Inside the Phillies: MacPhail’s career in baseball started early – Philly.com
Among the first reasons Phillies part-owner John Middleton provided for the organization’s selection of Andy MacPhail as its next president was his track record.
In the eyes of Middleton and partners Jim and Pete Buck, the “ideal candidate” to succeed Pat Gillick after the season would be someone who had won World Series championships. He would have rebuilt several teams and led them to the playoffs. Middleton said the candidate also would have “worked for different owners, under different economic circumstances, under different financial constraints, and using different personnel.”
“Because a person who met all those criteria,” Middleton explained early in Monday’s news conference, “is somebody who had shown his ability to think and adapt to changing circumstances.”
All of that led the rebuilding Phillies to MacPhail, a 62-year-old baseball lifer with experience leading three organizations in three different situations. His tenure as a front-office leader dates to 1985, when Carl Pohlad, the late Minnesota Twins owner, made the 32-year-old MacPhail the youngest general manager in baseball.
“I always teased him back then: He was sort of ‘Boy Wonder’ in our game,” said Phillies chairman David Montgomery, the former longtime club president who has known MacPhail since the 1980s.
MacPhail, who won two World Series in his nine seasons as the Twins GM, grew up among baseball royalty. His father, Lee, a Swarthmore College graduate, served as the American League president from 1974 to ’83 after years running the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles. Lee’s father, Larry, helped build the 1947 world champion Yankees and the 1941 NL champion Brooklyn Dodgers, and in 1935 he introduced night games to the major leagues. Larry and Lee are the only father-son duo enshrined in Cooperstown.
MacPhail spent many of his formative years in Baltimore – his father was the Orioles’ president and general manager from 1958 to 1965 – and then lived in New York, where his father was the GM from 1966 to 1973.
While in high school, MacPhail worked in the concession stands at Yankee Stadium. According to a July 1987 New York Times profile, on slow days the future baseball executive would venture to the right-field stands to watch the game.
“When I sat out there in right field,” he told the Times early in his days as Minnesota’s GM, “my friends and I would hoot [Charlie] Manuel, who was the Twins’ rightfielder then.”
MacPhail played Division III baseball at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa.), from which he graduated in 1976. Two older brothers, Bruce and Allen, also attended Dickinson, and MacPhail Field there was named for the brothers after their gift to the college.
After graduating, MacPhail became the business manager for the Chicago Cubs’ Gulf Coast League affiliate in Bradenton, Fla. He was promoted to their player development staff before leaving the organization in 1982, when the Houston Astros hired him as an assistant GM.
After his great nine-year run leading the Twins, MacPhail took on a new challenge in 1994, when the Cubs hired him to be their president and CEO. Although the Cubs made the postseason twice in his 12 years there – in 2003 they were infamously five outs from a trip to the World Series before falling short – his tenure in Chicago proved much less successful than his stint in Minnesota.
In 2006, a year after he left the Cubs, MacPhail joined the Orioles as their president of baseball operations. Over his five seasons there he hired Buck Showalter and made three great trades – landing Adam Jones, Chris Davis, Chris Tillman, and J.J. Hardy – to shape the Orioles team now on pace for its fourth consecutive winning season.
“Andy’s as solid as they come,” Showalter said during the Orioles’ June visit to Citizens Bank Park. “Andy is a man’s man. He’s loyal but has a lot of backbone. I was unbelievably lucky to have him.
“Andy does things for a reason. He’s got a lot of passion, and he knows right from wrong. He knows what it’s supposed to look like and what it doesn’t. I think he’s as good a man as he is a baseball guy, which is saying something.”
MacPhail left the Orioles in 2011 at the expiration of his contract. At the time, his father had little time left. (Lee MacPhail died in November 2012 at the age of 95.) There were also other experiences outside of baseball MacPhail wanted to enjoy. During his three years out of the game, he traveled to China, Vietnam, Ecuador, Thailand, Peru, and Brazil.
“I got out of my system what I needed to get out of my system. I really did,” he said. “It was a great experience for me. I’m a better human being as a result, and I think I’ll be a better executive as a result.”
Montgomery’s relationship with MacPhail dates to when they were both among the younger guys in the room at annual baseball owners meetings. Naturally, they gravitated toward each other. They also have served together on a number of labor committees.
“He’s a listener. He’s a learner,” said Montgomery, 69. “He’ll learn from whatever source he has. He will put in the time to pay attention, hear what somebody has to say, and then digest it and make decisions accordingly. I think that’s important for us in our situation right now.”
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