Margaret Whitton, an avid baseball fan who played the owner who concocts a plan to move the Cleveland Indians to Florida in the 1989 baseball movie comedy “Major League,” died on Sunday in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 67.

The cause was cancer, said her husband, Warren Spector.

Ms. Whitton, who shifted from acting to directing late in her career, was best known as Rachel Phelps, a newly widowed former showgirl who takes control of a moribund Indians team with a passion to make them worse.

At the time of “Major League,” the Indians were a losing team that had not won the World Series since 1948 (they still haven’t). Enter the fictional Ms. Phelps with a plan to stock her team with misfits and over-the-hill veterans so that fans would stay away and trigger an attendance clause that would let her relocate to Miami.

She takes away the players’ jet, downgrading them to a propeller plane, and then a filthy bus. She refuses to fix the clubhouse whirlpool.