December 26, 1919: The Yankees Purchase Babe Ruth

Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert,

manager Miller Huggins, and slugger Babe Ruth

December 26, 1919: The New York Yankees purchase the contract of outfielder George Herman "Babe" Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. It is the most famous transaction in the history of North American professional sports -- or, if you're a Red Sox fan, the most infamous.

Let's take a step back, to properly set it up: On July 30, 1919, Harry Frazee, owner of the Red Sox, traded pitcher Carl Mays to the Yankees for pitchers Bob McGraw and Allen Russell (neither of whom ever did much for either club) and $40,000. There was a hell of a to-do about this, as Mays had left, or "jumped" the Sox and gone home, and was suspended. At the time, the rules said you couldn't trade a suspended player.

This trade pretty much split the American League: Frazee, Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert, and Chicago White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey were on one side; on the other were AL founder and President Ban Johnson and the owners of the other 5 clubs. They were the brothers John and Ben Shibe and Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics, former Yankee manager Clark Griffith of the Washington Senators, Frank Navin and Walter Briggs of the Detroit Tigers, Phil Ball of the St. Louis Browns, and Sunny Jim Dunn of the Cleveland Indians.

The National Commission, which oversaw baseball in those days, ruled in favor of Frazee and Ruppert, and Mays became the 1st major player to go from Frazee's Sox to Ruppert's Yanks. There would be more. (Mays' role in the death of Cleveland Indians player Ray Chapman is a story for another time.)

As a result of the Mays contretemps, Frazee, Ruppert, and Comiskey, now known as "the Insurrectos," could pretty much now only make deals with each other, as the other AL owners, "the Loyal Five," wanted nothing to do with them.

Due to circumstances that Frazee should have been able to control, but didn't, he had to get rid of Babe Ruth, who, in 1918 and '19, had gone from being baseball's best lefthanded pitcher to being the biggest power hitter in the game, but also the biggest headache. He was already a carouser, and he was demanding that his salary be doubled from $10,000 to $20,000 for the 1920 season.

So Frazee sold the Babe to the Yankees, mainly because Ruppert was willing to pay $125,000 for Ruth's contract; while the other possibility, the White Sox, were run by Comiskey, a notorious cheapskate. (His parsimony led to a problem with that year's World Series, as you may be aware.)

So if you're a Red Sox fan, don't blame Frazee for what happened: He didn't have much choice, unless he wanted the press and the public to think Ruth was running the team.

The deal was announced on January 5, 1920. People in Boston weren't happy about it. But nobody could have foreseen what would result from it. Ruth revolutionized the game with the Yankees, turning the home run from a rare thing into a common occurrence. And there would be more deals between Ruppert and Frazee, as Mays would be joined on the Yankee pitching staff by former Sox Waite Hoyt, "Bullet Joe" Bush and "Sad Sam" Jones.

From 1918 to the present... Yankees 27, Red Sox 0. Without cheating, anyway.

UPDATE: The Red Sox have a team Hall of Fame. From their 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918 World Champions: Manager Bill Carrigan, shortstop Everett Scott, 3rd baseman Larry Gardner, left fielder Duffy Lewis, center fielder Tris Speaker, right fielder Harry Hooper, and pitchers Smoky Joe Wood, Dutch Leonard, Herb Pennock and Babe Ruth.

But from the 1920s, they have inducted only outfielder Ira Flagstead and pitcher Red Ruffing -- and, in Ruffing's case, it's only because he's in the main Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and that for what he did later, after he was... traded to the Yankees. From the 1930s: Team owner Tom Yawkey, general manager Eddie Collins, shortstop and manager Joe Cronin, catcher Rick Ferrell, and pitchers Lefty Grove and Wes Ferrell. That should give you an idea of how bad the Sox were from the 1919 sale of Ruth until Yawkey bought the team in 1933.

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December 26, 1919 was a Friday. It was the off-season for baseball, The NFL and the NBA did not yet exist. The NHL did, but it held no games that day.

In Western Canada, there was 1 game in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. The Victoria Cougars beat the Seattle Metropolitans, 2-1, at the Patrick Arena, built by the hockey-playing brothers Lester and Frank Patrick, in Victoria, the capital of the Province of British Columbia. 

This was no mean feat, as the Metros had won the PCHA title and reached the Stanley Cup Final in the previous season, against the NHL Champion Montreal Canadiens, but it was called off due to the Spanish Flu epidemic. In 1917, they had beaten the Canadiens to become the 1st American-based team to win the Stanley Cup. They would go on to win the PCHA title again in 1920, but lose the Stanley Cup Final to the Ottawa Senators, and fold in 1924.

The Cougars would win the West Coast Hockey League title in 1925, and beat the Canadiens, making them the last team from outside the NHL to win the Stanley Cup. They moved to the Western Hockey League, and won their title in 1926, but lost the Stanley Cup Final to the Montreal Maroons. Along with their league, they folded, but the bulk of their players were signed for a new team in the NHL. While not officially true, it can legitimately said that the Victoria Cougars still exist today, as the Detroit Red Wings.

In Britain, December 26 is known as Boxing Day, and England's Football League plays on the day, usually nearby rivals, to make it easier for people to travel. In this era, there tended to be what Americans would call a split doubleheader: Two teams facing each other at one's ground on Christmas Day, and at the other's ground the next day.

For North London team Arsenal, it wasn't a nearby team on this occasion. On the 25th, they lost to Derby County, 2-1 at The Baseball Ground, so named because Derbyshire was one of the few parts of the British Isles where baseball caught on, but only briefly. By this point, the stadium had been redeveloped so that playing baseball there was just about impossible, and you had a stadium which, like the Polo Grounds in New York, was named for a sport that was not being played there. On the 26th, Arsenal and Derby played at Highbury, and Arsenal won, 1-0.

July 30, 1919: The Carl Mays Trade

July 30, 1919: The Boston Red Sox trade pitcher Carl Mays to the New York Yankees for pitchers Bob McGraw and Allen Russell, and $40,000. More than any other trade in the history of the sport, this one changed the history of baseball.

McGraw, Russell and the money don’t matter for this discussion. Mays, a 27-year-old Kentuckian with a righthanded "submarine" delivery -- think 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates World Series hero Kent Tekulve, and 1980s Kansas City Royals closer Dan Quisenberry -- had already helped the Red Sox win the 1915, 1916 and 1918 World Series.

But he was a rotten guy, what we would now call "a clubhouse cancer." One teammate (I can't find a record of which one) said, "He has the disposition of a man with a permanent toothache."

Mays himself couldn't explain it: "I always have wondered why I have encountered this antipathy from so many people, wherever I have been. And I have never been able to explain it, even to myself."

While he was at Spring Training in 1919, his farm house in Missouri burned down. He believed it was arson. He began the 1919 season with a 5-11 record. In a game in Philadelphia, home fans at Shibe Park pounded on the roof of the visitors' dugout, and Mays reacted to this by getting up and throwing a ball into the stands, hitting a fan in the head.

On July 13, against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park, Eddie Collins tried to steal 2nd base. Catcher Wally Schang tried to throw him out, and hit Mays in the head by mistake. When the inning ended, Mays walked off the field, walked into the clubhouse, changed his clothes, went to the train station, and headed back to Boston. He told Burt Whitman, a Boston sportswriter:

I’m convinced that it will be impossible for me to preserve my confidence in myself as a ballplayer and stay with the Red Sox as the team is now handled. The entire team is up in the air and things have gone from bad to worse. The team cannot win with me pitching, so I am getting out…

Maybe there will be a trade or a sale of my services. I do not care where I go.

His teammates had turned against him. Sox management were eager to get rid of him. The Yankees, needing pitching, were happy to make the trade.

But, because he had "jumped the club," Mays had been suspended by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee. And Byron Bancroft "Ban" Johnson, President of the American League, ruled that Mays could not be traded while he was suspended.

"Baseball cannot tolerate such a breach of discipline," Johnson said. "It was up to the owners of the Boston club to suspend Carl Mays for breaking his contract, and when they failed to do so, it is my duty as head of the American League to act."

This move by Johnson split the League. On one side: Johnson, one of its co-founders, and the "Loyal Five": The Philadelphia Athletics, owned by Benjamin Shibe and manager Connie Mack; the Cleveland Indians, owned by James Dunn; the Detroit Tigers, owned by Frank Navin; the St. Louis Browns, owned by Phil Ball; and the Washington Senators, owned by former pitching star Clark Griffith.

On the other side, the "Insurrectos," the other 3 teams: The Red Sox, owned by Frazee; the Yankees, owned by Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston; and the Chicago White Sox, owned by the AL's other co-founder, Charlie Comiskey, once Johnson's best friend, and now a bitter enemy.

The Yankees went to court, and got an injunction against Johnson's ability to prevent the trade. Mays went 9-3 the rest of the way, finishing the season 14-14. He would win 80 games for the Yankees, helping them win their 1st  Pennants and their 1st World Series.

He would also -- unintentionally, he always insisted -- become the only pitcher ever to kill an opposing batter with a pitch: On August 16, 1920, at a time when there were no batting helmets, he hit Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman in the head. Chapman died the next day.

But the implications of this trade went beyond that. After this, the Loyal Five refused to make any deals with the Insurrectos. Those 3 teams could now only make deals with each other. And Comiskey was famously cheap, which resulted in the Black Sox Scandal. So if Frazee had to make a deal, he had to make it with Ruppert. (Huston more or less stayed out of it.)

And that's why so many of the Red Sox champions of the 1910s went to the Yankees, and helped to make their Dynasty of the 1920s. Mays was the first, and Babe Ruth would be the biggest. Pretty much everybody who has studied this period of baseball history knows that.

What they tend to overlook is what happened to the Loyal Five. Sure, the moves wrecked the Red Sox for a generation. But what did it do to the other teams? The downfall of the White Sox can be traced to the banning for life of the "Eight Men Out" during the Black Sox Scandal.

But from 1921 (after the Indians won the 1920 World Series) through 1964, while the Yankees were winning 29 Pennants in 44 years, how many did the Loyal Five win? The Tigers 4, the Athletics (moving to Kansas City in 1955 and Oakland in 1968) 3, the Senators (becoming the Minnesota Twins in 1961) 3, the Indians 2, the Browns (becoming the Baltimore Orioles in 1954) 1.

And even that wasn't the end of it. The injunction unblocking the Mays trade, combined with the Black Sox Scandal, led to the replacement of the command structure of what we would now call Major League Baseball.

Previously, the game was run by a National Commission, consisting of each League's President and a 3rd man, allegedly impartial (but still doing what the owners wanted.) Afterward, the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball was created. The League Presidents would still have power, particularly in the area of discipline, until Commissioner Bud Selig eliminated their offices in 1999. But they would never be so strong again.

The Carl Mays trade was huge, above and beyond leading to the Babe Ruth sale.

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July 30, 1919 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees split a doubleheader with the Chicago White Sox at the Polo Grounds, and both games went to 10 innings. The Yankees won the opener, 6-5, on a suicide squeeze bunt by James "Truck" Hannah that scored Del Pratt. Bob Shawkey went the distance for the win. Wally Pipp hit a home run.

The South Siders won the nightcap, 5-3. Buck Weaver doubled home the winning run. Over the 2 games, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson went 4-for-5 with 3 walks and an RBI, and Eddie Collins went 3-for-10.

* A doubleheader was split at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The New York Giants won the 1st game, 9-0. Jesse Barnes pitched a 3-hit shutout. Hal Chase went 4-for-4 with an RBI and a stolen base, unaware that, due to getting caught throwing games, he was in his last 2 months as an active player. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the 2nd game, 6-1.

* The Brooklyn Robins beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-0 at Weeghman Park in Chicago. Jeff Pfeffer allowed 9 hits, but kept the shutout. Zack Wheat went 3-for-4 with a walk and 2 RBIs. (The Dodgers were named the Robins while Wilbert Robinson was their manager, from 1914 to 1931. Weeghman Park was renamed Cubs Park in 1920, and Wrigley Field in 1926.)

* A doubleheader was split at Fenway Park in Boston. The Detroit Tigers won the 1st game, 3-1. The Boston Red Sox won the 2nd game, 3-2. Over the 2 games, Ty Cobb went 4-for-7 with 2 walks and a stolen base, and Babe Ruth went 0-for-6 with 2 walks.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Cleveland Indians, 2-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Tris Speaker went 0-for-4.

* The Washington Senators beat the St. Louis Browns, 1-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. With 1 out in the bottom of the 9th, Sam Rice hit a triple, and Robert "Buzz" Murphy singled him home. Jim Shaw pitched a 4-hit shutout. George Sisler got 1 of those hits.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Braves, 7-6 at Redland Field in Cincinnati. (It was renamed Crosley Field in 1934.)

* And the Philadelphia Phillies beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-1 at Robison Field in St. Louis. Rogers Hornsby went 0-for-4.