Larry MacPhail  Leland Stanford "Larry" MacPhail, Sr. (February 3, 1890 – October 1, 1975) was an American lawyer and an executive in Major League Baseball. He served as an executive with several professional baseball teams, including the Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees. MacPhail's sons and grandsons were also sports executives. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978. MacPhail was born in Cass City, Michigan, on February 3, 1890. His father founded State Savings Bank of Scottville, Michigan, in 1882 as well as twenty other small banks in that state. He obtained an LL.B. from the George Washington University Law School, where he became friends with Branch Rickey. He worked for a time with a Chicago law firm. Prior to World War I Larry MacPhail was an executive of a department store in Nashville, Tennessee. During World War I, he served as an artillery captain in France and Belgium. He accompanied his commander, Colonel Luke Lea, on an unsanctioned mission to Amerongen in the Netherlands in January 1919 to attempt to arrest the exiled German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and bring him to the Paris Peace Conference to be tried for war crimes. MacPhail reportedly stole an ashtray that belonged to the Kaiser and received an official reprimand for the mission. After his discharge from military service, MacPhail opened a law office in Columbus, Ohio, where he eventually purchased an interest in the Columbus Red Birds, a minor league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. While in the role of president of the Red Birds, MacPhail came up with a plan to create a geographically based playoff system for determining the league champion of the American Association. It was not well-received and lasted only two years. In 1933 he was hired by the Cincinnati Reds and became its chief executive and general manager. MacPhail had been recommended for the Reds position by Branch Rickey, who said that MacPhail was "a wild man at times, but he'll do the job." After leaving the Reds, he spent about a year with his father's investment business before becoming executive vice-president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938. He was promoted to team president, a position that had been vacant for about a year after the death of the previous team president Stephen McKeever, on May 4, 1939. In 1939, he received the "Sporting News" Executive of the Year Award.