cover image The Roaring Redhead: Larry MacPhail: Baseball's Great Innovator

The Roaring Redhead: Larry MacPhail: Baseball's Great Innovator

Don Warfield. Diamond Communications, $16.95 (266pp) ISBN 978-0-912083-18-6

MacPhail, who was active in baseball from the early '30s to the late '40s, helped shape the contemporary version of the sport. He introduced night baseball to the major leagues, first in Cincinnati and then in Brooklyn; he pioneered air travel for baseball teams; he was responsible for the first televised diamond contest; he arranged the original ""Old Timers Game.'' And, besides being an iconoclast in the baseball front office, he was adventuresome, as witnessed by his involvement in an abortive plot to capture the exKaiser Wilhelm from his exile in Holland at the end of World War I. A study about this dynamic, volatile man could not be dull and, despite undistinguished writing by Warfield (a retired Illinois businessman), this most certainly is not. Photos not seen by PW. (April 15)