The Selling of the Babe (22 page)

Now he was in the process of getting another play together, this one entitled
My Lady Friends
. In addition, even after buying the Sox, Frazee had retained his interest and ownership in several theaters and other businesses. Although the economy had suffered during the war, in the end Frazee's theater interests hadn't suffered very much; he'd protected his assets and received rent for the theaters anyway, regardless of how well somebody else's shows did in them, and two of the three shows he produced at the time were hits. In fact, there are indications in his archives that during this time he funneled money earned from the Cort Theatre in Chicago to help support the Red Sox.

With the war over and the influenza epidemic a horrible memory, people were starting to stream back to the theater. As yet there was no radio, and the only mass forms of entertainment were confined to live music, vaudeville, baseball, boxing, and the movies, and only in the theater could the entertainment of vaudeville and the drama of the silent movies be paired with the music of an orchestra. Broadway was about to enter a Golden Age, something Frazee already sensed, and people began attending shows with the frequency they do movies today.

Although Frazee was not exactly Max Bialystock, the character played by Zero Mostel in the Mel Brooks movie
The Producers
who fleeced investors for profit, he was a shrewd businessman.

Just as his tax records in his archive show that Frazee held on to the sentiment that taxes were for people who couldn't figure out a way to avoid them—and as his archives show, he could, Frazee was just as circumspect about the financial worth of his productions. In his tax records, wherever he had a big year, there are inevitably big losses written off, usually in the form of creditors who could no longer be located. It is much the same with his theatrical records. Few plays show a profit on paper, no matter how long they ran or how many people went to see them. It is almost comical. When the house increases and his plays draw big crowds, there are big expenses, just high enough to keep the show in the red. And when the house is down, miraculously, those expenses disappear, yet time and time again the plays just come short of showing a profit.

This is not to say they did not earn money, for the theater started the tradition of what is known today as “Hollywood bookkeeping,” creative accounting designed to keep payouts to investors as low as possible, making vast profits look like something else, funneling receipts to shadow vendors and the like, something extraordinarily easy to do in businesses such as baseball or the theater where people paid cash for tickets every single day. Like many of his peers in both the theater and in baseball, Frazee knew how to cook the books to his liking. At any rate, Frazee was clearly in no desperate need for cash, and turned down the package deal for Ruth and Mays. Now New York focused only on Mays.

Very quietly, the Yankees and had been secretly been reaching out to the pitcher, checking on his health and making sure he'd report if they made a deal. He said he would, that his troubles were behind him. On July 30, Frazee, Ruppert, and Huston shook hands and it was done; for $40,000, Mays was a member of the Yankees. When he found out, Ban Johnson almost had a stroke.

Never before had his authority been so openly and brazenly not just challenged but blatantly ignored. Fighting him was bad enough, but this was insurrection, acting as if he didn't matter. Buying a team without permission was offense number one. Working behind his back in 1918 and calling for a single commissioner was unforgivable. But this, this thing, this was something else entirely.

Johnson sent a wire to Boston telling them to indefinitely suspend Mays. Frazee immediately sent one back to Johnson telling him where to get off and then started talking to reporters.

“This action of Johnson's is a joke,” he said. “Evidently he is still trying to run the Boston club or make things unpleasant for its management. However, on this occasion big Ban has been a little late. I am no longer concerned in Mays' fate as a pitcher. He is the property of New York.” Frazee went on to send a few more digs Johnson's way, chiding him for “Just waking up to what is going on.” After all, his negotiations with Ruppert were hardly a secret: the newspapers reported them daily. As the
Tribune
noted a few days later, “war to the knife has been declared in the American League.” Frazee was in the middle of it and it would take everything he had to keep from being mortally wounded, but neither would Johnson escape the blade. Knife fights are rarely tidy.

And Ruth was likely already a part of that battle, or at least Frazee had to think he might yet be. The Yankees has already shown some interest in him, and they'd just dropped $40,000 on a player everyone hated and might be mentally unbalanced and had just jumped his team. He had to wonder now how much they would pay for Ruth, his other problem child. Sure, he was starting to hit, when it didn't matter, but Ruth had already cost him plenty. There was no way he was going to earn it back, not in 1919, and perhaps not ever. Over the course of two seasons, Ruth had been a tease, with brief periods of explosive power followed by long droughts. Who was to say it wouldn't happen again? There might be an opportunity to sell high.

But for now, Ruppert and Huston went to court in New York. They had more influence there than Johnson had, and, pending a hearing, easily got an injunction that restrained Johnson from ordering a suspension, banning Mays from pitching, or anything else. Mays entered the New York rotation and Russell entered Boston's. Johnson fumed, his ire toward Frazee and Ruppert increasing by the day.

Oblivious to it all, Ruth only saw pitches coming over the fat part of the plate, long fly balls dropping over the fence, and pretty girls and parties waiting for him wherever he went. A home run surge at the end of July gave him seven for the month and all of a sudden, Socks Seybold's American League record of 16 home runs, set in 1902, seemed within reach.

Of course, it wasn't quite what it appeared. Seybold, a left-handed hitter for the A's, had benefited from playing at Philadelphia's home field, Columbia Park, where it was only 280 feet down the line and 323 in the right field power alley, far shallower than Fenway or any other American League park Ruth played in. Nevertheless, a record was a record, even a relatively obscure one at the time, and it gave sportswriters, bored with the Red Sox and with the court battle between the Yankees and Johnson, something else to write about.

It helped filled the stands, too. When the White Sox came into town on August 2 for a Saturday doubleheader, the combination of the league leader, fine weather, and Ruth's assault on the record brought out a surprisingly big crowd of more than 30,000. For the first time all year, Ruth was earning his keep.

That was fine with Frazee, because on August 1 he entered into negotiations to purchase Fenway Park from the Fenway Realty Group, a holding company created by the Taylor family. When they had sold the Red Sox to Joseph Lannin, they had retained ownership of the park, which they had just built, allowing them to see a nice return from the ball club well into the future. Frazee paid $30,000 a year in rent.

But the Taylors didn't own all the stock in the holding company. Lannin and a few of their business cronies owned some shares, too. Given the open war that erupted between Frazee and Johnson, Frazee had some fear that Fenway could fall into unfriendly hands and that the terms of his lease could be changed to make ownership of the Red Sox untenable. In addition, he was already in a spat with Lannin over payment on a note worth $262,000 due in November. Buying Fenway Park could solve several problems at once. Back in March, General Taylor and John Taylor had already told Frazee they were looking to get out of the ballpark business and terminate the trust. Frazee, who owned 150 shares, had balked at the time, but now, given the changing political situation, he was agreeable to move in that direction.

Conveniently enough for Frazee, Ruth picked the long home stand to go into another prolonged home run drought, one that kept the crowds coming out day after day, wondering if this was the day he would snap out of it and set the record. On August 9, 24,000 fans turned out at Fenway for another doubleheader, this time against St. Louis. They didn't go away completely disappointed, as Ruth tripled to the bleachers in dead center field, the place where it seemed all his long drives had been going the entire home stand. It almost seemed like he did didn't want to homer—when the Sox played out of town Sunday exhibitions, which they often did due to Boston's blue laws, Ruth suddenly seemed able to pull the ball and almost homer at will.

Not so at Fenway. Then again, pitchers had gotten smarter. As Ruth warmed up over the course of the summer, they pitched him more and more carefully, keeping the ball away, giving him nothing to pull, often satisfied by holding him to a base on balls. After walking only 31 times through June, over the last three months of the season he'd be put on base 70 more times. In fact, during the seventh inning of the final game of the home stand versus the Browns, with the game scoreless, the bases loaded, and Ruth at bat, St. Louis pitcher Allan Sothoron intentionally walked Ruth—forcing home a run that eventually proved to be the game winner in Boston's 1–0 victory.

For whatever reason, once Boston hit the road, Ruth's home run power miraculously returned. He didn't waste time, homering on August 14 in Chicago off Erskine Mayer, the ball clearing the right field wall and landing in an adjacent soccer field. The Red Sox' Babe, and not the A's Socks, was now the official American League home run record holder.

The next target was Gavvy Cravath's National League mark of 24, set in 1915 with the Phillies. Like Seybold, that record, too, had been set with a little help, for the Baker Bowl was one of the smallest parks in baseball, and Cravath hit 19 of his 24 home runs there. Still, it gave Ruth and the fans something else to look forward to, and in Boston that was all they had.

Now that someone was hitting home runs with regularity for the first time ever, everything about the hit was a potential record. Fans were enthralled. How far, how many times in a game, in a season, in a league, for a team, in a park, off a left-hander, off a right-hander, to center field, to left, to right, into the stands, into the bleachers, over the roof, almost anything you could think of in any combination potentially created a record … it was almost endless. All because of Ruth, fans and sportswriters alike began keeping track of ever more arcane marks. And as virtually the first practitioner of his craft, almost every Ruth home run was a potential record setter of one kind or another. It was almost as if he'd invented the hit.

From this point of his career onward, it seemed as if Ruth either set a record or broke a record hardly anyone had ever even known existed before. Consider this: before Ruth, baseball's all-time career home run leader was Roger Connor with 138, set during a career that lasted from 1880 to 1897, beginning when the ball was still thrown underhanded, but in general, his mark wasn't given much credence. In the so-called modern era, post-1901, the all-time record was held by Cravath with 118. Ruth broke Cravath's mark in 1921, and every single home run he hit thereafter, 596 of them, for a total of 714, set another all-time record. It was a similar situation with nearly every other possible home run record as well. There's nothing else like it in the history of professional sports. All of a sudden, relieved of the burden of pitching and trying to win, and able to focus on hitting for the first time, Ruth could not be stopped. For whatever reason, home runs rained down like raindrops, but the new, improved baseball and another road trip, where he took aim at fences more to his liking than those at Fenway Park, didn't hurt.

One day after Ruth set the modern American League record, the Red Sox went into St. Louis and Ruth cracked two more. Then it was on to Cleveland, where he failed to homer but still managed a long triple, as outfielders seemed to deny reality and reason and kept playing him in too close. A fair number of Ruth's other long hits, doubles and triples, were catchable but floated over the heads of fielders still unwilling to admit he could knock the ball over their heads.

It all took off. In a matter of a few weeks, Ruth had become bigger than the game. In fact, it seemed as if he was changing the game incrementally every day. Baseball was both powerless to stop it and didn't want to. In the finale in Cleveland on August 22, Ruth took exception to a strike called by his old nemesis, umpire Brick Owens, whom he'd famously punched back in the first inning of a game in 1917 when he didn't like the arbiter's calls and was ejected and then suspended. That was the famous game Ernie Shore came on in relief and pitched perfect baseball thereafter.

This time, Ruth wanted to take another crack at Owens. After the call, he stepped out of the batter's box and turned toward Owens, cursing him out and making sure everyone in the ballpark knew it. Owens listened, heard the magic word or two or three, and tossed Ruth from the game.

The Babe exploded, rushing the umpire and pulling his fist back to hit him again. Before he could unleash the punch, however, players from both teams got between the two men and true violence was averted.

Had it been anyone else, the player would have been fined and suspended. Ban Johnson had done that before, and Ruth had to know that another altercation with Owens might prove costly. But this wasn't just any old player, not anymore. This was Ruth, the Babe, and Johnson may not have wanted to risk another legal battle or the ensuing public relations fiasco a Ruth suspension would inspire. Besides, he'd just helped fill up the Cleveland ballpark and Johnson had a piece of the Indians. Ruth was making everyone money. It was a measure of Ruth's power that Johnson laid off, for suspending Ruth would have also struck at Frazee.

Yet Johnson did nothing. The message was clear: Babe Ruth was bigger than the game.