Larry MacPhail Marquee Hall of Fame 1978

Larry MacPhail modernized three clubs and introduced night baseball to the major leagues while running Cincinnati. Born in February 1890 and dead in October 1975, he was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1978, three years after his death.

He took over a bankrupt Cincinnati club in 1933 and put lights on the park, and the first major-league night game was played there in May 1935. He did it again in Brooklyn, brought in Red Barber to broadcast the games when the New York clubs had agreed not to, and put the first batting helmets on his players.

He was a difficult man who drank and fired people and was fired himself, and he left each of his three clubs, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and the Yankees, in a better state than he found it. His son Lee MacPhail is also in the Hall of Fame, and they are the only father and son in it.