The Selling of the Babe (45 page)

Major newspapers consulted for this project, virtually on a daily basis, included the
Boston Globe, Boston Post, New York Tribune
(the
Herald Tribune
beginning in 1924), and
New York Times
. Other newspapers that were the subject of more targeted research include the
Boston Herald
(in 1918 known as
Boston Herald and Journal
),
Boston American, New York World, New York Daily News, New York Mirror, New York Sun
,
New York American
and
New York Evening Journal
. I also consulted the weekly S
porting News
during this period and the monthly
Baseball Magazine
. The
Boston Globe, New York Tribune, New York Times,
and
Boston Post
are available online, although much of my earlier research from these sources was conducted from microfilm. The other significant newspaper sources cited can only be accessed through microfilm. I generally used files available at the Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, and my own extensive clip files accumulated over the past thirty years during which time I have been writing and publishing sports history, during which I have also made trips to the library at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. On occasion, other newspaper sources were consulted on
newpaperarchives.com
and
newslibrary.com
.

There is also no substantive, comprehensive archival collection in regard to Babe Ruth consisting of personal letters, journals, etc., that allow us to know, definitively, what Ruth thought or believed about many aspects of his career. Generally speaking, Babe Ruth “collections” consist primarily of memorabilia. As stated elsewhere, Ruth made very few public statements in regard to the period of his life covered by this volume, and most statements of any kind assigned to Ruth were almost always penned by ghostwriters, often with no input from Ruth whatsoever. The writer of history is left to write about Ruth primarily through his on-field acts and in reflection, through the impressions of others. Fortunately, nearly everyone whose life intersected with Ruth formed an impression. The basic details of Ruth's biography were gleaned from the standard Ruth biographies, most prominently Robert Creamer's
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life
and Kal Wagenheim's
Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend
. I found them superior and more useful than either of the other two other substantive Ruth biographies, Martin Smelser's
The Life That Ruth Built
and Leigh Montville's
The Big Bam
.

In combination, three books cover the 1918 season rather completely, Allan Wood's
1918
, Kerry Keene, Ray Sinibaldi, and David Hickey's
The Babe in Red Stockings,
and Ty Waterman and Mel Springer's
The Year the Red Sox Won the World Series
, which is more or less a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. All three were useful. The war between Harry Frazee and Ban Johnson is described in detail in Michael T. Lynch Jr.'s
Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League.
Previously published literature on the New York Yankees that was particularly helpful includes
The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees
by Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz. Oddly enough, no previous books have been written that take as their direct subject the 1918, 1919, and 1920 seasons, when the Dead Ball Era ended and the Lively Ball Era began. The author also accumulated an extensive clip file on Jacob Ruppert and many principal figures with both the Yankees and the Red Sox while researching
Red Sox Century, Yankees Century,
and other historical baseball books.

The Harry H. Frazee Collection is part of the Performing Arts Collection held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The massive collection consists of more than forty linear feet of material—forty-five document boxes, forty-three oversized boxes, and two oversized folders, containing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pages of documents. Apparently sold to the university by the family of a Frazee employee (the university considers its provenance confidential), the collection is both critical to an understanding of Frazee and frustrating. As described in the finding aid, the collection “contains typescript and manuscript plays; actors' sides; scripts and lyric sheets for
No, No, Nanette
and
Yes, Yes, Yvette
; telegrams, letters, cards and other correspondence; orchestra parts, orchestrations, and printed music for
No No Nanette
and
Yes Yes Yvette
; scrapbooks, booking registers, checkbooks, clippings; financial records of productions; real estate papers, bills, financial and theatrical correspondence, taxes, legal documents, contracts for productions, Longacre Theater construction, etc.; checkbooks; accounts, ledgers, photographs, and other papers relating to Frazee's ownership of the American League Boston Red Sox baseball team, 1916–1923; and miscellaneous oversize materials.” Baseball-related material is confined primarily to one document box. Since the provenance of the collection is uncertain, there is no way to determine if what exists is complete or if it was culled or stripped. For that reason, there is no real way to judge the meaning of the incomplete material that remains. For instance, the collection includes Frazee's income tax “worksheets,” but not the returns themselves, ledgers of plays, but not for every production, stock certificates for nearly a dozen corporations created by Frazee, but little information about them. There is hardly any information of a personal nature. Thus it is extremely difficult to reach a definitive conclusion about anything based on the material in the collection, in particular an accurate picture of Frazee's finances, which were never static. For this reason, I have not based my conclusions, particularly in regards to Frazee's finances, solely upon the records found in this collection. Rather, I have used them in context, to inform the circumstantial evidence of Frazee's lifestyle and activities as reported in newspapers, magazines, and other sources over the course of his career.

While researching this book, I spent four complete days in the Ransom Center and personally viewed the contents of every box apart from those that according to the finding aid included only sheet music and theatrical manuscripts. My conclusions are based on this research, the written evidence in period newspaper accounts, and my own thirty years doing historical sports research. It is particularly frustrating that so little of Frazee's corporate records appear to exist, which would provide a fuller dimension of his business career, but even more so that his baseball records are so incomplete. Frazee owned the Red Sox from 1917 to 1923, and it is extremely difficult to come to any definitive conclusion on that time period based on the contents of one single box consisting of perhaps five hundred assorted pages of documents.

The Eugene C. Murdock Baseball Collection at the Cleveland Public Library contains three scrapbooks apparently maintained by Frazee. Unfortunately, two only contain clippings subsequent to the sale of Ruth and a third was apparently stolen and is now listed as missing. In all likelihood, the bulk of Frazee's other financial records were lost or destroyed after his death and the bulk of his records with the Red Sox, like most of the other early historical records of the team, were apparently discarded during the Fenway Park renovation of 1933 and 1934 after the team was purchased by Thomas A. Yawkey. At the time, corporate records of baseball as a business were little valued, and the memorabilia market had yet to exist.

Although the Frazee family and heirs retain little original material pertaining to Frazee, the author did have the opportunity to interview Frazee's grandson Harry a number of years ago, and the family has shared a handful of useful documents, among them the sale agreement detailing Harry Frazee's ultimate purchase of Fenway Park in May of 1920.

Unless noted otherwise, statistics used throughout have been gleaned from
baseball-reference.com
. Yearly and league attendance figures are from
Total Baseball
(third edition). Ballpark information, particularly in terms of dimensions of the major league ballparks mentioned, is from Philip Lowry's
Green Cathedrals
and ballpark data and drawings maintained at
www.andrewclem.com
.

All dialogue in this book is taken from a previously published source, and anything that appears in quotation marks is from a written document. Absolutely no dialogue has been created or invented or surmised, but the reader and research should be aware that in regard to Ruth, particularly in the period covered by this book and before, all statements by Ruth himself should be taken with a grain of salt. At this juncture, it is virtually impossible to determine with any certainty whether Ruth actually spoke any of the words now credited to him. Newspaper reporting at the time rarely quoted players directly, and ghostwriters have always found Ruth a tempting subject to embellish.

The author would like to extend special thanks to the research staffs at the Boston Public Library and Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and researcher Zach Ripple.

Selected Books

Alexander, Charles.
John McGraw
. New York: Viking, 1988.

______
.
Our Game: An American Baseball History
. New York: MJF Books, 1991.

Antonucci, Thomas J., and Eric Caren.
Newspaper Reports About Big League Baseball in the Big Apple: New York Yankees from 1901 to 1964.
Verplanck, N.Y.: Historical Briefs, 1995.

Barrow, Edward Grant, with James M. Kahn.
My Fifty Years in Baseball
. New York: Coward-McCann, 1951.

Benson, Michael.
Ballparks of North America: A Comprehensive Historical Reference to Baseball Grounds, Yards, and Stadiums, 1845 to Present
. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1989.

Caren, Eric.
New York Extra
. Edison, N.J.: Castle, 2000.

Creamer, Robert W.
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Damore, Jonathan.
Hornsby: A Biography
, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004.

Gay, Tim.
Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend
. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons/University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Ginsburg, Daniel E.
The Fix Is In: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals
. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995.

Gutlon, Jerry.
It Was Never About The Babe
: New York, Skyhorse, 2009

Johnson, Richard, ed., text by Glenn Stout.
The Cubs.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

______
.
The Dodgers
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

______. Red Sox Century
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

______. Yankees Century
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Jones, David, ed.
Deadball Stars of the American League
. Dulles, Va.: Potomac, 2006.

Keene, Kerry, et al.
The Babe in Red Stockings
. Champaign, Ill.: Sagamore, 1997.

Levitt, Daniel R.
Ed Barrow
. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2008

Lieb, Frederick.
Baseball As I Have Known It
. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977.

______. The Boston Red Sox
. New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1947.

______
.
Connie Mack: Grand Old Man of Baseball
. New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1945.

Lowry, Philip.
Green Cathedrals
. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Lynch, Michael T., Jr.
Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League
. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008.

Macht, Norman L.
Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball
. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Mack, Connie.
My 66 Years in the Big Leagues
. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1950.

McNeil, William F.
The Evolution of Pitching in Major League Baseball.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.

Montville, Leigh
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth
. New York: Broadway, 2006.

Murdock, Eugene.
Ban Johnson: Czar of Baseball
. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982.

Nash, Peter J.
Boston's Royal Rooters
. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005.

Neft, David S., and Richard Cohen.
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball
. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.

Nowlin, Bill, ed.
When Boston Still Had the Babe
. Burlington, Mass.: Rounder, 2008.

Ritter, Lawrence.
The Glory of Their Times
. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

Seymour, Harold.
Baseball—The Early Years
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

______
. Baseball—
The Golden Age
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Smelser, Martin.
The Life That Ruth Built
. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1975.

Steinberg, Steven, and Lyle Spatz.
The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Stout, Glenn.
Fenway 1912
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Stout, Glenn, ed.
Impossible Dreams: A Red Sox Collection
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Stout, Glenn,
Young Woman and the Sea
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009.

Thomas, Henry W.
Walter Johnson: Baseball's Big Train
. Bison, 1998.