"I Can't Turn That Down"

Babe Ruth Becomes a Yankee

The day that would change the course of baseball history wasn't launched by a thundering home run, a bases-clearing triple, or even a bunt to advance the runners. Kicking things off was a bloop single of sorts--actually, a telephone call.

Answering the telephone at his Riverside Drive home on the Upper West Side in New York City that Sunday morning in December 1919 was one Ed Barrow, manager of the Boston Red Sox, who was about to step into the shower. On the other end was Harry H. Frazee, Broadway impresario turned Red Sox owner, with instructions for Barrow to meet him that evening in the bar of the Hotel Knickerbocker. Frazee had something important to discuss.

That night at the bar, Frazee wasted little time getting to the point. "Simon," Frazee told Barrow, who was nicknamed "Simon Legree" for his hard-nosed ways and strict discipline he demanded from players, "I'm going to sell Ruth to the Yankees. My shows on Broadway aren't going so good. [Yankee owners] Ruppert and Huston will give me over $100,000 for Ruth and they've also agreed to lend me $350,000. I can't turn that down."

It was an astounding decision. Babe Ruth was the Red Sox's best player, and in 1919 he had put together a season for the ages--an unheard-of 29 home runs and a hefty .322 batting average in only 130 games, more than justifying Barrow's decision the season before to turn Ruth, one of the game's best pitchers, into an everyday player.

Barrow was stunned. "You think you're getting a lot of money for Ruth, but you're not," he told Frazee.

But Frazee's mind was set, and on December 26 the deal with the Yankees was consummated. Ten days later, on January 5, 1920, the deal was announced, and the headlines in the next day's newspaper blared the news that Ruth was the new Yankee right fielder. The final sale price was $125,000, the highest amount ever paid for a ballplayer, and more than double the previous record of $57,500 paid by Cleveland to the Red Sox for Tris Speaker in 1916. The acquisition not only strengthened the New Yorkers in their weakest department, hitting, but according to Yankee pitcher Bob Shawkey virtually assured the pennant -- something the Yankees hadn't been able to win in all of their frustrating, underperforming sixteen-year history. "Ruth was such a sensation last season that he supplanted the great Ty Cobb as baseball's greatest attraction," gushed the New York Times , "and in obtaining the services of Ruth for next season the New York club made a ten-strike." The Daily News agreed: "Col. Jacob Ruppert and Colonel T. L. Huston can use Ruth very well. . . . [They] will feature him as a box office attraction, of course, and if his record is as good this season as it was last the investment was well worthwhile."

On and on the New York papers went about the havoc that the left-handed-swinging Ruth could wreak in the relatively short 256-foot right field of the Yankees' home park, the Polo Grounds. On and on they went about the truly wondrous season the 25-year-old Baltimore native had enjoyed in 1919. Just as wondrous was the strange arc of Ruth's career--he had started as a pitcher and developed into the lefty mainstay of the Red Sox's 1916 and 1918 World Series championship teams, before his 11 home runs in 1918 gave a hint of the power hitter than lurked within.

The Yankees had pulled off the sports steal of the century. Its genesis was in the friendship of Frazee with Yankee co-owner Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston, mercifully known as "Cap," a reference to his onetime military rank. The two men shared not just many a barstool, but also an office on West 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan. Cynics have even suggested that Barrow himself may have played a role in the deal, since less than a year later he would join the Yankees as general manager, and judging by the Boston-to-New York player shuttle pipeline that seemed to emerge whenever Frazee wanted to fund a new show.

The most common version of the story is that in October 1919, after the Yankees had finished a respectable third in the American League race, Huston's fellow co-owner, Jacob Ruppert, asked Yankee manager Miller Huggins what the team needed to produce a champion. The diminutive, blunt-talking, acid-tongued Huggins, who never backed down from anything, didn't this time either: "Get Ruth from Boston," he said, explaining that Frazee was in desperate need of cash to pay for his Broadway shows.

Huggins's idea wasn't as preposterous as it seemed. On his mind was recent history, namely a Yankees{-}Red Sox dispute from the year before that caused considerable turmoil and put Frazee in a dealing kind of mind. In the second inning of a July 13, 1919, game against the White Sox, Boston pitching ace Carl Mays stormed off the field in anger over his teammates' sloppy fielding, which Mays figured had caused him to lose several tight games. Mays not only left the mound, he jumped the team, taking off on a prolonged Pennsylvania fishing trip and vowing to never again play for the Red Sox.

While Red Sox management figured out how to respond, several teams, including the Yankees, made offers for Mays. American League President Ban Johnson warned Boston not to make a deal until Mays rejoined the team, but Frazee went ahead and sold Mays anyway--to the Yankees for $75,000 and two pitchers, Bob McGraw and Allen Russell. Johnson hit the ceiling and suspended Mays, and ordered the Yankees not to use him. But Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert got a court order restraining the league president from interfering, and pitched Mays anyway, eroding Johnson's authority and standing. The squabbling intensified--growing so acrimonious that Frazee, Ruppert and Huston, and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey strongly considered leaving the American League to join the Nationals. Early in 1920, Ruppert got Mays reinstated, with damages, and he joined the Yankees for good.

In fact, Mays was only one of several Red Sox who became Yankees over the next decade. In constant need of cash to fund his shows, Frazee discovered a quick solution to financial problems: sell his players to the Yankees. Swapped for cash from Boston to New York in 1918 and 1919 were pitchers Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard and outfielder Duffy Lewis. In the 1920s, other Boston players like Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, and Everett Scott would be shipped to New York and become big Yankee contributors.

So when Huggins journeyed up to Boston to see Frazee about Ruth, "it was like dispatching someone to a supermarket with a bundle of cash," as Ruth biographer Kal Wagenheim wrote. Set the price at $125,000, Huggins suggested to Ruppert, and Frazee would "begin talking." Ruppert was floored. "Who ever heard of a ballplayer being worth $125,000 in cash?" he wondered aloud. But Huggins was emphatic: line Ruth up and with that short right-field porch at the Polo Grounds he'll hit 35 home runs, maybe more.

Not quite 40 years old, H. Harrison Frazee was a young man with an itch to make it big--quickly. He had come to baseball in roundabout fashion, working in his native Peoria as a bellhop before moving to Chicago to run the Cort Theater. Landing in New York, he moved into a plush Park Avenue apartment and set his sights on Broadway--buying the Longacre Theater, producing his own shows, and even promoting heavyweight prizefights.

His 1916 purchase of the Red Sox at the age of 36 from Joe Lannin made the fast-talking, moon-faced Frazee big-league baseball's youngest owner--giving him another way to be in the midst of things. To meet the steep $675,000 Red Sox price tag, Frazee and his two partners--Hugh Ward and G. M. Anderson, both of whom ignored baseball--agreed to pay half in cash and the rest in the form of notes, which put Frazee in an immediate financial bind.

To raise the rest of the money, Frazee turned to Broadway, where he needed to produce hits. One was the 1916 smash comedy Nothing But the Truth , and a year or so later came another success, Leave It to Jane , with words and music by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse. For a while anyway, the strategy worked, as the money poured in and Frazee brought good players and championships to Boston. Led by Hall of Famers like Speaker and Harry Hooper in the field and Ruth and Carl Mays on the mound, the Sox took two World Series titles in his first three years of ownership.

In those days, Frazee spent freely, wheeled and dealed, and was rewarded accordingly. Regarded warily at first by Boston's hard-core fans and writers, he won praise from both when, after the 1916 World Series triumph, he offered the Senators $60,000 for pitcher Walter Johnson, although even for that price Washington owner Clark Griffith wasn't about to unload his franchise player. Trading Speaker after the 1916 season to the Indians would prove a mistake, as Tris raised his batting average in 1917 by 64 points to .386 to take the A.L. batting title. But even that move was softened when, with several players on military duty in Europe, Frazee swiftly brought to Boston frontline stars such as Stuffy McInnis, Amos Strunk, Wally Schang, and Bullet Joe Bush, who all became crucial parts of Boston's Series winners in 1918.

Frazee endeared himself to Bostonians in other ways too. When the rest of baseball's National Commission received the "play or fight" order of 1918, it was Frazee who led a drive to postpone the order from July to September to get in as much of a regular, 154-game schedule as possible. Along the way, he urged his American League owner comrades to raise money for the war effort with proceeds donated to the Red Cross. Frazee even tried more than once during the1918 season to organize a real "World" Series--that is, to take it to Europe as entertainment for American troops. But the idea stalled.

So just why Frazee needed cash in 1919--and large infusions of it quickly--is still, more than 80 years later, a bit of a mystery. The common explanation is that he needed to finance his new play, No No Nanette , but that play did not open until 1924 at a Frazee-owned theater in Chicago, and only reached Broadway in 1925. The play hit the jackpot, bringing some stability to Frazee's fortunes--but that was two years after he had sold the Red Sox and left the chronic financial uncertainty of baseball life.

A more likely explanation is that in late 1919, Frazee was still heavily in debt to previous Red Sox owner Joe Lannin. On buying the team in 1916, Frazee had paid Lannin $262,000, but less than a month after Ruth arrived in New York, Lannin's attorneys went to court, asserting that Frazee owed Lannin $125,000--ironically, the same amount Frazee had received for Ruth--which had been due the previous November. Frazee countered by stating he owed only $60,000, which he said he would pay "anytime Lannin is willing to concede . . . the amount that is due." The case appeared to be headed for the courts, but the two settled their differences away from public scrutiny.

Even so, Harry Frazee would go to his grave known to the world as the man who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees.

Stepping off the train in Los Angeles on a barnstorming tour following the 1919 season, Babe Ruth professed his interest in the movies. But when reporters questioned him about it, he demanded an immediate payment of $10,000 before he would even set foot on a set, a statement that did not endear him to the local Hollywood crowd. And if that wasn't enough, the Babe even took a swipe at the weather, proclaiming it wasn't quite the kind he liked. Not a good start.

Things didn't improve at the ballpark. In Los Angeles, Ruth was booed after striking out twice, doubling, and hitting no home runs. By the time he and the other barnstormers reached Oakland on November 10, rumors were rampant that Ruth was ready to leave baseball for a boxing career, of all things, fueled by the persistent story that the Babe was about to sign up for a title fight against heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, who he had met in Hollywood.

If Harry Frazee had clearly mastered the art of spin control, Babe Ruth in late 1919 was a man in dire need of a lesson in how not to offend. Before Ruth even became a Yankee, he had decided after the 1919 season to hold out for more money from the Red Sox. The holdout coincided with Ruth's November arrival in Los Angeles, which attracted enormous local interest. Stepping from the train, the Babe proclaimed himself ready for some rest and relaxation by combining golf with barnstorming baseball against Pacific Coast League teams as a member of White Sox third baseman Buck Weaver's all-star team.

Thanks to his major-league record 29 home runs in 1919, the Babe was the biggest story in baseball; in less than two years as a full-time batter he had shattered the big-league home run record. His star just rising, Ruth was already displaying an interest in being in the movies.

Meanwhile, the Boston papers continued to hurl unflattering publicity at Ruth, painting him as an overpaid ingrate. The stories, no doubt fueled by Frazee, focused on Ruth's gigantic earnings from the year before, including one report stating that the Babe's income in 1919 was substantially greater than his $10,000 salary--in itself among baseball's highest. In addition to straight salary, according to the Herald , Ruth received on top of his salary a $5,000 gift from Frazee in September at Babe Ruth Day at Fenway, another $2,500 for playing in two exhibition games in October, and $10,000 as a member of Weaver's all-stars.

In Oakland, Ruth only fueled the fires, telling the Sporting News that "a player is worth just as much as he can get," and used Ty Cobb as an example of someone who "has been paid all that he is worth." That, in turn, riled the surly Cobb, who promptly labeled Ruth a "contract violator" for holding out. Ruth then challenged the cantankerous Detroit star to a fight, saying he'd "lick [him] on sight" if given the chance. "I wouldn't say anything against Cobb if he held out for $100,000, [so] why should he say anything about me?" Ruth said. "He ought to be tickled to see any player get as much as he can. I'll settle the question when I meet Cobb."

On it went, with media on both coasts lapping it up and the Sporting News in late November reporting that the Babe's holdout was "more serious . . . than is generally believed in the East." From the way Frazee and others were making it sound, Babe Ruth was more trouble than he was worth.

"I still can't believe what I saw," an aged Harry Hooper said, looking back at the phenomenon of Babe Ruth. "A 19-year-old kid, crude and poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth, and the symbol of baseball the world over. [He was] a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since."

Suffice it to say that the Babe Ruth sold to the Yankees in early 1920 was closer in spirit to the coarse 19-year-old than the superstar later worshiped by a nation. Only six years removed from the dismal Baltimore orphanage that served as his childhood home, Ruth was a pop psychologist's dream--a young man of 25 who was very intent on making up for lost time. "When they let him out," a teammate once said, "it was like turning a wild animal out of a cage."

For the young Babe Ruth, life was all about satisfying an insatiable appetite--devouring vast quantities of food and drink, having sex as much as possible, and driving faster, staying up later, and hitting a baseball farther than anyone else. Lord, how he could hit a baseball, swinging so hard that when he connected, one said, "it was like two billiard balls, like a sound of solid things crashing together."

Given what Ruth accomplished as a Yankee, it's hard to fathom how good he'd become in Boston. Here's how good:

•  Signed in 1914 out of St. Mary's School by Jack Dunn of the International League's Baltimore Orioles, Ruth made an outstanding impression in spring training that year. Playing in an intra-squad game in Fayetteville, North Carolina , on March 7, Ruth smacked a ball, as Roger Pippen of the Baltimore News-American put it, "that will live in the memory of all who saw it. . . . The ball carried so far to right field that he walked around the bases."

•  Four months later, Ruth was in the big leagues as a Red Sox pitcher. The next year, 1915, he went 18{-}8 with a 2.44 ERA, and served notice of things to come by belting four home runs, his first coming on May 6 off Jack Warhop of the Yankees at the Polo Grounds. Four home runs may not seem like a lot, but in 1915 the rest of the Red Sox hit ten; A.L. leader Braggo Roth hit seven. Ruth's slugging prowess was already apparent.

•  By 1916, Ruth was the best left-hander on baseball's best team, going 23{-}12 with a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts. That fall in the World Series against Brooklyn, Ruth gave up a run in the first inning, drove in the tying run himself, and then held the Robins scoreless for 13 innings until his team scored the winning run in the 14th.

•  In 1917, Ruth's record was 24{-}13 with a 2.01 ERA, nine shutouts, and 35 complete games.

•  In 1918, he tied the A's Tilly Walker for the home run title with 11, batted .300, and pitched the Red Sox to two wins against the Cubs in the World Series while setting a record for postseason consecutive scoreless innings that lasted for 43 years. Remarkably, he pitched his final game against the Cubs with a badly bruised knuckle on the middle finger of his pitching hand--the very finger a pitcher needs for control.

Ed Barrow recognized that for all Ruth's prodigious talents on the mound, the Babe could be of more value with his bat. On April 4, 1919, in a spring training game at the old fairgrounds in Tampa against John McGraw's Giants, Ruth cracked what Barrow called many years later "the longest home run in history." Batting in the second inning against "Columbia George" Smith, so named for the university he had attended--rare was the big leaguer who attended college in those days--Ruth sent a pitch high over the right-center-field wall, far above right fielder Ross Youngs's head, clear out of the fairgrounds and into a neighboring hospital yard. After the game, as Youngs stood where the ball fell, a group of writers watched as somebody dug up a surveyor's tape and measured the distance to home plate--579 feet.

Ruth had become a slugger--continuing to hit moon shots and acquiring all the quirks, mannerisms, and swagger of a home run hitter. He always used the same dark ash wood bat, carrying it on and off the field himself and not letting anyone, even the clubhouse boy, so much as touch it. Like Shoeless Joe Jackson, the marvelous White Sox hitter whose swing Ruth said he emulated, Ruth would coat his bats with tobacco juice and lovingly pat them before lugging one up to home plate and bashing another long hit.

One day, when Harry Hooper asked Ruth to lend him the bat once he was finished with it, Ruth replied, "I will like hell. I'll keep this baby as long as I live." But a few weeks later the bat cracked, and after the game Ruth tried to repair it using a hammer, tiny nails, and tape. A few days later, when he was called out on a third strike, Ruth became so indignant that he slammed the bat like an axe on home plate, cracking it beyond repair.

Ruth turned and walked back toward the dugout, his eyes still "blazing" with anger, Hooper would say years later. In the dugout after a few minutes of silence, Hooper again brought up the bat.

"Babe, how about that bat?" he asked.

"Take the son of a bitch," Ruth said. "I don't want to see it as long as I live!"

Hooper took the bat, held onto it, and with a noble sense of history, donated it decades later to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

If you think that Ruth's sale generated excitement in New York, double it and you have an idea of how the news hit Boston that frosty Monday in early January 1920. For the city's loyal baseball fans, news of the sale struck with the force of a New England nor'easterner.

The city's relationship to its Red Sox was deep, intense, occasionally complicated, and very much subject to the state of the American League pennant race at the moment. A charter A.L. member in 1901 and winners of the first World Series in 1903, the Red Sox--known as the Pilgrims until 1916--attracted a large and passionate fan base, whose core were a particularly rabid gang of supporters called the Royal Rooters. The Rooters had evolved from the Winter League as a group of Boston businessmen who would leave their offices to rush out to the Sox's home park, the Huntington Grounds, after work, remove their ties and hats, and play baseball till dark. And leading the Rooters in revelry was a Boston saloonkeeper right from central casting with a name to match--Michael T. "Nuf Said" McGreevy. Not that 'Nuf Said exactly ran a shot-and-beer joint; he was an important political figure himself, and ran the main meeting place for Boston's key government and sports figures. McGreevy became the final arbiter of all debates, and people turned to him for his opinion. Once he ruled, that was that. 'Nuf said.

The Red Sox typically drew twice the crowds that their poor crosstown cousins the Braves drew, even in 1914, when the team dubbed the "Miracle Braves" inexplicably took the pennant and swept the heavily favored Philadelphia A's in the World Series. Although the years 1917 and 1918 were hard on attendance at all big-league parks, in 1919 the Sox drew reasonably good crowds, with 417,000 spectators traveling to Fenway Park, not as many as they had earlier in the decade, but more than Washington and St. Louis. Clearly, Boston loved its Red Sox.

By 1920, Boston had 11 daily newspapers, most of which devoted sizable space and resources to keep its citizens abreast of baseball doings. In a world where baseball on the radio was still two years away, television was a generation away, and thankfully there was no such thing as yet called sports talk radio, newspapers generated the most accurate gauge of a community's feelings.

As in New York, those feelings generated a swift and passionate response to the sale of Babe Ruth. Whereas the Ruth deal is today recognized as the most lopsided sports transaction in history--the one that Red Sox fans cite as the start of a curse against their team, the reason they have not won a World Series since--the initial reaction was curiously mixed.

To one side were the naysayers, the ones who asked, "What in the world could Harry Frazee be thinking?" At the Suffolk Athletic Club, just north of Boston, men "groaned, hissed, and booed" on hearing news of the deal. An editorial in the January 6 Boston Post summed up the collective thoughts of many: "Cy Young and Tris Speaker went their ways, much to the disgust of the faithful, but the club did not suffer materially. But Ruth is different. He is of a class of ballplayers who flash across the firmament once in a great while. . . . During the past 20 years there have been three great superstars--Wagner, Cobb, and Ruth. Wagner stayed with Pittsburgh. . . . Cobb will never play except for Detroit. Money could not buy these two men. But Boston with Ruth is another story."

In the Boston Evening American , Nick Flatley wrote that the Red Sox had "lost the greatest drawing card the game has ever known, and the esteem of many of thousands of supporters." Calling Ruth "a bird [who] hops into the picture once in a lifetime," Flatley predicted the quick demise of a Ruth-less Red Sox and the prompt elevation of the Yankees into pennant contention.

In the Herald , cartoonist Franklin Collier penned a cartoon showing "for sale" signs on the Boston Public Library, the Boston Common, and Paul Revere's statue. Herald columnist Bob Dunbar wrote that Red Sox fans were "astonished and staggered" at the news, adding that "the departing of Ruth . . . is regretted by all."

But not all , at least not then. The Boston Evening Transcript got solidly behind Frazee, writing that there was "remarkable unanimity of opinion that the Red Sox made a good deal in disposing of the home run hitter."

"Nearly everyone agrees that Ruth is too big to stay in Boston," the Evening Transcript concluded, obviously not speaking to members of the Suffolk Athletic Club. "Red Sox players doubtless will be pleased with the disposal of the incorrigible slugger."

In the Globe , James O'Leary stood solidly behind Frazee, stating, "It is hard to see how [he] could have turned down New York's offer for [Ruth], and it looks as if he had made a good bargain." O'Leary continued his rant in the January 15 edition of the Sporting News by summarizing what he called Frazee's "many convincing points" in selling Ruth. "When it began to look as if Ruth regarded himself as bigger than the Boston club, bigger than the game itself, Frazee made up his mind that there would have to be a change, in order to avoid more serious trouble in the future."

Matching the mixed response were baseball people themselves. Supporting Ruth were two of his former Red Sox managers, Bill Carrigan and Jack Barry. Carrigan said Ruth was nowhere "near the hard proposition to handle that he was made out to be," forgetting perhaps that he had ordered Ruth to room next door to him on road trips and that he had even designated infielder Heinie Wagner as Ruth's chaperone. Barry called Ruth "the most willing member of my team," stating that any problems with him stemmed from the ballplayer wanting to pitch too much.

But backing the move was retired Boston Braves hero Hugh Duffy, who claimed that "no matter how great a star [Ruth] is, he hurts a team if he does not fit in with his fellow players." In hindsight, Duffy may have been siding with Boston ownership with an eye to his future; indeed, Frazee would hire him to manage the Red Sox in 1921.

How curious that so many of Frazee's defenders focused on Ruth's behavior. He was bigger than the team and "incorrigible," they wrote. Suffice to say that Frazee's defenders were the victims of an old-fashioned game of spin control launched by the Red Sox owner himself.

With the January 5 announcement of the deal, Frazee shrewdly orchestrated a blunt, one-man public relations campaign, which he kicked off by proclaiming that Ruth's wayward ways had left him no alternative but to get rid of the star slugger. Frazee did so by explaining his reasons in a 1,500-word statement that was printed in the Post.

"Twice within the past two seasons, Babe has jumped the club and revolted," Frazee wrote. "He refused to obey the orders of the manager and he finally became so arrogant that discipline in his case was ruined. . . . He had no regard for the feelings of anyone but himself. He was a bad influence upon other and still younger players."

His comments came as Ruth demanded that his three-year contract for $10,000 a year be doubled to $20,000 a year in 1920. Reportedly, Ruth was basing his demand on the way that Carl Mays had walked out and put into motion the events that got him traded to the Yankees, where he received a substantial salary increase. If Mays, the surly submarine pitcher, could do it, the Babe figured he could too, reasoned the Herald . Citing a source "close to Ruth," the paper wrote that the Babe "based this astounding action on the belief that he is doing himself an injustice not to better himself in any way possible."

Frazee had a real advantage in the war of words: logistics. Ruth was on the West Coast on a prolonged golfing and barnstorming vacation, giving the Red Sox owner the ability of firing the opening salvo in what became weeks of venomous, back-and-forth accusations. In the days after the announcement, Frazee grew increasingly defensive, revealing how wounded he was personally by Ruth's way of life. "Out there on the West Coast, I could have prevented him from playing a single game as his contract signed by him gives me that right. But I allowed him to play unmolested. Then he sends me back his contract in an envelope without a scrap of writing for explanation. This is just a sample of how Ruth respects his written word and his obligations."

Even Ruth's conditioning became an issue. "Ruth is taking on weight tremendously," Frazee said. "He doesn't know how to keep himself in shape. . . . He has floating cartilage in his knee . . . that may make him a cripple at any time and put him out of baseball."

Harry Frazee had mastered the essentials of Pubic Relations 101. Nowhere was there mention of his severe cash-flow problems, which had triggered the big transaction. He had essentially thrown the focus away from himself and spread the notion that Ruth's behavior had left him little choice beyond unloading the star. He had done away with Ruth while the star vacationed. But it was Ruth who would have the last laugh.