Lee MacPhail, a former president of the American League, a general manager of the Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles, and the oldest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, died on Thursday night at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 95.

The Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, N.Y., announced the death.

In a baseball career that spanned five decades, Mr. MacPhail held virtually every baseball executive position except commissioner. He and his father, Larry, are the only father-and-son pair in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the MacPhail family now includes four generations of baseball men.

Lee MacPhail was a calm presence, a conciliator, in contrast with Larry MacPhail, a combative executive who introduced night baseball to the major leagues in 1935 when he ran the Cincinnati Reds and later moved on to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Yankees.

“My father shunned the attention and the spotlight,” Lee MacPhail’s son Andy, a third-generation baseball executive in the family, told The Palm Beach Post in 2008. “My grandfather enjoyed it.”

Despite his placid demeanor, Lee MacPhail was probably best remembered for being at the center of a baseball storm: the pine-tar dispute of July 1983. In a game between the Yankees and the Kansas City Royals at Yankee Stadium, an umpire disallowed a go-ahead home run by George Brett of the Royals with two outs in the ninth inning, ruling that Brett hadtoo much pine tar on his bat.

Mr. MacPhail, the A.L. president at the time, overruled the umpire, citing “the spirit of the rules,” and determined that the home run could stand, even though Brett’s bat indeed had too much pine tar on it under major league rules.

Mr. MacPhail’s decision infuriated George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner and Mr. MacPhail’s former boss. Mr. Steinbrenner fumed that if the ruling cost the Yankees their division race, Mr. MacPhail might consider going house-hunting in Kansas City. (The Yankees finished third in the A.L. East.)

Mr. MacPhail survived the tempest. That year he became the major league club owners’ chief labor executive, and in 1985 he averted a second long players strike. As a member of the management negotiating team while he was A.L. president in 1981, he had been instrumental in settling a 50-day work stoppage.

Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr. was born Oct. 25, 1917, in Nashville. He graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he played baseball and football. In 1941 he became the business manager of the Dodgers’ Interstate League farm team in Reading, Pa., while his father was bringing a pennant to Brooklyn for the first time in 21 years as the Dodgers’ general manager.

Except for teaching history at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and serving in the Navy during World War II, Mr. MacPhail said, “my whole working life was baseball.”

Mr. MacPhail played a key role in building the Yankees teams that dominated baseball in the two decades after World War II. He was the general manager of the Kansas City Blues, the Yankees’ top farm team, in the late 1940s, joining the organization while his father was a one-third owner of the Yankees. He served as farm director and later as director of player personnel and assistant general manager of the Yankees from 1949 to 1958, when their minor league system produced stars like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson and Bill Skowron.

Mr. MacPhail left the Yankees to become general manager of the Orioles in 1959. He developed a farm system in Baltimore that produced the Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, and he engineered the trade that brought the Hall of Fame slugger Frank Robinson from the Reds after the 1965 season. The Orioles won their first pennant in 1966, then swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. But Mr. MacPhail had left Baltimore by then, having become the administrative aide to William D. Eckert, a retired Air Force general, who had been named baseball commissioner despite knowing little about the game.

“I was always with him and was generally described as the man who was there to show him where second base was,” Mr. MacPhail recalled.

He returned to the Yankees in October 1966 as their general manager, hoping to rebuild a storied franchise that had fallen on hard times while owned by CBS. The Yankees were an aging team with few talented replacements in the minors, and over the next six years Mr. MacPhail was unable to bring another pennant to New York.

When Mr. Steinbrenner gained control of the franchise in January 1973, he quickly involved himself in baseball decisions, and at the end of the 1973 season Mr. MacPhail and the Yankees’ manager, Ralph Houk, left the team.

Mr. MacPhail became the A.L. president in 1974 with the retirement of Joe Cronin and served two five-year terms. He ran the player relations committee, management’s labor relations arm, from 1983 to 1985, then retired from baseball.

Mr. MacPhail is survived by three sons from his marriage to the former Jane Hamilton, who died in 1972: Bruce, Allen and Andy. Andy MacPhail was the Orioles’ president for baseball operations, the general manager of the Minnesota Twins when they won the World Series in 1987 and 1991, and president of the Chicago Cubs.

Mr. MacPhail is also survived by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One grandson is Lee MacPhail IV, the Orioles’ director of professional scouting, representing a fourth generation of MacPhails in baseball.

Mr. MacPhail’s brother, Bill, who died in 1996, was a pioneering television sports executive. A son, Lee MacPhail III, was the general manager of the minor league Reading Phillies when he was killed in an automobile accident in 1969. Mr. MacPhail’s second wife, the former Gwen Dayton, whom he married in 1974, died in 2002.

In his autobiography, “My 9 Innings,” published in 1989, Mr. MacPhail was self-effacing in describing the scene when he would go home after a day at the ballpark.

“When I came out after a game, there were a gang of kids waiting to get the players’ autographs, and especially in my younger days I would be mobbed,” he wrote. “Someone at the back of the group would yell, ‘Who is it?’ and then one of the kids who had gotten my autograph would exclaim in disgust, ‘Oh, he’s nobody.’ But you couldn’t not sign; they wouldn’t believe it if you tried to tell them you were nobody.”

In 1998, 20 years after his father was inducted, Lee MacPhail was enshrined at Cooperstown.

Leland S Macphail