The Original Curse (6 page)

Almost as soon as he turned in his official resignation to the heads of the IL, Ed got the call from Frazee. He answered the telephone to Frazee’s voice saying this: “Say, Ed, I have just selected you as manager of the 1918 Red Sox. Want the job?”

Ed replied: “Well, Harry, I wanted that job ever since I knew Jack Barry couldn’t return. But I was afraid that if I asked for it, you might say, ‘Get out of this opera house.’”
¹

So that was it. Anticlimactic, sure. But he was now Ed Barrow, manager of the Red Sox. He walked out of the lobby of the Hotel Imperial and out of minor-league ball forever. There was a gray chill on Broadway, and Ed looked up 32nd Street to Penn Station. He hoped he was prepared for this.

This is how the devil—or, at least, the greatest boogeyman in the history of baseball curses—once described himself:

Stature
: 5 feet, 7 inches

Forehead
: High

Eyes
: Gray

Nose
: Grecian

Mouth
: Medium

Chin
: Firm

Hair
: Black

Complexion
: Ruddy

Face
: Full, clean shaven

When it comes to Harry Frazee, much is misunderstood, exaggerated, debated, or just plain false. He was wealthy, or he was broke. He was desperate for money to produce a failed musical called
No, No, Nanette
, or
No, No, Nanette
was a hit and came well after the sale of Ruth. He greedily sold players for money, or he made shrewd
transactions that just didn’t work out in the end. And maybe his contemporaries thought he was Jewish and disliked him for it. Maybe not. At least when Frazee filled out an application for a U.S. passport on June 8, 1911, just three weeks shy of his 31st birthday (he is often listed as having been born in 1881, though he wrote 1880 on official documents), there were some definite truths on the record. He was five-foot-seven, with black hair, for example. His nose was, um, Grecian.

Today’s fan knows Frazee as the Red Sox owner who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. That’s true. But he did not, as suggested by popular lore, sell Ruth to support a musical called,
No, No, Nanette
, which came well after the sale of Ruth. Closer timing-wise was the play on which
No, No, Nanette
was based, called
My Lady Friends
, but even in that case there is scant evidence that the sale of Ruth was directly related to the financing of the production. Ironically,
No, No, Nanette
, so despised by Red Sox fans, was a hit more than a year before it reached Broadway—a 1925 review in the
New York Times
said, “It was not difficult last night at the Globe Theatre to understand why ‘No, No, Nanette’ for the last twelve and more months has proved so popular with the natives of Chicago and points West, East, North, South.”
²
Hits were not uncommon for Frazee, a self-made giant of the theater world. Many of his productions were hits, and he owned theaters in Boston, New York, and Chicago. Frazee did sell Ruth. He sold a slew of stars, mostly to the Yankees, and his ownership of the Red Sox undoubtedly caused him financial distress. But there’s no evidence that his motives for selling Ruth were
Nanette
-related, as legend holds.

Frazee liked to spend and wasn’t very responsible with his money. But just how irresponsible he was, and what condition his bank account was in when he sold Ruth in 1920, is a subject of testy debate among baseball historians. Frazee owed money to Joseph Lannin, the team’s previous owner, and Ruth had become a headache who was disruptive to the team and to Frazee’s bottom line—Ruth had gotten into the habit of making exorbitant contract demands. When the Yankees made a reported $125,000 offer to Frazee (some historians say it was actually $100,000), it proved too much to pass up. But was Frazee selling because he thought he could make the team better? Or because he was making a cash grab? If he wanted to make the team better, he could have accepted an offer from the White Sox, who would have given up $60,000 and outfielder Joe Jackson. There are
tax filings showing Frazee was so down on his luck that he reported negative income in 1918,
³
but there is a counterargument that Frazee and other well-heeled men of the day easily found loopholes in the nation’s fledgling income tax system.

Either way, Frazee’s sell-off—though not universally panned by the press—was labeled “the rape of the Red Sox” by writer Burt Whitman, a phrase perpetuated by Fred Lieb’s oft-cited book,
Baseball as I Have Known It
.
⁴
But Whitman and Lieb weren’t the only ones with a negative view of Frazee. “He was money-mad,” Red Sox outfielder Harry Hooper said. “He soon sold most of our best players and ruined the team.”
⁵
Hooper told another interviewer, “I was disgusted. The Yankees dynasty of the twenties was three-quarters the Red Sox of a few years before…. [Frazee] was short of cash and he sold the whole team down the river to keep his dirty nose above water.”
⁶

That view persists. But go back to 1918 and remember that Frazee was seen as well liked (by most), wealthy, and powerful. His passport application is a reminder that Frazee was just a guy—imperfect, but not the embodiment of evil a generation of Red Sox fans would later imagine. Frazee was heading into his second season as owner, a bit stockier than when he had applied for a passport in 1911, and the stress of his business interests no doubt made his face ruddier. Alcohol added to the ruddiness. Irving Caesar, a lyricist, once said, “Harry Frazee never drew a sober breath in his life, but he was a hell of a producer. He made more sense drunk than most men do sober.”
⁷
In a
Baseball Magazine
article, Frazee was described as being, “short, stocky, heavy set … his head is enormous.”
⁸
He was a bundle of energy, always talking, shifting from one task to the next. In the clichéd language of the day,
Baseball Magazine
called Frazee “a sizzling, scintillating live wire.” With an enormous head.

With few other options, Harry matter-of-factly hired Ed to be his manager in February 1918. There was some question about whether Barrow, accustomed to the front office, could handle the job. From Frazee’s perspective, Barrow’s personnel experience was an added benefit. After his first year in the owner’s chair, Frazee decided that, however much fun it was to own a team, he’d prefer to have someone else make player decisions. Someone like Barrow.

It was an odd match. Barrow was a favorite of AL president Ban Johnson, and after Barrow quit the International League that winter
it was Johnson who helped place Barrow with the Red Sox. Frazee wasn’t a likely candidate to be offered—or to accept—favors from Johnson. Though he had been the owner of the Red Sox for only one full season, Frazee already knew that if there was one aspect of owning a baseball team he most disliked, it was dealing with Ban Johnson. The feeling was mutual.

If Frazee remains a controversial figure these days, it’s only fitting, because in his 1918 heyday he was the AL’s most controversial owner—which is to say, simply, that Johnson hated him. As the father of the AL, Johnson ruled his league like a benevolent dictator, though in 1918 his dictatorial grip would begin to weaken. Johnson’s domineering personality helped sustain the AL through hard times, and elder magnates tended to put up with Johnson’s quirks in deference to his past leadership. But Frazee was not an elder magnate. He was young and brash, just 38. When he bought the Red Sox in November 1916, the deal was done strictly between Frazee and Joseph Lannin (the same man who later owned an International League team and nearly came to blows with Barrow). There had been no consultation with Johnson on the sale. That’s just not how things were done in the AL. Everything went through Johnson. Within two days of the sale to Frazee, an article in the
Boston Globe
said Johnson was already wondering if the deal should be undone. The tone was set for a contentious relationship.

It was contentious, and eventually Johnson and Frazee became the bitterest of enemies. But they weren’t yet enemies in 1918, and Johnson’s fondness for Barrow outweighed his disdain for Frazee. Johnson even manipulated his league’s rosters to benefit Frazee’s club—which, Johnson already knew, would be Barrow’s club too. Frazee, like Weeghman, saw the 1918 season as an opportunity and was a buyer. That winter word spread that Frazee had wagered $2,000 against $12,000 that the war would be over by the time baseball began its season in the spring.
⁹
Even if the war persisted, Frazee thought Americans would attend ball games. “People must be amused,” Frazee said. “They must have their recreation despite the grim horrors of war.”
¹⁰

Connie Mack, manager of the Athletics, was a seller. The day after Weeghman traded for Alexander and Killefer, the Red Sox made a blockbuster purchase at the AL meetings in Chicago, facilitated by Johnson. Frazee laid out $60,000 and sent off three players for speedy outfielder Amos Strunk, catcher Wally Schang, and pitcher “Bullet Joe” Bush. At the same time, Mack and Frazee arranged for the trade of another star, first baseman Stuffy McInnis—the pride of Gloucester High, just 35 miles north of Boston—for cash and players to be named, though that trade did not become official until the middle of January. Mack’s once-proud A’s were gutted. The demolition job done on Philadelphia’s AL team ranked only with Baker’s crushing of the NL’s Phillies.

After being traded from the A’s, Stuffy McInnis (left) prepares to sign his contract, with Red Sox owner Harry Frazee (middle) and former manager Jack Barry seated with him. (N
ATIONAL
B
ASEBALL
H
ALL OF
F
AME
L
IBRARY
, C
OOPERSTOWN
, N.Y.)

Writing about the deal in the
Daily News
, Reichow speculated, two months in advance, “This may sound odd to those who know the wrangle that Johnson and Frazee have had for several months, but … this deal, it is said, was engineered by Johnson, who wanted to help Mack out financially and make it possible for him to find a place for Barrow in Boston.”
¹¹
Reichow was right about Barrow. Other AL clubs grumbled. Yankees owner Colonel Jake Ruppert claimed he would have outbid Frazee for Strunk, Schang, and Bush, but he hadn’t been told the players were for sale. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was “not overjoyed” when the announcement was made and “intimated that he should have at least been given a chance to bid for the services of the three players.”
¹²

Both Frazee and Weeghman believed that boosting their rosters made sense because the war in Europe would soon end. But there were significant differences in their motivation to stock their teams for the 1918 season. The Cubs were buyers because the team was coming off two disappointing seasons. Boston, though, was a very good team in 1917, finishing with 90 wins, second only to the White Sox. Before that, Boston had won back-to-back championships. But where the Cubs had been virtually untouched by the war, the Red Sox roster had been slashed. Barry, manager and second baseman, took a soft job with the naval reserves. Star outfielder Duffy Lewis, a .302 hitter, and pitcher Ernie Shore, who had gone 13–10 in 1917, were gone to naval jobs too. In all, 11 Red Sox were in some branch of the military. Frazee added players thinking he would get Barry, Duffy, Shore, and the rest back when the war ended, possibly before the season started, leaving the Red Sox with one of the greatest rosters in baseball history.

The off-season was baseball’s busiest on record, but Frazee and Weeghman made the biggest splashes—for better or worse. Weeghman was given harsh public scoldings by NL owners that winter, and Frazee, too, was criticized. A
New York Times
editorial stated: “[Weeghman and Frazee] have stirred up no end of commotion in the two major leagues by starting out to monopolize the two pennants next season. Baseball club owners of the past never knew the methods in accord with which these two owners have started out to buy players who can land them a pennant at any cost.”
¹³

They were buying at any cost, but for what were they buying? No one could even say for sure whether there would be a 1918 season. Since the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, baseball had struggled to find its place in a mobilized nation. The game attempted to ingratiate itself to the public with patriotic displays. Johnson had players spend their pregames conducting military drills, using bats instead of Springfield rifles. Magnates bought Liberty Bonds, making sure the papers knew about it. Teams hosted endless military parades and Red Cross benefits. From the war’s outset, America frowned on slackers, and baseball did its best to avoid the label.

But the game’s magnates got mixed signals from the government. In May 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, making all single men between the ages of 21 and 30 (inclusive, which is why the draft age is sometimes listed as 21 to 31) first in line to be drafted.
That made players prime targets. It was a tenuous situation. Nobody wanted to see baseball shut down, but how could a league be run when its best players could be called to war at any moment? And how could the frivolity of sport be reconciled with the reality of war? The
Tribune
soberly summed up the situation in May 1917: “An American newspaper will sacrifice a great deal of self-respect if it has to print, or does print, box scores and casualty lists in the same issue.”
¹⁴