Horace McGarity

Horace J. McGarity (Il Mago)

• Born April 3, 1914 in Babylon, NY USA
• Died January 15, 1989

Biographical Information

Horace McGarity was an Italian baseball pioneer.

McGarity had served in Anzio in the US Army. He married an Italian girl and began supervising a cemetery for the American dead in Nettuno, Italy in 1950. He decided to teach Italians baseball to help strengthen ties to America. He would coach the Nettuno club to three Italian titles. He was banned for life in 1952 due to leading a riot against the Lazio club, but he was reinstated a year later. He would manage the Italian national team in their first major tournament, the 1954 European Championship. They won the Gold Medal. He ran afoul of the US Battle Monuments Commission, which claimed he was using US equipment for the ballfields in Italy. McGarity went home to the US. He would be posthumously inducted into the Italian Baseball Hall of Fame's first class in 2005, the only American in that class (others would follow in later years)

Sources

• Italian Hall of Fame
• Baseball in Europe by Josh Chetwynd
• 1956 Sports Illustrated article