The Selling of the Babe Read Online Free PDF

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    Everything the other owners were, who almost without fail were longtime baseball men who had been in the game for years, moneyed friends of Johnson, or both, Frazee was not. Johnson represented baseball’s conservative hierarchy that sought to preserve their little fiefdom with as little interference as possible; it was a dirty little secret for instance, that Johnson owned part of several American League clubs, and that he often arranged “trades” between teams that weren’t necessarily equitable, but helped both his bank account and those owners he favored. It smacked of “syndicate baseball,” the holding of a financial interest in multiple clubs by a single individual. In the 1890s that had caused National League fans, rightfully, to question the integrity of the game. This was little different. In a sense, over time the American League became Johnson’s own private fantasy league. In the end, he always won and everyone involved knew enough not to complain very hard about the arrangement.
    From the start, Frazee was a threat, not in terms of trying to seize Johnson’s power for himself, but in exposing it. A native of Peoria, Illinois, Frazee, born in 1880, got his start sweeping up a theater as a boy, learning the business from the bottom up a self-made man in every way possible. Like every other boy at the time, he also played some baseball on his school team, where he was a teammate with Harry Bay, later an outfielder with Cincinnati and Cleveland.
    At age sixteen, he left home, determined to find his place in the world, and became the business manager of the Peoria Theatre, which meant he probably did everything there was to do but sing and dance. When a show came through town and the advance agent backed out, Frazee took over, going on the road ahead of the production, booking theaters, drumming up publicity, and meeting everybody who was anybody in the theater world all across the Midwest.
    He was only nineteen when he got his start in baseball. The Western Association, a minor league, disbanded in midseason. Frazee treated the Peoria ball club like a play, taking them on a barnstorming tour to little towns where Peoria meant the big city, and made money. He also learned a valuable lesson: baseball and the theater were not all that different. You sold tickets, you put on a show every day, and the real money wasn’t on the field, but in the front office. No matter how much the players earned, the guys who owned the team usually made more.
    He stumbled upon a show called Mahoney’s Wedding and talked a few investors, including Harry Bay, into providing some seed funds and then took it on the road, putting on a professional play in places that had never seen the likes of one before. He reportedly earned Bay a 1,000 percent profit and suddenly had no lack of suitors wanting to back his next venture. Over the next few years he kept striking gold again and again, eventually moving from the small towns to Chicago, where he built the Cort Theatre, enabling him to make money not just with his own shows, but with somebody else’s.
    By 1910, Chicago had grown too small for him and he took on New York. He was just as successful there as he was in Chicago, embraced by the elite, and in 1912 gracing the cover of the New York Clipper , a theatrical and sporting newspaper, already so well known the paper didn’t see the need to identify his photograph with a caption. No wonder, he’d been printing money with a string of hits, then taking them on tour and making even more. He wisely branched out, spreading his risk, opening all sorts of other businesses, buying real estate, building the Longacre Theatre, investing in the stock market, and rubbing shoulders with an ever increasing roster of A-list celebrities, friends, or acquaintances with every notable actor in the country, like Frank Morgan, Nora Bayes, and every playwright, producers like the Shuberts, and composers like