The Selling of the Babe (40 page)

The Yankees earned a pretax profit of $666,000, as home ticket receipts increased by a half million dollars to $864,830 and road receipts tripled to $273,000. League-wide, the men who owned baseball probably grossed at least an extra $2 million in 1920, all because of Ruth. For that, Ruth was paid $20,000.

And that wasn't the half of it.

The sale of the Babe to the Yankees not only resulted in selling an entire city on Ruth, but an entire nation, as fans of the sport embraced an entirely new game, played a new way, for a new reason. Just as the Babe would take the title as the King of All Sluggers (or depending on your taste, the Bambino, the Big Bam, the Sultan of Swat, Behemoth of Bust, Maharajah of Mash, Wazir of Wham, Rajah of Rap, or the Caliph of Clout), his signature accomplishment, the home run, was now the one single play that brought fans out to the ballpark. It was what kept them talking about the game and reading the papers afterward, and that lit the fires of the Hot Stove League all winter long.

Moreover, he fired the imagination, and expanded the capacity of dreams, of possibilities. After seeing Ruth, all things seemed possible.

Babe Ruth had delivered in every possible way.

The Yankees and Giants still wanted to play a city series, salivating at the financial returns, but Ban Johnson still had some pull. And he had not forgotten.

While Ruth was distracting most of the baseball public, the festering rumors over the 1919 World Series came to a head. A grand jury was convened in Chicago to investigate. One day before the end of the season, on September 28, Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte confessed. In another month, indictments would be handed down.

Baseball was already nervous. Rumors of scandal were everywhere. National League president John Heydler, speaking for the National Commission, let it be known that the three-man group, including Johnson, would not authorize any plans for a city series between the Yankees and Giants, even one that featured Babe Ruth. They would, he said, block any attempt to hold such a “money-making scheme.”

 

Epilogue:

Closing the Sale

In every possible way but a pennant, Ruth's first season had been a resounding success. It was already hard to imagine George Ruth before Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth before the Babe, the Yankees, and even New York or the game of baseball before the Babe. He and the sport were now synonymous, the game's history cleaved in two, the Dead Ball Era and the present.

Ruth was also synonymous with one more thing—money. And since organized baseball would not authorize a city series, Ruth did the next best thing and went barnstorming, putting a team together with his old Boston teammate Wally Schang and Carl Mays, the inclusion of the pitcher a macabre attraction in the wake of Chapman's death. At the same time, while he toured the Northeast and New England, he was “writing” an account of the World Series between the Indians and Brooklyn for the newspapers. A minor scandal broke out when one reporter had the audacity to reveal that Ruth, in fact, was nowhere near the World Series, hadn't seen an inning, and was barely following it at all. “Babe is apparently as good a long distance reporter as he is a long distance hitter,” wrote the
Times
.

Then Ruth ended up back in court—over money. He hadn't received the $35,000 he was still due for
Headin' Home
and was ticked off. He went to court and sued for the remaining amount. However, he also got some bad advice and had a restraining order taken out prohibiting the showing of the film, which had long since left Madison Square Garden for much more modest theaters.

Ruth would eventually become a victim of both Hollywood accounting and his own naïveté. Shutting down the picture cut off any possible source of income from the film. Prohibited from showing the film, the company that produced the picture folded, leaving Ruth only a bounced check and a fat legal fee. Outside the batter's box, he was still a rube. Bad advice was proving ever more costly.

He hurt his wrist sliding during a game in Oneonta, New York, and reports suggested he'd broken a small bone, but he still hit a home run. He probably should have sat out the rest of the off-season but the lure of the sun, and the dollar bill, proved too strong. He finished the barnstorming tour, laughed off the story about the broken wrist, and went into business with Giants manager John McGraw, money bringing the rivals together.

Only a year before, McGraw had said that Ruth would hit into “a hundred double plays.” That hadn't happened, but he had drawn millions of fans to the ballpark, and that's all McGraw cared about now. He had put together a team to go to Cuba for a month and Ruth came along, the number one draw. He didn't play very well or make much money—well, he did earn $20,000, but he lost it all gambling.

In the meantime, the Black Sox scandal blew wide open. In mid-October eight members of the Chicago White Sox, pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, third baseman Buck Weaver, infielders Fred McMullin and Swede Risberg, outfielders Joe Jackson and Happy Felsch, and Ruth's neighbor at the Ansonia, Chick Gandil, were indicted by a grand jury for their role in fixing the 1919 World Series. If one included Sport Sullivan, Ruth had more than a passing relationship with at least three of the men, and while no one has ever suggested Ruth had any involvement in the scandal, that had to be of some concern, not only to him, but to Jacob Ruppert and the National Commission. He needed to be careful who he hung around with.

While it would later become a cliché to say that Ruth saved baseball after the scandal, the truth is he already had. The Black Sox could have been indicted for murder and it wouldn't have made any difference to the future of the game. Fans would have continued to pour into the stands. The game as it had been played in 1919 was already dead. Nobody outside the newspapers and Chicago much cared.

However, it proved to be the final blow for Ban Johnson. After the season, the owners of the National League and the Insurrectos all met in Chicago to discuss the so-called Lasker plan, floated by Cubs owner Albert Lasker, a proposal to have major league baseball administered by a single, impartial commissioner, or at least one not so obviously and inextricably bound up in the petty politics of the club owners. The plan much resembled the same idea earlier put forth by Harry Frazee, and one that he had long advocated.

Another bitter, tempestuous meeting ensued, followed by backroom arm-twisting, virtual bribery and threats, as Johnson and the Loyal Five resisted as long as possible, but in the end, faced with a threat from the National League and the Insurrectos to break off and form their own league—significantly, taking Ruth with them—they capitulated. The notion of a major league existing apart from Ruth was no longer tenable—that's how big he was. In the end, baseball scrapped the old National Agreement that had governed baseball for decades, and adopted the commissioner system. On November 12, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, familiar with the sport through his work on both the Federal League case and the Black Sox scandal, agreed to become the first commissioner of baseball.

Ban Johnson was finished, a figurehead from here forward, but his league would continue on, in part due to his initial genius at its creation, but moving forward, fueled by the engine of Ruth, the home run, and the game he created. Johnson, totally by chance, had played a major role in that, but not in any way he ever intended or planned. It remains a lasting yet thoroughly accidental legacy. Johnson stayed on as AL president another six years, the bulk of his power gone, resigning because of ill health in 1927 before passing away on March 28, 1931.

Frazee had kept his team, and over the next few seasons the Red Sox would repeat their familiar pattern of getting off to a good start, then fading. Frozen out by the Loyal Five, Frazee stubbornly held on and tried to rebuild his ball club, but he simply could not compete with the juggernaut in New York. No one could, at least in the box office or the bank account. The Red Sox, after finishing fifth in 1920 and 1921, then fell to last place. Still, on Frazee's terms, the Ruth sale had been a success and done exactly what he needed it to; he had saved his team, and protected its value. Midway through the 1923 season, he finally sold out, getting $1.2 million—twice what he had paid for the club, from a syndicate led by Bob Quinn. Frazee turned his full attention back to the theater. Opening first in Chicago in 1924,
No, No, Nanette
became a hit, made it to Broadway in 1925 and then overseas, earning Frazee millions. Unfortunately, he would have only five years to enjoy his success, dying of Bright's disease on June 4, 1929. When he died, no one blamed him for anything.

Under Bob Quinn, the Red Sox sank to the very bottom as their main investor, Palmer Winslow, died, leaving the team underfinanced. In 1933, they were purchased by Tom Yawkey, who spent millions of the team, but under Yawkey and those who ran the franchise in the Yawkey tradition, saddled by mismanagement and institutional racism, the Red Sox failed to win another world championship until 2004. The spurious “Curse of the Bambino” would be invented out of whole cloth years later, a way to excuse the continuing failure of the Red Sox under Yawkey, who despite his wallet never won anything apart from a reputation as a bigot. Not until the Yawkey legacy was finally erased did the team manage to accomplish what it had last done in 1918, when Frazee owned the team and Ruth was a pitcher.

The deal worked for Joseph Lannin, too. He got his money from Frazee, made his real estate deal, and continued to find some success as a real estate developer. But on May 15, 1928, he fell—or jumped, or was pushed, no one was ever certain—from a narrow window of the Hotel Granada in Brooklyn, and died at age sixty-two.

It also worked for Jacob Ruppert. His big gamble paid off in every way possible, as Ruth outperformed even the most generous and optimistic expectations. Under Ruppert, the Yankees became a dynasty and Ruppert's legacy became one not built from beer and politics, but baseball. By the time he passed on January 13, 1939, his Yankees had won seven world championships and the Yankees, who Ruppert and Huston purchased for less than a half million dollars, were valued at more than $3 million. And in 2014, he was finally inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The game Ruth created reigned. Season by season, more and more players adopted his style of hitting, and in only a few years the old scientific style of baseball became an utter anachronism. New, younger sluggers, who grew up swinging the bat the way Ruth did, and not the way Cobb had, soon began entering the game. Lou Gehrig, Ruth's teammate, a native New Yorker and Columbia graduate, was one of the first and perhaps the best of this new breed. Their success in tandem in the Yankee lineup fully relegated the old style of play to the history books, proof that Ruth was not singularly superhuman—not quite—but that his method and approach could be learned and put into practice by others. As result, major league attendance would maintain the lofty levels it reached in 1920, and never look back, surviving even the Depression and another world war. Everybody would make money off Ruth and his game. By the 1940s, there were no players left who had been active in the Dead Ball Era.

And Ruth himself? Fifty-four home runs in 1920 would be followed by 59 in 1921, and 60 in 1927. He would play at the highest level for the next decade, setting records too numerous to count. The Yankees would make the World Series for the first time in 1921, win it for the first time in 1923, and win three more titles with Ruth on the roster, becoming baseball's dominant team and most enduring dynasty.

Off the field, Ruth remained much the same problematic, self-absorbed, guileless yet occasionally troublesome player he had been in Boston. While making records in New York he'd also suffered from venereal disease, alcoholism, gain a tremendous amount of weight, and suffer from a host of other physical maladies, be suspended by his team several times, reportedly be stabbed and shot at by angry husbands and jilted women, wreck any number of cars, leave his wife, and do all sorts of things that would have brought down any other man in the game … and be celebrated for it.

Ruth's inherent, candid good nature was part of the reason, but so was the way his talent was inoculated by those around him. Ruth was too big to fail, too important to the game, and as Ruth's career continued, his protectors became more adept. Home runs, it seemed, covered all sins large and small, and Ruth had a great time seeing just how true that was. So did sportswriters, and no one would have a greater influence on Ruth—or, in the end, cover more of his sins with boyish boosterish and often bamboozling goodwill—than a young writer named Christy Walsh. Late in 1920, Walsh met Ruth, and closed the sale for good.

An attorney by trade, Walsh first dabbled in the newspaper business before joining an auto company in advertising. After being fired, he returned to words and had his first big success in 1919, ghostwriting an account of the Indianapolis 500 for world war flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, splitting the $800 fee. This gave Walsh the germ of an idea; he envisioned his own syndicate of athlete-authors, all backed by a stable of ghostwriters he would pluck from the pages of American newspapers.

There was nothing new about the idea itself—newspapers had featured such stories for years, but putting it all together under a single, organized umbrella, managed by one man, was. Walsh envisioned not just doing a single story with an athlete and then moving on, but—for lack of a better phrase—building a brand.

Who better to start with than Ruth? Walsh had briefly met the Babe in 1919, but by the end of the 1920 season, even as it became more and more obvious that Ruth needed some kind of financial help and advisor, Ruth was beginning to use a bit more caution with whom he met and invited to his apartment. Walsh used to wait outside and Ruth repeatedly brushed him off. At the same time, Ruth was besieged by offers for endorsements and investments and business deals of all kinds. He was ill equipped to sort them out and after the debacle with the film, and now the Black Sox scandal, increasingly untrusting.