The Selling of the Babe (28 page)

He turned Comiskey down. Taking the player and the money just didn't make much sense. Eventually, much of the money would have to be paid to Jackson in salary, and Joe Jackson wasn't going to make the Red Sox a pennant contender anyway—as a hitter, even Ruth hadn't done that. And if he didn't play well, the Red Sox would be stuck with an underperforming and perhaps tainted star, one who would prove to be a constant reminder, if Ruth succeeded elsewhere, of what might have been.

Still, Comiskey's offer, which some have questioned in regard to its veracity, is likely true. In order to cut a deal with the Yankees, the Red Sox needed another suitor, or else they'd have had little leverage. Fortunately for Frazee, the Giants were in pursuit of St. Louis Cardinals infielder Rogers Hornsby and reportedly offered the Cardinals $70,000 and four players for the future star, who had yet to fulfill his immense potential. If Hornsby was worth more than $70,000 based on potential alone, what about Ruth? Moreover, the fact that the Giants were in the market so aggressively had to be a concern to Ruppert. He was still trying to catch up to his rivals and could not afford to fall further behind.

The question of whether Ruth would have succeeded elsewhere is another question that has rarely been asked about the sale, but had to be the foremost question in the mind of not only Frazee, but also Ruppert. The way each man may have factored that calculation may well have been the deciding factor behind the eventual sale.

This demonstrates the degree to which “the Babe,” the player that Ruth had yet to become, has overwhelmed and overshadowed the player he was at the time. When one looks at Ruth's baseball biography today, the notion that one could doubt his future at the time seems insane. But coming off the 1919 season, even after setting a record, that was not the case. One, as previously noted, Ruth's offense had blown hot and cold over the last two seasons, hitting streaks sandwiched between slumps. He'd hit better when it didn't matter than when it did, he showed absolutely no loyalty to his team, and had proved to be a disruptive presence in the clubhouse. There was no guarantee his prowess at the plate would continue—and given his lifestyle, he showed every sign of being a fast-burning candle. There were already signs his body was starting to betray him; he'd had arm trouble, the wrenched knee he'd suffered in June was a cause of some concern, and he had already put on a great deal of weight. Ruth had already gone from lean and rangy to solid to stout. How far behind were just plain pudgy and then fat?

His performance in 1919 had also been so far outside the norm over the last months of the year, how reasonable was it to think that it would continue? Could it? Had he already reached some imaginary ceiling for hitting home runs that couldn't possibly be reached again or sustained? Jack Chesbro won 41 games in 1904 and no one had come close to that mark since. That sort of thing is common in baseball. Remember, 1918 World Series hero George Whiteman was already back in the minor leagues, and it was only normal to wonder whether Ruth's unexpected, unprecedented explosion could be repeated.

Through 1919, Ruth had hit 49 career home runs, but only 11 in Fenway Park. There, he hadn't often been BABE RUTH—at least not yet, and not for a sustained period. There is every indication, in fact, that had Ruth stayed in Boston and played the bulk of his career in Fenway Park, while he still would have been a record-setting home run hitter for his time, it might have impacted his career home run totals by as much as 25 percent. There's a big difference between 714 home runs and 530 or so. The ballpark, with its distant right field fence, simply did not suit him.

And what if the Red Sox kept Ruth and he deteriorated, got hurt, or became just another guy—after all, even Gavvy Cravath never came close to hitting 24 home runs again. Ruppert had already indicated he'd pay as much as $150,000.00 for Ruth. A wrenched knee, a broken wrist, a car wreck, a case of syphilis, or some scandal could move the decimal point on that number several places to the left and make Ruth worth far less. From Boston's perspective, Ruth might never be worth more. To suggest that ANYONE knew he would become the legendary Babe is utter fantasy. In fact, while there are those who believed he could become the greatest player in the game, or already was, no one dared put any kind of number on that.

Or if Boston was wrong and Ruth sustained his high level of production or even got better, Frazee might also have wondered how he could ever afford to keep paying him. Remember, he was hamstrung by the Boston market, competition from the Braves, a ballpark that he did not own, and the increasingly onerous handicap of not being able to play baseball on Sunday, costing the team perhaps one third of its potential gate. Under any calculation, it was hard to see the Red Sox of the era drawing much more than 600,000 or so fans a year. Had Ruth stayed in Boston and still become BABE RUTH, would the team have been able to pay him what he was worth? What would the team do if he hit 40 or 50 home runs and asked for half of the proceeds? Surround him with refugees from Boston's semipro Park League who all hit .200 and finish last every year? That would be like keeping a hit play in Boston's 500-seat Beacon Theatre instead of taking it to one of New York's 1,200-seat venues; it just made no sense. In fact, it would not be until after World War II, when the Red Sox, with Ted Williams, annually challenged the Yankees for the pennant, that the club would finally draw in excess of one million fans, something the Yankees became the first team to do in 1920.

Boston was a great baseball town, and a rabid one, but a small one, and relatively frugal. Roughly speaking, teams of the era could afford a payroll of perhaps 20 percent of the receipts from their attendance. Just as small market teams today are forced to sell off high-priced talent to wealthier clubs, that's likely what would have happened in Boston. In a sense, it's no accident Ruth ended up in New York; it was just economics.

And there was still one more factor. The recent battle with Johnson had been sparked over Frazee's refusal to suspend a player who jumped the club. The Red Sox and the Insurrectos had prevailed on that, but only because they had all been on the league's three-man board of directors, which allowed them to set the agenda and stretch out the battle until the season had ended, making the question of whether Mays could play moot until the court ruling.

Meanwhile, jumping the team was becoming something of an annual occurrence for Ruth, only now the Insurrectos no longer controlled the board; Johnson and the Loyal Five did. If Ruth jumped the team, what would happen now? He was already claiming that his contract was meaningless, the ultimate challenge to professional baseball. Would Johnson force a suspension, and this time, would one be upheld? How much would that cost? Sending Ruth elsewhere was a way to avoid an almost certain migraine.

Ruppert and the Yankees may have shared some of Frazee's baseball concerns, but they were viewing Ruth more through the lens of his performance at the Polo Grounds, where he was already BABE RUTH and mostly had been for the last two years. They may have been concerned about other issues, but Ruppert, from the time he had made his first offer for Ruth more than a year earlier, had already set those concerns aside. He had little choice. To make it in New York, to topple the Giants, to get his own ballpark, and make enough money to offset the losses the brewery would suffer from Prohibition, he either had to take a chance or sell the club, admit defeat, and do something else with the rest of his money. He could afford to take a chance and acquiring Ruth was the best option he had to build another fortune. Besides, he wasn't going to fail; he was a Ruppert.

Yankees manager Miller Huggins had already given the deal his blessing. When asked by Ruppert what he needed to win a pennant in 1919, Huggins had answered bluntly “Get me Ruth.” He'd seen what Ruth had done in the Polo Grounds, and since taking over as New York manager Huggins had witnessed the birth of the power game. His Yankees were already one of the most potent teams in baseball, and Ruth would only help.

He also knew that if he had Ruth, that meant no one else did. Even if Ruth didn't turn out to be as dynamic as hoped, if nothing else Huggins wouldn't have to worry about playing against him 22 times a year. That's a part of every trade; it's not only what it does for your club but what it does to another. Decades later, when the Yankees acquired Mike Torrez and Luis Tiant as free agents, taking them from the Red Sox was as much a part of their thinking as adding them to the Yankee roster.

Once the Red Sox and Yankees agreed in principle to a deal, they now had to decide how to make that happen, how to structure it to serve the needs of both teams and their owners. Frazee wanted to take advantage of Ruppert's eagerness and willingness to take a risk and get a good return, one that would also help extract him from his current difficulty with Lannin yet still leave his ball club intact, firmly in his control and well positioned to ward off any attacks by Johnson. Ruppert, too, wanted Ruth at almost any cost, and he, too, wanted help against Johnson. Although the Insurrectos had lost out, they knew they'd wounded Johnson and neither man thought for a minute that Johnson would forget that or was through with them. And since both Frazee and Ruppert planned on remaining in the American League, neither man was done trying to get rid of Johnson. They'd lost a major skirmish at the league meeting, but both were ready to go forward and fight again another day.

It's useful to consider what might have happened had the two men
not
made the deal, a question rarely asked, at least in its full dimension. The assumption is often that Ruth would have gone on to hit another 665 home runs for them, and creating a dynasty in the Hub while leaving the Yankees as a second-rate franchise. While that is certainly a possibility, given the events of the 1918 and 1919, and Ruth's recent behavior, there were other, more likely scenarios. Ruth may well have held out well into the spring, then been traded away in anger or jumped the club and causing some kind of protracted legal battle, one that might have cost Frazee his ball club, or sent Ruth to Detroit, or Cleveland. In any case, the entire history of the game may well have been changed. But a scenario that simply supplants a Boston dynasty for one in New York might be the most far-fetched and unrealistic of all, a false equivalency. There were simply too many moving parts, and history is rarely so tidy.

When the two men started talking seriously about the deal, it quickly became primarily a financial discussion. Much has been made of Ed Barrow's later, ghostwritten assertion that when Frazee asked him if there were any Yankees players he wanted in exchange for Ruth, and he responded that “losing Ruth is bad enough, but don't make it tougher on me by making me show off a lot of ten-cent ballplayers that we got in exchange for him. There's nobody on that ball club I want.” If that's true, Barrow was either deluded or already secretly on the Yankee payroll. The 1919 Yankees were better at nearly every position than the 1919 Red Sox and had a number of valuable players who remained productive for several years to come. Pitcher Bob Shawkey was already a star and would put up a WAR of 7.8 and win 20 games in 1920, while first baseman Wally Pipp and second baseman Del Pratt were probably the best two players at their positions in the league, and rookie outfielder Bob Meusel, just purchased from the Pacific Coast League where he hit .337 for Vernon, was one of the best prospects in the game. Any team in baseball would have taken any of them in any kind of deal, and would have been a fool not to. It is also interesting that Barrow frames the deal only in terms of himself, saying “don't make it tougher
on me
” while evincing no concern about either the Boston fans or the performance of the team. If anyone was acting in his own self-interest, it was Barrow.

So who was the bigger fool? Frazee for asking for Barrow's advice, or Barrow, his baseball man? Despite later writing his own revisionist history of events, let's not forget that Barrow initially wanted to keep Ruth on the mound, that his management of the team had been widely and publicly criticized, that he'd taken a world champion into sixth place, and that his failure to rein Ruth in had played a huge part in the demise of the 1919 Sox. Barrow didn't become a genius until he followed Ruth to New York a few years later. There, armed with the money Ruppert made off Ruth, Barrow suddenly got a whole lot smarter. Barrow, acting as the team's general manager, was usually able to outbid every other team for young talent and spend his way out from behind mistakes. That's long been the Yankee way, and it started with Ed Barrow.

Although Ruppert had offered $150,000 or perhaps even more for Ruth in the past, that number wasn't on the table any longer. Prohibition was scheduled to go into effect on January 17, 1920, and he may not have been as eager to part with as much cash as he had been a year or so before. In fact, the way the deal was eventually structured, as a cash payment of $25,000 and a series of $25,000 notes, totaling $100,000, indicates that Ruppert had a bit of a cash flow problem himself. If he lost his lease on the Polo Grounds, he had to be able to move fast.

Regardless of whether they cut a deal or not, Frazee was moving forward anyway in the event the deal fell through. On December 15, he made a formal offer to the Taylors to buy out their shares of Fenway Park for $150,000—$25,000 in cash and three notes payable at one-year intervals. If the Taylors had accepted, that would have given Frazee control of Fenway Park and therefore leverage against Lannin—he would not have needed the mortgage, and may have considered keeping Ruth. But the Taylors turned him down.

The more Ruppert and Frazee talked, the more likely that each realized that one of their problems boiled down to the ballpark issue—neither man owned their own park, and both faced a situation in which they could potentially end up with a team that had no place to play, something that would have forced a franchise sale or the mother of all legal battles. If Frazee didn't pay off Lannin soon, Lannin was threatening to auction off his shares of Fenway. Since the Taylors wouldn't sell, that likely would have put Fenway out of Frazee's reach forever, leaving him to pay rent in a park that was already falling down, making it even more difficult to make money, and hurting the value of the franchise in any subsequent sale.