The Selling of the Babe Read Online Free PDF Page A

teams into what had previously been National League towns, renaming his circuit the American League, and undercutting ticket prices.
    The new league was a financial success, and one year later Johnson declared that it, too, was a major league and began raiding National League franchises. The AL proved to be so successful that the NL was eventually forced to make Johnson a partner, operating under the National Agreement, which installed the three-man National Commission as the sport’s ruling body. A strong personality, Johnson slowly took command, becoming the most powerful person in the game. And although he had started out as something of a reformer, setting up his American League as a cleaner and more wholesome version of baseball than that played in the National League, as his wealth and power increased, so did his increasingly pompous, hard-drinking management style.
    By 1918, Johnson considered the game his, and as a member of the National Commission he had the means to act on his impulses. Increasingly, he acted with impunity, playing favorites among the owners, bullying those who tried to resist him, telling everyone what to do and how to do it as power corrupted his rule. Those who referred to him as a czar and a despot were close to the mark.
    After the federal government instituted the draft, Johnson, as unable to see past his own self-interest as he was to see his shoes due to his massive belly, put in a request to the War Department that each team be allowed to exempt eighteen players from service. The proposal got him laughed out of Washington as hopelessly out of touch and put ballplayers everywhere under the bull’s-eye of local draft boards. All the request did was make an already uncertain situation even more tenuous, and cause the public to view ballplayers as slackers desperate to avoid serving their country. It was a public relations disaster, one that would eventually put the whole season at risk.
    Of all the club owners in the game, perhaps none was as affected as fifty-five-year-old Philadelphia A’s owner and manager Connie Mack. Mack, who had already been in the game for more than thirty years, including nearly twenty as a magnate, had already weathered several financial storms. Now he saw war and decided to hunker down in his own trenches, try to save as much money as possible, and wait it out. He had already sold off many of his players during the Federal League war and decided he would sit out this one, too. Most fellow owners came to the same conclusion.
    Not Harry Frazee. The Boston owner did things his way.
    Who was Harry Frazee? Even today, it depends on who you ask and how much they’ve cared to examine the question. For years, Frazee was considered the unqualified villain in the sale of Ruth, a man sportswriter Fred Lieb dubbed an “evil genie,” and charged with raping the Red Sox even as Lieb asked for free tickets to the plays Frazee produced. In baseball history, the theatrical portion of Frazee’s biography was widely dismissed as inconsequential and consistently ignored. Yet in the world of musical theater, where his ownership of the Red Sox was seen as an interesting yet rather insignificant sidelight, Frazee was considered something of a forgotten genius, a visionary and a pioneer.
    Neither characterization is wholly accurate, wholly false, or complete. To separate Frazee the theatrical entrepreneur from Frazee the baseball magnate is to fail to view him in his full dimension and complexity, and to lose sight of a human being in favor of a historical caricature.
    To put it mildly, Harry Frazee was nothing like most of the other men who owned baseball teams. They were black-and-white, with all the personality of a tinted tin portrait. Frazee was all garish color and traveled with his own orchestra making up the sound track. In more modern terms, he was as brash as Bill Veeck, as outspoken as Mark Cuban, and as independent as Al Davis. And Ban Johnson hated