The Selling of the Babe (25 page)

With only a week left in the season it was Ruth who dominated the headlines, not the upcoming World Series, the only drama remaining whether Ruth would actually hit one more home run and make the record entirely his own. By now, that seemed almost preordained.

And as if the baseball gods were listening, they sent Ruth and the Red Sox to New York, the capital of the world, to demonstrate that he conquered all he saw. In the second game of a doubleheader on September 24, with Yankee fireballer Bob Shawkey helping to provide the fuel, Ruth added an explosive exclamation point to the season. Once again, it came in the ninth. The Red Sox trailed 1–0, and on Shawkey's second pitch, Ruth struck.

Bat hit ball and sent it up, up, and out, over the roof of the grandstand in right, leaving the park between the fourth and fifth flags that adorned the roof and then onto little Manhattan Field, a local park in the Polo Grounds' shadow. The consensus was that it was the longest home run ever hit at the ballpark. It tied the game, and although the Red Sox eventually lost in 13 innings, no one cared. The major league single season home run record, regardless of league or era, was Ruth's and Ruth's alone: 28 home runs. There were no others to break.

Now it was as if Ruth stood back, looked around, and asked if there was possibly any other kind of record he might set with his next home run. The Red Sox went from New York to Washington, where Ruth hadn't hit a home run all season long, the only place he hadn't done so. No major leaguer had ever hit a home run in the same season in every park in the league.

Ruth got it over early this time in ho-hum fashion, in the third inning driving the ball only four or five feet over the right field fence, this time not breaking up a ballgame or crashing through a porch or a window, just a plain old, garden-variety home run. Yet even that was special in its own way. Only a few short years before, every home run hit anywhere over the fence had been the cause of wonder, an anomaly that seemed both a bit magical and accidental at the same time. Now, Ruth had made it both spectacular and commonplace. The notion that there could be “just” an average home run had once been unthinkable, but not anymore.

Thirty was a nice round number, but on the last day of the season Ruth sat on his laurels—sort of. Actually, at the peak of his popularity, he jumped the club, walking out on his teammates, stiffing the fans, and giving everybody who cared about him a big fat raspberry. Right when every eye on the game was trained on him, Ruth told everyone where to get off and thought only of himself. He had been offered a pretty good payday to play an exhibition in Baltimore, so he left. Frazee later lumped it in with his midseason shipyard vacation in 1918 as another example if Ruth's me-first attitude.

Either way, the move was both ballsy and selfish. By playing for another team, Ruth was breaking his contract, and had the Red Sox chose to, they could have caused trouble for him, and so could have Ban Johnson. But for the time being, Ruth was more powerful than all of them put together. He pretty much did what he pleased, and on the last day of the season, on what would have been his final day in a Boston uniform, he ditched everybody, missing a chance to hit home run number 30 to play with a bunch of strangers for money.

That says a lot about just who Ruth was at the time. Nothing was ever enough for him, his appetite in all things never sated, and apart from women and food, nothing drove Ruth like money. For the chance to make a dollar, he'd risk his reputation. Maybe it was insecurity, maybe it was greed, maybe it was childhood poverty, maybe it was ignorance, or maybe it was genius, but there was little Ruth wouldn't do for a check.

For the record, Ruth finished the season with a 9–5 record on the mound, a record better than the way he pitched. At the plate, however, he recorded numbers not yet seen, finishing with a record 29 home runs, and also leading the league in runs with 103, and RBI, with 113, while batting .322, with an OPS of 1.114 and a cumulative WAR, as pitcher and hitter, of 10.2. History tells us that WAR mark was second in the AL only to Walter Johnson of the Senators, who was still proving that pitching was perhaps more valuable than hitting.

It has become something of a cliché to say that had there been an MVP award in 1919, Ruth would have won in a rout, but that's not true, not if one paid attention. The frenzy of record setting in the season's final few weeks masked a thousand ills. The Red Sox finished sixth, 20
½
games behind pennant-winning Chicago, far out of the money, and after April, in which they went 4–1, only in September did the ball club have a winning record. Although the big crowds of the final month of the season helped the bottom line, a contending club for an entire season would have proven even more lucrative.

Ruth had an amazing season—of that there is no doubt and no question. But it was also aggravating. His was an individual accomplishment, with virtually all his production coming after the Red Sox were buried, and long after it could have made a difference in their season. Moreover, it was his failures, early on, that caused the Red Sox so much trouble and strife. If one is going to credit Ruth with the remarkable, it cannot come at the expense of reality, and the truth of the 1919 season is that for all his achievements, Ruth also cost his team a chance at winning another pennant.

Now perhaps that was necessary, an unavoidable consequence of the transformative nature of his game, but when viewed through the lens of exactly where Ruth and the Red Sox were at the end of the 1919 season, before anyone knew what was about to come, it is a not insignificant piece of the puzzle that was still Babe Ruth. Over the past two years, across nine months of regular season play, Ruth had been a spectacular and extraordinary hitter for perhaps four months—six weeks in 1918 and then the last half of 1919. The rest of the time, he had been a troublesome and problematic player of almost average ability, someone who had shown he would leave in a moment's notice for a chance to make a penny more, team be damned.

Babe Ruth was being pulled in two directions, one way by his immense talent, and another way by his various appetites, the dimensions of each not yet known.

It was not yet possible to see which Babe Ruth was to come.

 

7

The Insurrectos

“A rabbit didn't have to think to know what to do to dodge a dog.… The same kind of instinct told Babe Ruth what to do and where to be.”

—
Yankee outfielder Sammy Vick

The regular season may have been over, but for Ruth, the off-season was nearly as important and just getting under way. His name was on every tongue. He had been well-known before, a phenomenon in Boston and a familiar name in baseball, but this was something else again. He was crossing over, like only a handful of athletes before him—the boxer John L. Sullivan, perhaps, into the realm of celebrity, famous far beyond his field. People who didn't give a damn about baseball swooned when they heard Ruth was in the room and craned their necks to get a good look.

It was time to cash in. Ruth and Johnny Igoe, still his de facto manager, were overwhelmed but knew enough to try to cash the checks as quickly as possible. The Spanish flu made it clear that nothing was for certain and anything could happen, and as the Roaring Twenties came into focus, an increasingly fickle public warmed to a celebrity and then forget about them just as fast, moving on to the next big thing at a dizzying rate. He or she who hesitated left cash on the table.

Ruth first embarked on a New England tour with the “Red Sox Independents,” a team featuring himself and other locals, such as Gloucester's Stuffy McInnis and Dave Shean of Winchester. They were supplemented by some lesser talents, minor leaguers and good amateur players, but occasionally by major leaguers such as New York pitcher Bob Shawkey, willing to play a little more baseball for a few dollars to support Ruth in a starring role. The club toured New England—Sanford, Maine; Rutland, Vermont; Beverly, Massachusetts; and others. For most New England fans, the World Series taking place in Cincinnati and Chicago was just another set of games, and with no real way to follow it apart from the newspaper, a set of games in which they had no stake.

Ruth and his squad were the better draw, and the barnstorming series was almost as lucrative for the players as the real World Series. Such exhibition tours alerted the players to the amount of money that was really in the game—when they didn't have to share with management, they didn't have much problem earning big money. Ruth often cleared $500 a game while barnstorming. Most of the time, he satisfied the crowd with a long home run, likely often helped by a side arrangement with the opposing pitcher to make sure Ruth had a chance and received at least a few pitches to his liking. In fact, when he didn't hit a home run, such as in Troy, New York, it produced a headline. No local barnstorming tour to date had ever been more successful. One Boston writer made note of the “barrels of shekels” the ballplayers were earning and further mentioned that Ruth was such a draw that “if the warm weather continues, he can book many more engagements.”

The success of the tour likely played a role in Ruth's next move. He was increasingly dissatisfied with his pay. The three-year deal he had signed before the 1919 season, even though it had been his suggestion, now seemed like a con. He wanted a new deal, and told the press he thought he was worth $5,000 more a year, $15,000.

For the time being, Frazee rolled his eyes. He was used to this by now: Ruth could wait. He had more pressing matters.

The knives were out between him and Johnson. After the league president's humiliation in court in New York, his had been withdrawn, but Johnson could only sharpen the edge. He had Frazee in his sights and fully intended to back him up against the wall and watch him squirm as he slowly stuck the blade into his chest—at least that's what he dreamed. But Frazee would prove to be an elusive and worthy adversary. A lot was happening behind the scenes as each man tried to outmaneuver the other, extract revenge, and survive. There were wheels within wheels and the advantage would change week to week and even day by day as each built alliances and jockeyed for position.

In a sense, the Red Sox were the target of a very unfriendly takeover attempt. Everything Johnson did in regard to Frazee was designed to remove him from the game. And everything Frazee did was designed to keep control of his team and remove Johnson from office. Ruth was just a piece of the property, a pawn in a series of decisions made partially for baseball reasons, partially for political reasons, and partially for financial reasons. One thing can be said for certain—no single reason, no single fact, and no single condition led to the sale of Ruth. To argue otherwise is to deny the reality of the time in favor of the rose-colored glasses of hindsight.

The complexity of the causes has long defied analysis and led many observers to try to reduce the Ruth deal to the simplest possible terms, ending their most elementary and misleading calculation within the conclusion: that Frazee was broke and simply “needed the money,” that he “raped” the franchise due to greed, ineptitude, and dishonesty. The truth is more complicated, but tells a far better and richer story, but one that also happens to be built from facts.

In the simplest possible terms, in the fall of 1919, Frazee's situation was this: He owned the Red Sox but had yet to pay off all his notes to previous owner Joseph Lannin. The team had been purchased on something like the installment plan, and Frazee owed Lannin $262,000 in November of 1919. He did not own Fenway Park—yet. The Taylor family, who owned the
Boston Globe
, had once owned the Sox and built Fenway Park before selling the club to Lannin. They retained ownership of the park, charging Frazee $30,000 a year for a facility that was rapidly deteriorating—the Taylors' own paper reported at the end of the season that the bleachers needed to be torn down and “many of the present seats are in bad shape.” Lannin, too, owned shares of the Fenway stock, as did some of the Taylors' business cronies, and no one was eager to spend their own money to fix up the park. In an ideal world, Frazee wanted to own both Fenway Park and the Red Sox outright. If he did, he would be protected from the reach of Ban Johnson. But he did not, and until he did, he was at risk. He was afraid that Lannin might sell his shares of Fenway, that they would fall into Johnson's hands, and that might force him to sell at an inopportune time, costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Johnson's state of affairs at the time was one almost purely about retaining his own power. Frazee, Ruppert, and Comiskey had all aligned against him, believing that Johnson, acting in his own self-interest, had damaged the value of their franchises and cost them all money. Johnson's goal was to force either Frazee or Ruppert to sell his team, which would enable Johnson to retain control, protect his own investments in the game, and, most importantly, retain his power.

Ruppert, on the other hand, had some cash, for the Yankees turned a profit in 1919, but with Prohibition on the horizon, he was was worried about the future. He, too, was in an onerous ballpark situation, paying exorbitant rent to the Giants for the use of the Polo Grounds. His lease ran only through the 1920 season and he, too, was worried about losing a place to play.

And then there was Joseph Lannin. He was in financial trouble, which is the only reason he had agreed to structure the deal with Frazee the way it had been in the first place, having invested heavily in real estate whose value suffered during the war. He was depending on the payment from Frazee because he was already mortgaged to the hilt to other debtors and had entered into several financial agreements for which he now lacked capital—he needed Frazee's money to buy his way out of debt.

The overall situation was this: Frazee needed to keep his team and oust Johnson, Johnson needed to force Frazee to sell to keep his power, Ruppert needed Frazee's support to find a way to keep his team, and Joe Lannin needed his $262,000.