Lee MacPhail remembered as solid baseball man, consensus-builder

The tradition began with his father, Larry, an energetic former executive with the Reds, Dodgers and Yankees. It continues with his son Andy, most recently the general manager of the Orioles, and with two grandsons who work within the game.

Yes, baseball ran in his blood. But MacPhail, who died this past week at age 95, never allowed it to become his entire life. It was perhaps the only way he could have emerged as a peacemaker during baseball's bitter labor wars, when his trusted voice helped usher the game through trying times.

"He had maybe the underrated quality of keeping things in perspective,'' Andy MacPhail said by telephone Saturday. "His interests outside of the game . . . I think that helpedhim maintain a perspective.''

That perspective -- which made him one of the game's most respected leaders -- stemmed from his appreciation of classical music, his passion for history, his love of art. Before beginning in baseball, MacPhail taught history at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. In his later years, he penned an unpublished manuscript about the Revolutionary War.

As president of the American League, he kept a running tally of which art museums he had visited in each AL city, "often dragging his children with him,'' Andy MacPhail recalled. For years, his father kept shoeboxes filled with postcards of famous artwork. He'd use the postcards later to quiz himself about the artists behind the works.

Even with his outside interests, MacPhail displayed a keen instinct as a baseball man. As a