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.

*

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.

April 10, 1925: "The Great Gatsby" Is Published

April 10, 1925: The Great Gatsby is published by Charles Scribner's Sons. It sold well in its initial printing, but it was after the 1940 death of its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that it achieved legendary status.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He became known as one of the "Lost Generation" writers, disillusioned by their experiences in World War I, and willing to critique American society where mainstream writers went out of their way to praise it.

Although he wrote many short stories, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 1922, he only published 5 novels. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920, and was a runaway success. The Beautiful and the Damned came in 1922, and was considerably less successful. In 1922, he published a collection of short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age. The 1920s have been called "The Jazz Age" ever since.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, and did well at the time, but not well enough that people then would have considered it an all-time classic.

Fitzgerald stuck to writing short stories for a while, then went back to novels with Tender Is the Night in 1934. It didn't sell well. He moved west, thinking writing screenplays would make him a lot of money. He was right. But he had begun working on another novel, The Last Tycoon. It was unfinished on December 21, 1940, when he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was 44 years old. Edmund Wilson, a writer and literary critic who was a close friend, finished it and published it.

As with many creative people, death was a great career move for Fitzgerald. He could no longer disappoint people with weak new product, and what little he left behind left people wondering what more he could have done. His books became popular among U.S. soldiers in World War II. By the 1950s, the nostalgia wave for the "Roaring Twenties" was underway, and Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre, the archetypal "flapper," became icons.

The other 4 novels are afterthoughts: It is The Great Gatsby that everyone remembers. It takes place in the Summer of 1922, in four places:

* New York City, during the Roaring Twenties, a time of parties fueled by alcohol even though Prohibition is in effect, alcohol supplied by organized crime.

* East Egg, a glamorous stand-in for Great Neck, in Nassau County, on Long Island.

* West Egg, a less-wealthy stand-in for Little Neck, over the City Line in Queens, separated from East Egg/Great Neck by Little Neck Bay, known for the clams that wash up on its shore. Across the bay, narrator Nick Carraway can see the mansion of the titular Jay Gatsby, and both can see a green light on a dock, which seems to represent hope.

* And a place about halfway between Midtown Manhattan and East Egg, which Carraway calls "a valley of ashes," which has been alleged to be present-day Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, home of baseball's New York Mets and site of the 1939-40 and 1964-65 New York World's Fairs.

Spoiler Alert for a novel published nearly a century ago: Gatsby is murdered, although not by any of his organized crime contacts. In fact, it turned out to be a mistake: Although it was revenge for a death caused by Gatsby's distinctive yellow convertible car, he wasn't the driver.

Gatsby was what would later be called an "anti-hero." Not knowing that Gatsby would soon be killed, Fitzgerald had Carraway tell Gatsby, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." But, on another occasion, Fitzgerald wrote, "Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

And people tend to not get it. Just as people read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and wrongly guessed that the 1950s were a time of "kicks," people read The Great Gatsby, and love the old-time party aspect of it, without realizing what Fitzgerald, and his counterpart Carraway, realized: It was all fake, a cover-up for their generation being "lost." A remake might be set in the late 1970s, with disco and cocaine masking the anxieties of the recent Vietnam War taking the place of the jazz and booze unsuccessfully used to forget about "The Great War."

The Great Gatsby was made into a Broadway play and then a silent film, in 1926, which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald hated, and left halfway through. It was filmed again in 1949, with Alan Ladd as Gatsby; staged for NBC television in 1955, with Robert Montgomery; staged for CBS-TV in 1958, with Robert Ryan; filmed in 1974, with Robert Redford; staged for cable TV network A&E in 2000, with Toby Stephens; and filmed in 2013, with Leonardo DiCaprio.

*

April 10, 1925 was a Friday. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The Stanley Cup had been awarded on March 30, as the Pacific Coast Hockey Association's Victoria Cougars beating the NHL's Montreal Canadiens. This remains the last time the Stanley Cup has been won by a team from outside the NHL.

And the baseball season wouldn't start for another 4 days. So there were no scores on this historic day.

March 30, 1925: The Last Non-NHL Stanley Cup Winners

March 30, 1925: The Stanley Cup is awarded, but not to the Champions of the National Hockey League. That has never happened again.

The Montreal Canadiens won the Cup in 1924, led by the legendary goaltender Georges Vézina, and a pair of young stars, center Howie Morenz and left wing Aurèle Joliat, all of them early inductees into the Hockey Hall of Fame. They won Cup by winning the NHL Championship, then beating the Champions of the West Coast Hockey League, the Calgary Tigers. They won the NHL Championship again in 1925, and again prepared to face the WCHL Champions for the Cup.

Unlike the season before, the WCHL Champions would not have to qualify for the Finals by beating the Champions of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. The PCHA folded, and 2 teams from the Province of British Columbia, the capital city's Victoria Cougars and the biggest city's Vancouver Maroons (formerly the Millionaires, 1915 Cup winners), were admitted to the WCHL. The Cougars beat the Tigers for the title, setting up the Finals against the Canadiens.

The Cougars were loaded with experience: Goaltender Harry "Hap" Holmes, center Frank Foyston and winger Jack Walker had each won the Cup with both the 1914 Toronto Blueshirts and the 1917 Seattle Metropolitans. Defenseman and Captain Clem Loughlin had won the Allan Cup, the championship of Canadian senior amateur hockey, with the 1915 Winnipeg Monarchs. Left wing Jocko Anderson had won the Allan Cup with a military team, the Winnipeg 61st Battalion.

Left wing Harry Meeking (not to be confused with later Toronto star and broadcaster Harry Meeker) had won the Cup with the 1918 Toronto Arenas. Center Frank Frederickson was a member of the Winnipeg Monarchs, the team that Canada sent to represent them in 1920, the 1st time the sport was played in the Olympics, and they won the Gold Medal. And their head coach, Lester Patrick, had won the Cup playing for the Montreal Wanderers in 1906 and 1907.

The Stanley Cup Finals were a best-3-out-of-5 series that season. Game 2 was played in the Denman Arena in Vancouver, and the rest were played at the Patrick Arena in Victoria. Both arenas had been built with funds raised by Lester Patrick and his brother Frank.

The Patrick Arena

The Cougars won Game 1, 5-2. Walker and defenseman Gord Fraser each scored 2 goals. They won Game 2, 3-1, with Walker again scoring 2 goals. The Canadiens kept the series alive by winning Game 3, 4-2, with Morenz scoring a hat trick. But the Cougars ran away with Game 4, 6-1. Frederickson scored 2 goals, and the Cougars were the World Champions.

A Cougars sweater, on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame

For the 1925-26 season, the WCHL was renamed the Western Hockey League. The Cougars won the title again, but lost the Stanley Cup Finals to the Montreal Maroons. The WHL folded, and the Cup became an NHL-only trophy.

That folding opened the door for expansion in the NHL, and 3 new teams were added. The owners of the Detroit franchise signed all the players from Victoria, and named their new team the Detroit Cougars. New owners renamed them the Detroit Falcons in 1930, and another change in ownership made them the Detroit Red Wings in 1932. Since the Cougars are considered a separate franchise, the Red Wings do not claim the 1925 Stanley Cup among their achievements, nor does the NHL recognize it as such.

The owners of the Chicago team signed the players from the Portland Rosebuds, forming the Chicago Blackhawks. The other new team, the New York Rangers, signed Lester Patrick as head coach and general manager, and he signed several WHL players.

The 1925 Cup remains the last one won by a team from outside the NHL. In 1954, the Cleveland Barons, winners of the Calder Cup, the Championship of the American Hockey League, reminded the NHL that the Cup was a challenge trophy, and challenged the holders, the Red Wings, for the Cup. The NHL rejected this challenge, and got away with it.

This was also, through the 2020-21 season, the last Cup won by a team from the Province of British Columbia, of which Victoria is the capital city. The Vancouver Canucks were founded in 1970, and have been to the Finals 3 times -- 1982, 1994 and 2011 -- losing all 3.

*

March 30, 1925 was a Monday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. And professional basketball was still minor-league at this point. So there were no other scores on this historic day.

March 10, 1919: Arsenal Are Elected to the Football League's Division One

Sir Henry Norris

March 10, 1919: With World War I over, the Football League, England's soccer organization, holds a meeting to reorganize. In the leadup to this meeting, it was suggested -- as it turned out, correctly, even more than they suspected -- that the postwar market for football would be insatiable, and that Division One should be expanded from 20 to 22 teams.

This would seem to have been great news for West London team Chelsea, which had finished 19th in Division One; and for Middlesex team Tottenham Hotspur (in North London from 1965 onward), which had finished 20th and last. Now, in spite of their grand ineptitude, these 2 teams could keep their spaces in Division One and not be relegated; while the top 2 teams from Division Two in the last completed season, 1914-15, Derby County and Preston North End, could still keep their hard-earned promotions.

But it was revealed that the April 2, 1915 game at Old Trafford, which Manchester United had won 2-0 over Liverpool. had been fixed. There you have it: Proof that Manchester United were cheating bastards 26 years before Alex Ferguson was even born.

Man U were then desperate to avoid relegation: Had they lost, they, rather than Chelsea, would have finished 19th. Liverpool were willing to accept this loss: Man United were only 33 miles away, and, with transportation costs being what they were, the Scousers didn't want to lose a close, therefore relatively cheap, roadtrip.

Imagine Liverpool giving the club that has become their most hated opponents a break that saves them from relegation. Better yet: Imagine Man United being in position to be relegated. A wonderful thought.

By all rights, Chelsea were screwed out of 18th place and safety. By all rights, Man U should have been kicked out of the League. After all, it's not as though people in the Manchester area would be without a team: Manchester City, Manchester Central, Bolton Wanderers, Oldham Athletic, Bury F.C., Rochdale F.C. and Stockport County were all already in business. (Wigan Athletic would come later, in 1932, effectively if not geographically replacing Manchester Central, who went out of business due to the Great Depression.) But Man U were already one of the biggest clubs in the North of England, and a lot of people didn't want them kicked out.

Enter Sir Henry Norris, a real estate developer, a Member of Parliament who had been knighted for his work supporting the war effort, and also the chairman of Arsenal Football Club, of North London. He had a plan: He would bring several clubs in to vote to keep Man U in the League... if Man U and their allies would vote to bring Arsenal into Division One.

It worked: Chelsea rightly got the 21st spot, and Arsenal got the 22nd, even though they had finished 6th in Division Two in 1915. (A later check of the results showed they should have been listed as 5th, but that doesn't matter now.)

This election would seem to have screwed not only Tottenham, but Barnsley F.C. (a Yorkshire club that had finished 3rd in Division Two), Birmingham-area team Wolverhampton Wanderers (a.k.a. Wolves, 4th), and Birmingham City (a.k.a. Brum or the Brummies, officially 5th) out of that 22nd place. Yet all 3 of those clubs have been in the Premier League in recent years, and while their fans don't particularly like Arsenal (many fans admire Arsenal, but few genuinely like them), they never bring up the fact that "You screwed us out of the first division in 1919!"

Only Tottenham fans, separated from Arsenal by 4.7 miles, do that. To this day, Tottenham fans claim that there must have been bribery, that Norris must have paid off some of the club chairmen to vote Arsenal into Division One.

It has been over 100 years. More than a full century. Not one shred of evidence has ever been publicly produced that Norris bribed anyone to make it happen.

You want to call Norris' move underhanded? It might have been. But it was not corrupt. Not until 1987 would the League make a team's promotion be automatic: Until then, it was always by election. Granted, those elections nearly always turned a rightful promotion into a formality and a reality. But not always. Sometimes, it was based on other factors, such as convenience for the clubs' business managers.

This was one of the times that it was decided based on something other than finishing position, and, while it may have been odd, it was done within the rules of the time. Norris did not break the rules, he used the rules to his advantage. Possibly unfair, but absolutely legal at the time.

Indeed, there is more evidence that Tottenham bribed their way into the League at all in 1908 than there is that Arsenal bribed their way into Division One in 1919. Certainly, no one at the time publicly suggested that Norris had bribed anyone.

According to Andy Kelly from the website Untold Arsenal:

It looks like no one really questioned the events of 1919 for 33 years. Bernard Joy suggested that something underhand may have occurred in his book "Forward, Arsenal!" in 1952. Since then, every Arsenal history seems to have built on this, and Tottenham fans have latched on to it.

Why was nothing questioned at the time or in 1927, 1929, 1934 (when he died), or at any other time before someone decided to write a book?

Brian Glanville wrote an Arsenal history around the same time as Joy, but didn't feel the need to question the decision. However, following Joy's book, Glanville has increasingly vilified Norris even though no new evidence has come to light since.

And with Joy's and Glanville's histories full of holes and second-hand accounts, it's difficult to give them any credibility.

And, besides, as the team that finished last in the last season, Tottenham had far less right to gripe about Arsenal screwing them over than did Barnsley, Wolves or Brum. Spurs were last, and on merit, too.

Yet the story persists, and fans of other clubs who hate Arsenal are more than happy to pass the lie along.

Tottenham did rightly win promotion to Division One at the end of the 1919-20 season. You would think that, since (presuming that they were screwed at all) they were only screwed for 1 year, they would have gotten over it by then.

But since they can't claim to be a more successful club than Arsenal, or a bigger one, or a more admired one around the world, Tottenham fans hang onto this myth that Arsenal were corrupt in 1919 and cheated them.

It makes me wonder why they never blame Man United for screwing them. After all, if United hadn't fixed that game in 1915, they would have been 19th, and thus entitled to remain in Division One, and Arsenal wouldn't have been able to make arrangements, legal or otherwise, to get that 22nd spot. So why don't Spurs fans hate United?

Because hating Manchester United requires taste. And if Tottenham fans had any taste, they wouldn't be Tottenham fans.

On May 24, 1919, a friendly (what Americans would call an exhibition game) was played between Arsenal and Tottenham, at the Arsenal Stadium, known as Highbury for its neighborhood. This was technically a home game for Tottenham, as White Hart Lane, their home stadium since 1899, had been impounded by the British government for war-related activities. (The reverse was done for World War II: The government impounded Highbury, and Arsenal were forced to play at White Hart Lane until League play resumed in 1946.) The game ended 0-0.

It had been 10 weeks since the decision to give promotion to Arsenal and deny it to Tottenham had been made. And yet, not only had Tottenham decided to continue playing matches (there had been matches during the war, just not League or FA Cup matches) at Highbury until The Lane was given back to them at the start of the next season, they agreed to play this completely unnecessary friendly against their local rivals.

If Tottenham -- management, players or fans -- were so angry at that time about Arsenal using corrupt means to keep them out of Division One, then why would they have agreed to play this game at all? And why play this game, or any game, at Highbury? Why not find some other place to play, if The Lane hadn't yet come back under their control? Money? If the money was that good, surely, another nearby club could have gotten them a similar amount.

Yet another fact to demolish the lie that there was any thought, at the time, to Arsenal's "corruption." Whenever that story started, it wasn't in the Spring of 1919.

*

March 10, 1919 was a Monday. In North American major league sports, Baseball was in Spring Training, football was out of season, professional basketball barely existed.

In hockey, the Vancouver Millionaires beat their arch-rivals, the Victoria Cougars, 11-8 at the Denman Arena in Vancouver, to win the regular-season title in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. And yet, over the next 4 days, they would lose the league's playoff title to the Seattle Metropolitans.

The Metros would play the Montreal Canadiens, Champions of the NHL, for the Stanley Cup. But the worldwide flu epidemic would interrupt the Finals, and no winner was crowned.