The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (13 page)

From 1913 to 1917, prior to joining the Yankees, he had managed the underfinanced Cardinals well enough to attract AL president Johnson’s notice and subsequently be introduced to Ruppert. He was 40 years old when he took the train west to see Ruth, convinced that the big man was the answer for his ball club. He told friends he thought Ruth could hit “at least” 35 home runs as an every-day player. Despite the fact that the slap-and-run game had been perfect for his small body and limited skills, Huggins was a converted believer in the long ball, a visionary.

When he reached Los Angeles, he set out to find Ruth. His research led him to Griffith Park, where the Babe was playing golf. This was on January 4, 1920. Not wanting to interrupt the Babe’s golf, Huggins waited at the clubhouse. Ruth, when he arrived, was still upset with some transgressions suffered on the 18th hole. The meeting did not start well.

“I don’t have any time,” Ruth said. “I have somewhere to go.”

Huggins said he should make time. There were some things that had to be discussed.

“Have I been traded?” Ruth asked.

Huggins indicated that, yes, a trade had been made but still had to be formalized. That was why he had come west. Ruth went into his salary demands. Huggins said they could be addressed when the contract was drawn up. He then began to talk about what he expected from Ruth in the manner of personal behavior. He tried to be fatherly, to help Ruth correct his wanton lifestyle. Ruth would have none of it.

He forever had a bias against small men. He tended to bully them, to make them the butt of many of his practical jokes. He paid small men no heed, as if physical size were the answer in all arguments, the small man’s opinion worth nothing without the bulk to back it up. Huggins immediately was added to the small-man list.

The contract was signed the next day at the Hotel Rosslyn. Ruth received the $20,000 per year for two years he wanted, a $20,000 bonus making up the difference in his existing contract. The news was announced in New York and Boston and made headlines across the country. The largest amount ever paid for a baseball player had been $55,000 for Tris Speaker by the Cleveland Indians. The figure for Ruth more than doubled that.

Were the Colonels crazy? No one in New York thought so. “The two Colonels—Ruppert and Huston—were praised on all sides for their aggressiveness and liberality in landing baseball’s greatest attraction,” the
Times
said. “If the club, strengthened by Ruth and by other players the owners have in mind does not carry off the flag, it will not be the fault of the owners.” Was Frazee crazy? Opinion in Boston was divided. Red Sox fans universally—and often hysterically—thought Frazee had made a mistake. The 11 newspapers mostly took a more analytical view, especially the sportswriters, many siding with the owner.

“Ruth was 90 percent of our club last summer,” Johnny Keenan, leader of the Royal Rooters, said from the fans’ perspective. “It will be impossible to replace the strength Ruth gave the Sox. The Batterer is a wonderful player and the fact that he loves the game and plays with his all to win makes him a tremendous asset to a club. The Red Sox management will have an awful time filling the gap caused by his going. Surely the gate receipts will suffer.”

“Stars generally are temperamental,” the
Boston Herald
said as a voice of calm. “This goes for baseball and the stage. They often have to be handled with kid gloves. Frazee has carefully considered the Ruth angle and believes he has done the proper thing. Boston fans undoubtedly will be up in arms but they should reserve judgment until they see how it works out.”

“It is believed that practically every man on the Boston team will be pleased at Ruth’s sale to New York,” columnist Paul Shannon wrote in the negative in the
Boston Post
. “Popular as Ruth was, on account of his big-heartedness, the men nevertheless realize that his faults overshadow his good qualities.”

Frazee continued to campaign to his disgruntled electorate. His showmanship had to be put in reverse, unselling his prime attraction. He sounded like a politician discussing an opponent in a Democratic primary in South Boston.

“While Ruth, without question, is the greatest hitter the game has ever seen, he is likewise one of the most selfish and inconsiderate men that ever wore a uniform,” Frazee said. “Had he possessed the right disposition, had he been willing to take orders and work for the good of the club like the other men on the team, I never would have dared let him go. Twice during the past two seasons Babe has jumped the club and revolted. He refused to obey orders of the manager.”

The Babe blustered from the West Coast in response. He blustered that he now wanted a part of the purchase price. He blustered that Frazee was a skinflint, so cheap that he’d charged Mrs. Babe Ruth for a ticket to Babe Ruth Day at Fenway Park. He blustered that, okay, now he was glad to be going to New York because he didn’t want anything to do with H. Harry Frazee.

“Frazee sold me because he was unwilling to meet my demands,” Ruth said, “and to alibi himself with the fans he is trying to throw the blame on me.”

In the middle of all the bluster, all the noise from everywhere, Miller Huggins quietly made the most important announcement of all. He said in California that the Babe’s days as a pitcher were done. No man can spread himself between pitching and playing the outfield. The Babe was an every-day player now. He was a hitter.

Frazee’s real reasons for selling Ruth would be debated for generations. At the time the deal was made his statement to the newspapers was pretty much accepted. Frazee’s contention that Ruth, good as he might be, was contentious, greedy, and a squeaky wheel had some truth to it. Perhaps, from that view, it was possible the slugger presented as many negatives as positives for the Red Sox in the future. The key argument was that this was a baseball move that would be followed by other baseball moves to strengthen the franchise. As news came out about the $300,000 loan, however, and as other moves proved fruitless, as history unwound, and Frazee dealt away other stars, the analysis became quite different.

Frazee was in a financial bind. That was the evening story. On November 1, he missed a $125,000 mortgage payment to Lannin. Forced to choose between his two moneymaking businesses—baseball and the theater—he chose the theater, his first and biggest passion. The money from the sale of Ruth, plus the money from the loan, was used to pay off Lannin and keep Frazee’s theatrical interests viable, notably the staging of the hit Broadway musical
No, No, Nanette
in later years, which proved to be a tremendous hit and made him millions of dollars.

Frazee was cast in the easily constructed role of a villain, “the Man Who Sold Babe Ruth,” a Boston version of Judas Iscariot. For years, long after all the characters in the drama were dead, Frazee would be seen as the despicable cur with mustache and top hat, knocking on the front door in the middle of a December night to foreclose on the widow woman and her children. Babe Ruth for
No, No, Nanette.
This was Frazee’s Folly.

Then, in the 1990s, a revisionist look appeared. Wait a minute,
No,
No, Nanette
didn’t debut on Broadway until September 16, 1925. That was more than five years after the deal for Ruth. How could the two events be connected? Frazee’s heirs, especially grandson Harry Frazee III, insisted that the owner had been unfairly maligned. He wasn’t selling Ruth for personal gain. His finances were fine. The refusal to pay off Lannin was not a sign of financial weakness; it was a dispute, tied to payments Frazee thought Lannin should have made to the American League as part of a settlement with the now-defunct Federal League. Frazee simply was making shrewd business decisions, working mainly to thwart the efforts of American League president Ban Johnson, who wanted him out of Boston. He had been put in a box and was fighting his way out.

This all sounded very good, including the part about anti-Semitism at work because Frazee was perceived in Boston to be Jewish, even though he wasn’t, except…

Except the final judgment wasn’t true.
No, No, Nanette
was indeed part of the deal. Frazee did use the money to keep his theatrical interests afloat. The picture that had been handed down to generations of New England schoolchildren was essentially correct: Harry Frazee was the bad guy.

“In the spring of 1920, I was playing with the Boston Red Sox,” Hall of Fame pitcher Waite Hoyt said in an interview for the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Before the season opened, we played an exhibition series with the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. There was a notice posted on our bulletin board that we were invited to a theatrical performance, a light comedy, called
My Lady Friends
, that Harry Frazee was producing. There would be tickets at the box office.

“We went to the show, and it was quite amusing, very good. We enjoyed it a great deal. That show was put to music in 1924 and became
No, No, Nanette
…. If you trace it back, it was the sale of Babe Ruth that provided Harry Frazee with the $125,000 to produce that show.”

The deal might not have been as straightforward as that—the Babe for the show—but the show and other theatrical ventures were involved. Frazee had a lot of things happening at the same time.

On October 23, 1919, he was quoted in the
Times
, under the headline “Red Sox Club Not on Market,” saying he didn’t want to sell because he considered “his star slugger Babe Ruth as the greatest attraction in the national game.” Didn’t that make him sound like he wanted to keep the Babe forever? On November 1, he defaulted on the $125,000 payment on the note to Lannin. On December 3,
My Lady Friends
opened in New York. On December 26, two days before he was quoted in the
Times
saying that he “would include any player in a deal with the exception of Harry Hooper,” the deal for Ruth already had been made.

How had “the greatest attraction in the national game” become a liability in less than two months? Could Ruth’s dance to renegotiate his contract have been that offensive? Frazee was from the world of the theater. He had worked in boxing. The contract dance with a temperamental star was a staple in both environments. He’d worked in baseball, had been through these dances with other players, had been through them with Ruth. Management always held the trump card at the end. Where could the player go?

In a 1951 memoir,
My Fifty Years in Baseball,
Ed Barrow, the Red Sox manager, recounted the dialogue when Frazee told him that Ruth was gone. He said he met the owner, who was sitting with actor Frank McIntyre, at six o’clock in the evening in the café at the Hotel Knickerbocker.

“Simon,” Frazee said, “I am going to sell Ruth to the Yankees.”

“I thought as much,” Barrow said. “I could feel it in my bones. But you ought to know that you’re making a mistake.”

“Maybe I am,” Frazee said, “but I can’t help it. Lannin is after me to make good on my notes. And my shows aren’t going so good. Ruppert and Huston will give me $100,000 for Ruth, and they’ve agreed to loan me $350,000. I can’t turn that down. But don’t worry. I’ll get you some ballplayers too.”

Three months later, on March 26, Frazee announced the purchase of the Harris Theater on West 42nd Street in New York. No details of the purchase were given, but the theater had been built 20 years earlier at the cost of $500,000 and certainly was worth more now. Frazee announced that he was renaming the Harris the Frazee. A hurry-up letter he sent to Ruppert in early April requested the transferral of funds for the loan. He said he needed the money “very badly to complete the balance of my negotiations.”

An interesting footnote was that two days before he bought the Harris and renamed it the Frazee, the Yankees had announced they were moving their offices from 30 East 42nd Street to 226 West 42nd Street, where they had taken out a ten-year lease in the Cohen and Harris Theater Building on the same block of the same street as the Frazee. The Yankees now owned a mortgage on Fenway Park and Frazee was the Yankees’ neighbor on 42nd Street, and everywhere, it seemed, he and the Colonels, the Red Sox and the Yankees, baseball and the theater, were entwined. The circumstantial evidence pointed directly to where Frazee’s interests resided. In May 1923, news would come of Frazee’s investment in the musical version of
My Lady Friends.
Nine weeks later, he would sell the Red Sox.

A second footnote was that he paid
No, No, Nanette
star Louise Groody $1,750 per week, which translates to $87,500 per year. He could have had four years of Babe Ruth—even at the Babe’s extravagant asking price of $20,000—for one year of Louise Groody.

“The best part about Boston,” Harry Frazee once said, “was the train ride back to New York.”

The final Boston word on the deal came on the editorial page of the
Globe
on January 7, 1920. Under the title “The Athens of America,” the paper decided that it was all right for even the most respected Brahmins and the smartest of the intelligentsia to shed a tear over the departure of a baseball player.

“The Red Sox without Babe Ruth will certainly be—different,” the paper said.

There is much to be said on both sides, and the fans gathered at the daily meetings of the Hot Stove League have already begun to do full justice to the sale of Boston’s colossal fence buster.

The Hub of the Universe, also known as the Athens of America, is undeniably “het up” on the prospects of next season. It is possible that unscholarly persons will rise and remark that the prevailing excitement concerning a man who merely made 29 home runs is unbecoming Boston’s reputation as a center of learning. If any assertion of that sort is made, it will only indicate a lack of classical culture.

Ancient Greece was both the intellectual and athletic center of the world. Much has been written about the simple chaplet of olive leaves as the only prize for winners of the Olympic games. That was all they were given at the stadium, but when they reached home they received substantial rewards—a jeweled casket filled with gold, a house and lot, no doubt a wife—possibly more than one—and the esteem of the highest circles of society.