Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 202

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created," by Jane Leavy.

Babe Ruth swept into the great hall of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station either with or without two ladies of the night prominently clinging to his arm. He had or had not spent the night before in their company. Did or did not pat them on the derrière and tip them effusively, calling out to a pal among the assembled scribes, photogs, hangers-on, autograph addicts, and redcaps gathered to see him off: “Coupla beauts, eh?” 

Christy Walsh thrust himself into the scrum. Among other things, it was his job to make sure the story remained an either/or—either it wouldn’t find its way into print until long after they were all dead or it would be forgotten in a blitz of favorable mentions of the visits Walsh had arranged to hospitals and orphanages, where Babe would be photographed being his best self. Most Americans still thought the Babe was a happily married man—the photos of Dorothy and Helen in the stands at Games 3 and 4 helped. Walsh could count on the discretion of the beat guys on the payroll of the Christy Walsh Syndicate who doubled as Ruth’s ghosts, but not on their editors. Not anymore. Not since Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid, plastered photos of Babe’s mistress, Claire Hodgson, on page 1 in August 1925. And not with Bernarr Macfadden of True Story fame bankrolling New York’s newest scandal sheet, the New York Evening Graphic—known around town as the Porno-Graphic.

Ruth was the first athlete to be as famous for what he did off the field (or what people thought he did) as he was for what he did on it. And in 1927, with Walsh’s help, he would become the first ballplayer to be paid as much for what he did off the field as what he did on it. What began six years earlier as an agreement to syndicate ghostwritten stories under the Babe’s byline had become not only big business but an entirely new kind of business: the management, marketing, and promotion of athletic heroism. Together they were inventing a new way for athletes to be famous—and to profit from that fame. 

The sports world had begun to take notice. Even the inveterate curmudgeon Westbrook Pegler, the former ghostwriter responsible for the treacle serialized under Ruth’s name in 1920, had been forced to admit they were onto something new. Now a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Pegler had given Walsh his grudging due in a February 11, 1927, column, played as a scoop by the Washington Post: “Babe Ruth Now an Industry and Has Acquired a Manager.” 

Which was particularly sweet coming from Pegler, who had dismissed the syndicate’s offerings as “journalistic chitterlings” and “rhetorical offal.” 

Radical as it was to think of an athlete as an entity to be capitalized, the headline was new only to the newspaper’s editors—Walsh had been in complete control of Ruth’s affairs for more than a year. In fact, he had signed him to a new five-year contract in July. He gave the story to New York Telegram columnist Joe Williams, who reciprocated with a fawning profile titled “Christy Walsh, the Man Behind Mr. Babe Ruth.” He now controlled every aspect of Ruth’s financial life: investments, annuities, insurance policies, endorsements, personal appearances, and taxes. And he was involved in every aspect of Ruth’s personal life, too. He would say later, “I did everything but sleep with him.” And one night, when only a single unoccupied berth was available on their overbooked Pullman, he even tried that. Ruth kicked him out of bed.

The Big Fella didn’t set out to be a revolutionary. But in his anti-authoritarian soul, he understood the injustice of ownership holding all the cards. He thumbed his nose at the pooh-bahs in every front office of every major-league franchise by authorizing Walsh to represent and protect his interests, making him the first sports agent in industry history. Why shouldn’t he get his? 

He thumbed his nose at the autocrats of the dugout, managers like John McGraw, who exerted complete control of the game, moving men around the bases like chess pieces until the Babe came along, took the game into his own hands, and remade it in his image. Who said bunt and slash was the only way to play baseball? Who said you can’t swing away?

He told so many versions of how he met Babe Ruth that it was hard to keep track of them all. There was the version he told his brother Matt: how he found out the floor and room number of the hotel where Ruth was staying, climbed the fire escape, clambered through the window (magically open a crack), found Ruth in bed with a blonde, slapped the Babe on the butt, and said, “I want to represent you.” If it wasn’t true, it should have been.

People like Vin Scully’s mother, a redheaded Irish girl just off the boat whose new beau took her to Yankee Stadium to learn about America. “One of the first things he said was, ‘You must see Babe Ruth,’” said her son, who would become a defining voice of the game. “She had no idea what baseball was about. But that’s how important it was. One of the first things this American wanted to show an immigrant was Babe Ruth.”

In 1927 America, there were two competing narratives about the Babe, divergent creation myths: one the white Horatio Alger myth; the other, the story of a secret brother whose words and deeds, especially involving “race players,” were reported religiously in the black press.

The purchase price was $100,000—inaccurately reported by the New York Times in January 1920 as $125,000—to be paid to Red Sox owner Harry Frazee in four annual $25,000 installments, with 6 percent interest on three promissory notes due each November through 1922. The first $25,000 payment was made on December 6, 1919, a month before the sale was announced and three weeks before the Eighteenth Amendment became the law of the land. The brilliant brewmaster of East Ninety-third Street knew he was going to need a new source of income. 

Harry Frazee was already hard up. So Ruppert agreed to loan him $300,000, guaranteed by the deed to Fenway Park, kept on file in the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds in Massachusetts. 

“Frazee borrowed $300,000 at 7 percent a year, or $21,000 annually,” Haupert explains. “Ruppert bought Ruth for $100,000, a total of $108,750 with interest paid over three years. But Frazee sent Ruppert a check for $21,000 in interest that first year on a $300,000 loan that was not repaid in full for thirteen years. After six years he had paid over $100,000 in interest alone, more than Ruth had cost the Yankees. And Ruppert had the deed for Fenway! In the end, it didn’t cost him anything to buy Babe Ruth. He was a genius and Frazee was desperate. So the Red Sox actually paid the Yankees to take Babe Ruth.” 

Talk about cursed.

Yet even Ruppert could not have envisioned just how much—or just how quickly—his investment would pay off. A good albeit conservative return is 4.5 percent, Haupert says, the same return Ruth averaged on his stock portfolio throughout the Great Depression. The lowest single-season return on Ruth was 4.5 percent in 1925, the year the Babe got a tummy ache and gave the Yankees indigestion. The Yankees earned more than 100 percent of their investment in Ruth back in 1920 alone. Then he continued to pay off for fourteen more years. By 1934, the Yankees had made $1.25 million on the $100,000 investment. (Haupert calculated the return by compiling the team profits from concessions; ticket sales for home, exhibition, and away games; plus World Series revenues during Ruth’s Yankees career.) 

The best year was 1926, when Ruth returned 191 percent. “Except for 1925, the annual return ranged between 32 percent and 192 percent,” according to Haupert’s calculations. “These returns are so gaudy, they’re embarrassing. In each of six different years the Yankees earned more than double Ruth’s purchase price.