All in the family: How Andy MacPhail learned to love baseball again

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Andy MacPhail, farther than ever from baseball, stood atop what his tour guide described as the greatest graveyard in the world. The third generation of a family with two generations of Hall of Fame executives, he had craved a new perspective. So, when the game was no longer fun in 2011, MacPhail walked away.

He went to the Great Wall of China.

"The scope of it is just remarkable," MacPhail said last month from his office at Bright House Field, where as the president of the Phillies he now oversees a company worth more than a billion dollars. "I still have photos of it somewhere in here. The magnitude of it is just indescribable."

A few hours before a meaningless Grapefruit League game, he tapped the screen of his iPhone. He flipped past photos from Turkey, Greece, and Italy. Memories of Peru, Brazil, Ecuador. Belize and Honduras. Even more from Bermuda, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.

"I have to scroll back some ways here," MacPhail, 62, said. "It's things that you remember. You have a choice of what you want to do. If you want to try to collect merchandise . . ."

Wait. A photo from Machu Picchu, an image so clear that it looked as if it came from a catalog. MacPhail and his wife, Lark, stayed at the ancient mountaintop Inca ruins.

He swiped some more until he found China, which he visited in 2013. "Here," MacPhail said. "It just goes forever." It's a picture often seen. To actually take it, he said, was so gratifying. You cannot see a ballpark from space. But the Great Wall? Its scope defies mankind.

"That's as far away as you can get," MacPhail said. "It was great."

As first pitch neared, MacPhail grabbed a straw hat and a scorecard. He hand-wrote the names of his Phillies players on the blank sheet. He found Lark, and the couple weaved through the stands to the two best seats in the stadium, right behind the Phillies dugout.

Born into one of baseball's most prominent families, Andy MacPhail had to travel across the world to love the game again.

Two winters ago, when baseball called again, MacPhail and his wife were watching a Disney movie on their couch in Maryland. A text message lit MacPhail's phone. It interrupted Saving Mr. Banks because MacPhail had to tell his wife what the words said. The sender asked MacPhail if he would be interested in receiving a call.

It was Phillies owner John Middleton.

"When you leave the game, you have to understand this game is going to march along very nicely without you," MacPhail said. "It's not unreasonable to expect that after you've been out for a year or so, you're just out of sight and out of mind. So I was surprised to some degree. It's been three years."

Three years without baseball, and now the game wanted him back. They called him "Boy Genius" when he won the 1987 World Series as a first-year general manager with the Minnesota Twins and "MacFail" when that team lost 88 games in 1990. Then, in 1991, he was a champion and genius again.

His grandfather was instrumental in putting baseball on radio. Larry MacPhail arranged the first night games in the National League and the first team travel by airplane, and he made plastic batting helmets commonplace. He spent just 11 years in baseball, and still was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Larry did not want his son, Lee, to work in baseball. He found his son a job at a pig farm in Florence, S.C., and two years there persuaded Lee to pursue a baseball career. For 45 years, he won accolades as one of the most respected executives in the game. The Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998, making the MacPhails the first father-son tandem enshrined at Cooperstown.

The third generation knew not to stray from the family business.

"Clearly, he wanted me to get into it," Andy MacPhail said of his father. "But he did not declare it."

It was because of his father that MacPhail left the game. Every 10 years, Lee told his son, you should try something else. MacPhail lasted just five years in Baltimore, where his teams lost an average of 94 games a season. He grew resentful of the hours spent at the ballpark.

Lee's health declined in his early 90s, and MacPhail wanted to be with his dad. They had a year together before Lee died in 2012.

"That's something a lot of people in baseball need to work on," MacPhail said. "You cannot get so invested in this game that you lose your own sense of identity and what's important. It will make life after baseball so much easier for you. I did not fall into that trap."

Still, his wife worried.

"To be honest," Lark said, "I didn't really want him to leave at first. I felt like he didn't quite finish the mission. I knew when he walked away there was a possibility he'd never get back in. We talked about that. You just never know."

So MacPhail took Middleton's call. He met the Phillies' owners, Middleton and Pete and Jim Buck, at a law firm in Center City before spring training started. The second interview, again in Philadelphia, was tedious.

"They clearly wanted someone with an analytic bent," MacPhail said. "And I'm not someone like that. But I was very clear that you employ all of your resources. You don't ignore anything."

The Phillies hired him last June.

There was a time when MacPhail surrendered any thoughts of returning to baseball. Lark and he were empty- nesters, and they relished time with neighbors. MacPhail did the grocery shopping. He pledged a healthier lifestyle after decades of late-night stadium snacks.

Those idyllic summer nights at a ballpark ceded to a new sensation.

"I would just work that grill," MacPhail said. "You put some salmon on it and maybe some asparagus. Sit out there in the summer and have a glass of wine on your deck. That's pretty good."

Lark was at peace with the new routine. The couple planned another European trip last summer, but even before Middleton's text, Lark sensed her husband's nostalgia. So did Reed MacPhail, their oldest son. Reed, 27, followed the three generations of MacPhails to his current post in Major League Baseball's labor relations department. Whenever he came home to Maryland, he noticed his father spent more time in the basement.

MacPhail, on a health kick, installed a treadmill downstairs. With a treadmill comes a TV, which just so happened to have the MLB season package. His father's workouts, Reed said, mirrored the baseball schedule.

"Every time I was there," Reed said, "he was watching a lot."

MacPhail paid close attention to the Orioles, who have averaged 89 wins in the four seasons since he departed. He initiated the rebuild.

"When he left, it was somewhat unclear what the fruits of his labor would be there," Reed said. "That helped rekindle his interest in coming back, knowing the job he did there was successful."

As MacPhail searched for perspective, the family's next generation forged ahead. Reed, whose first word was "ball," has spent three years at MLB. MacPhail's younger son, Drew, 23, just took a job in player development with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

MacPhail's nephew, Lee IV, is the director of professional scouting for the Seattle Mariners. Another nephew, Logan, had analyst jobs in baseball and now is the director of basketball research for the San Antonio Spurs.

The Phillies job, MacPhail said, will be his last job in baseball.

"You can't let your work dictate to you who you are," MacPhail said. "A title is not who you are. Who you are is independent of your job description. It has to be more than that. Titles will come and go."

Lee's principles are a crutch. Buck Showalter, the Orioles manager and a friend to MacPhail, described him as a "voice of reality." The bloodlines and experience have bred consistency, a trait paramount to conquer the grind.

"Oh, Andy's got a real competitive fire," Showalter said. "As nice a man as he can be, he's not going to get involved in something unless he's all in. He tries to be fair. He's all in. He's totally committed."

In Baltimore, MacPhail wondered what else he could be doing. He went to China and Peru and he stopped thinking about baseball. And, when he did everything else, the family business prevailed.

"I never knew, really, a summer weekend," MacPhail said. "In baseball, there are no summer weekends."

mgelb@philly.com

@mattgelb