The Selling of the Babe (27 page)

For now, apart from public posturing, everything was tabled until the official league meeting in December. The Insurrectos weren't backing down, but behind the scenes they were concerned. They looked at one another and decided they had the nucleus of a pretty good league, and started making noise about breaking off and forming their own circuit. Press reports claimed they had the backing of big money from investors Edsel Ford in Detroit, Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil in Pittsburgh, and others in Cleveland, Baltimore, and Montreal, and they hoped to poach a few other existing teams from the National League as well.
The Sporting News
dismissively termed the notion “the Pipe Dream League.”

Each was worried about his own survival, for this battle with Johnson was a game of chicken that was certain to cost someone everything. The Yankees, despite Ruppert's wealth, were still as vulnerable as the Red Sox, perhaps even more so due to their ballpark situation, beholden to the Giants, continuing to pay approximately $60,000 a year in rent. They tried to negotiate a long-term lease, but the Giants, blanching at having to share those new lucrative Sunday dates, were ready to let the lease run out after the 1920 season and let the Yankees worry about the Yankees.

Johnson saw opportunity. Behind the scenes, he tried to gain control of the lease, which he could then use to force new ownership on the Yankees; they'd either have to sell or have no place to play. As a measure of his desperation, Johnson was even ready to do business with the Giants. To gain their cooperation, he was offering to make owner Horace Stoneham president of the National League. It was all veiled threats and conspiracies, strong-arming and posturing, lawyers and lawsuits … mostly over money.

The pressures on everyone, both politically and financially, increased by the day. Lannin wanted his money, unintentionally—or perhaps with a little nudge from Johnson—helping his cause by putting the squeeze on. Frazee however, likely had the money—or most of it, or could have raised it in any number of ways. His real estate holdings alone were easily worth well over a million dollars, he had a standing offer to sell film rights to an earlier production,
A Good Bad Woman
, for nearly $10,000, and he had enough money to launch a new play—
My Lady Friends
was scheduled to open in early December. Less than a month later he would receive lucrative offers to take the play overseas. He was also preparing to buy the Harris Theatre in New York and had already turned down Ruppert's $200,000 offer for Ruth and Mays. These were hardly the actions of a man on the verge of financial collapse.

The main reason he wasn't paying—or at least the reason he offered publicly—was due to a dispute over who was responsible for payments resulting from a lawsuit filed against baseball by the Federal League. When Frazee bought the Red Sox, Lannin was supposed to be responsible for all existing debt. Although the league collapsed, it had won in the courts and been paid off, only to appeal and have the judgment increased. Frazee had paid, but now wanted to deduct those costs—more than $50,000—from what he owed Lannin. The question was whether this was an existing debt. Lannin didn't think so, and was threatening to put a lien on Frazee and force him to come up with the cash at auction. The two eventually filed suit against one another, to the absolute delight of a gaggle of attorneys on each side, none of which were eager to make anything happen too quickly.

Over the next month, everyone involved was paying lawyers and plotting their next move. For the time being, Frazee had Lannin held at bay. As lawyers for both men negotiated, Frazee and Lannin had agreed to an extension of the November 1 deadline to pay off the notes, first to December 4, then to January 15. Lannin was not really in a position to hold a gun too close to Frazee's head to pay. He'd made an offer on some property based on the assumption he'd be paid, and was also committed to making an investment in the Mercedes automobile company. In the meantime, Frazee was having Fenway Park appraised in anticipation of making an offer to buy everyone out.

By the end of November, the notion that Ruth might be traded or sold was one of the worst-kept secrets in baseball. Sportswriters weren't stupid and kept asking Frazee if Ruth was on the market. He kept denying that he was, but at the same time, Frazee had made it clear that there were always offers too good to ignore, telling the press that the only player he wouldn't consider trading was Harry Hooper. With the official American League meeting scheduled for New York on December 10, everybody in baseball knew that would inspire a time of intense horse-trading, just as the Winter Meetings inspire a similar frenzy today. Then, as now, speculation often centered around the biggest and most controversial figures in the game. Ruth fulfilled both definitions.

In early December, just before what promised to be the most tempestuous meeting in the history of the game, Christy Mathewson penned a syndicated story “Big Baseball Trades Due” on what deals fans might expect to take place during the off-season. Mathewson, the rare player who actually wrote many of the articles that carried his byline—or at the very least, wrote an early version of them—dropped a widely broadcasted hint. He wrote, “This week will see some of the biggest trades pulled off in baseball for years, I know of one of very large dimensions almost certain to go through; it should startle the followers of baseball.”

Hmm, that's an odd way to put it. What could he possibly mean by “very large dimensions”?
The Sporting News
was even less circumspect. It offered that Ruth “had been analyzing the celebrated Mays case and has arrived at the conclusion that a contract is not binding.” The article went on to say that there was some indication that “Babe has picked his club, ala [sic] Mays, that he too would join the Yankees.” Remember, he'd already been barnstorming with Bob Shawkey and Bob Meusel's brother. He knew what was happening in New York.

It wasn't only Mays doing the picking, either. Owners in other cities, particularly Clark Griffith in Washington, learned that talk about trading for Ruth generally received a welcome reception in the press, and more or less pushed everything else away for a few days and guaranteed positive coverage. Such was the power of the Home Run King—he could make the other team look good even when he didn't play for them.

The magnates gathered in New York on December 10. By then, Frazee, Ruppert, and Comiskey had to know their plot to oust Johnson would collapse; they'd failed to get any of the Loyal Five to join them, and were now almost powerless to do anything. At the start of the meeting, the three were ousted from the board of directors, which meant they could no longer set the agenda for the remainder of the meeting. Had they been able to, they planned to present a case arguing that Johnson was not fit to remain in his position, that his long-term contract as American League president was illegal and in violation of league bylaws, that his personal financial interest in ball clubs in the league was the equivalent of syndicate baseball, and that he had, for years, acted unfairly. It was all true, but it was also now meaningless without the votes. In the end, they hoped to convince the other owners to oust Johnson and move toward naming a single commissioner of baseball, one elected by all the clubs, and prohibit the commissioner's office from having a financial interest in any clubs, serving only for the betterment of all. It was a bold, forward-thinking proposal, one that baseball eventually would adopt, but one for which the Insurrectos themselves would rarely be credited.

Detroit owner Frank Navin was named league vice president, leaving the Insurrectos thoroughly out in the cold. Unable to entice any team from either league to join them, their quixotic quest for a third major league simply faded away. Now that Johnson had exerted his control, he suspended the rest of the meeting until February. To fill the time, everybody filed another round of lawsuits.

In their one substantive act, the owners voted to ban the spitball, later expanding the ban to all sorts of other trick pitches, like the shine ball and emery ball. For the first time since the spitball had first been developed nearly twenty years earlier, beginning in 1920 batters would only have to worry about breaking balls, fastballs, change-ups, and the rare knuckler. Although spitballers were grandfathered in, everybody else had to learn to get by with their real stuff. That meant almost every pitcher in the league would have to adjust. For Ruth, it was an early present. A lot of pitchers who had given him trouble before now had to take the mound missing a few bullets. Ruth's value only went up.

All the Insurrectos could do now was talk, mostly to one another, about what to do next. They'd been at this long enough to have some contingencies already in the works, plans C and D in case plans A and B didn't work. And there is every indication this is the time the Red Sox finally decided Ruth was available for acquisition as part of that contingency. But this would be no Carl Mays scenario, in which they'd hold some kind of public auction. By this time, Frazee knew who the serious players were, who had the money, and, more importantly, who he could trust. That was a very short list that included only the White Sox and Yankees.

But really, why trade Ruth at all? The answer to that lies not so much in the financial aspect of the deal as it does the political and the personal.

 

8

For Sale

“The owner who trades or sells a star player must expect criticism. It is the law of the game.”

—Harry Frazee

So why was Ruth traded? If Frazee didn't need the money after all, like everyone has long assumed, then why not keep him? What had changed? These questions vexed and distracted historians for decades. But in a sense, these were the wrong questions to ask, or at least it was wrong to think that the answer to the second question fully answered the first. The logic behind the selling of the Babe is not bound up in a single reason any more than the secrets of Ruth's success as a batter. The answer lies in the complicated confluence of events.

Did Frazee really need the money? Well, who didn't? But to men and women of means, wealth doesn't mean the same thing it does to you or me, who feel anxious when the credit card bill is more than the figure in the checking account. To the one percent, a pile of cash in the bank is not nearly as important as the ability to get access to cash when needed. Frazee had both cash and access to cash, just not enough to do everything he wanted at the time, which was pay off Lannin, buy Fenway Park outright, and purchase the Harris Theatre. That building, which had cost a half million dollars when it opened in 1902, had done nothing but make money for its owners ever since.

Was the sale made out of financial desperation? Hardly.
My Lady Friends
had just opened to great reviews and was making $3,000 a week. Any financial problems he was having were of a temporary nature, a cash flow problem only because he had plans bigger than his bank account. Adding in his various legal battles, or potential legal battles, with Johnson, and cash was always a good thing to have. But, significantly, right up to the time of the sale, Frazee still did business as usual, and that did not materially change once the Ruth deal was made. He neither went on a spree nor acted particularly frugally. What has been missed is that the financial aspect of the deal was not entirely a question of Frazee's personal finances, but that of the Boston franchise, and its future value.

Still, had there not been the political situation to consider, or real and serious questions about Ruth, both as a ballplayer and a person, it is extremely doubtful any deal would have been made, or if it had been, that it would have been structured as it eventually was. Had there not been political considerations, Ruth may have commanded an even higher cash price. And had there not been questions about Ruth's talent and his character, perhaps he may not have been sold at all. Ultimately, the sale of Ruth to the Yankees was an elaborate package wrapped in a complicated bow that, once consummated in a secure knot, took care of any number of loose ends, particularly for the owners of the Red Sox and Yankees.

Tellingly, Frazee first rejected an entreaty from Comiskey, who reportedly offered him left-handed hitting outfielder Joe Jackson and $60,000 for Ruth. At first blush, the offer might have appeared tempting. Sixty thousand dollars was a lot of money, and Jackson's career batting average was nearly .360. Together with Ty Cobb, George Sisler, Tris Speaker—and Ruth—he was considered one of the greatest hitters in the game. Earlier in his career, with Cleveland, Jackson hit as high as .408. If Frazee wanted both cash and value back in exchange for Ruth, Jackson seemed to fit the bill.

Or did he? Joe Jackson was thirty years old. In both 1915 and 1917 he had hit barely .300, and had never played particularly well in Fenway Park, where the left-handed hitter, like Ruth, showed less power than elsewhere and owned a batting average nearly 50 points lower than his career mark. There may not have been a statistician on the payroll, but Boston pitchers had to be aware of that. Furthermore, Jackson's slashing, Dead Ball Era approach to hitting wasn't likely to result in many home runs or extra base hits. And Jackson would be costly to keep. Comiskey, a notorious skinflint, had kept Jackson as more or less an indentured servant and he'd been earning only $6,000 a season, but he was certain to ask for more from Frazee.

There was also the Black Sox scandal, the one that eventually would lead to Jackson's lifetime banishment from baseball. Although Jackson's level of involvement is still debated today, he eventually paid the price and was suspended for life. Precisely how many whispers were taking place in the late fall of 1919 is uncertain, but it's likely Frazee would have heard something by then. Remember, Frazee had strong business ties in Chicago, and Sport Sullivan was well known in Boston. If guys like the sportswriter Ring Lardner, who'd been dropping hints about a fix into his stories during the Series, thought something funny was going on, Frazee had to have heard the rumors as well. And with Johnson already breathing down his neck about gambling at Fenway Park, the last thing he needed was to acquire a player who might be wrapped up in that.