Volatile, egotistical, and driven, Larry MacPhail pioneered the movement among major league baseball owners to approach the game as a business that provides sports entertainment. Like any good businessman engaged in selling to the public, MacPhail believed in promotion. To him a baseball team owner's job was to attract ticket-buying fans to the stadium and give them a good show.

Entering Baseball.

MacPhail was a student athlete at the University of Michigan and earned his law degree at the age of twenty from Georgetown University. After a successful military career in World War I, during which he just missed in...