Baseball: The Unknown Soldier

The only experience William Dole Eckert, 56, had with baseball was as a high school first baseman back in Madison, Ind. Last week the 20 owners of the major-league ballclubs elected Eckert to succeed Ford Frick for a seven-year term as baseball's $65,000-a-year commissioner.

The theory was that Eckert, a retired lieutenant general, who collected a chestful of medals commanding a B-17 bomber group in Europe and later rose to Comptroller of the Air Force, would give the office back some of the dignity it had lost since autocratic Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled the leagues from 1921 to 1944. So someone around the place would know something about the game, the club owners decided to install a "cabinet" headed by Lee MacPhail, 48, who was born into baseball (his father was once president of the New York Yankees) and who will sell his interest in the Baltimore Orioles to take the $40,000-a-year job.