PrintAn infamous day for baseball
Please don’t show this one to any Red Sox fan in your family. He may walk out on your next Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas party, or skip town when you invite him to a family gathering.
Remember the infamous “Curse of the Bambino”? I don’t know about curses, but Boston did not win another World Series until 2004. Yes, from 1918 to 2004, or a very long time that the curse hung over Fenway Park. Sounds like a curse to me!
On a day like today, Babe Ruth went from Boston to New York, and the baseball fortunes of two cities changed forever. Here it goes:
On January 5, 1920, the New York Yankees announced that they had purchased the contract of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. The next morning’s New York Times erroneously reported the sale price as $125,000. The actual purchase price was $100,000, payable in four annual installments of $25,000 at 6 percent interest. New York had made the first payment on December 19, 1919. Including interest, the Yankees paid $108,375 for Babe Ruth. Or so it appeared.
Any serious baseball fan would agree that the Yankees got the best of that bargain. Indeed, as research has shown, New York earned an astounding financial return on Ruth.1 When The Babe left Boston for the Bronx, he already was a two-time American League home-run champion. Ruth bashed a major-league-record 29 homers in 1919, a mark he would eventually shatter.
Not surprisingly, Red Sox fans have cursed Harry Frazee’s name for a century over that sale. But what if they knew all the details surrounding this transaction? Details that reveal just how sweet the deal really was for New York. It turns out that Harry Frazee, a theatrical agent and producer, actually paid Yankees co-owner Jacob Ruppert to take Ruth off his hands.
Two parts of the deal led to this unfortunate (for Red Sox fans) outcome. The first one involved the three-year contract at $10,000 per season that Ruth had signed before the 1919 season. The second involved a loan. Both issues were known at the time, though the specifics were not. And as they say, the devil is in those details.
Ruth was sold to the Yankees for $125,000, and the rest is good history in New York and very bad history in Boston. Talk about a tale of two cities, with all due respect to Mr. Dickens.
Looking back, Ruth was the greatest player ever to play major-league baseball. He may have been the most consequential athlete in U.S. history. He probably saved baseball after the White Sox scandal that challenged the integrity of the game. Who got the fans to buy tickets again? It was the Great Bambino, who was traded on this day.
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