What If the Babe Had Kept His Red Sox?: And Other Fascinating Alternate Histories from the World of Sports

Introduction

Sports arguments can be endless exercises in frustration because they normally produce no real answers. Despite an array of available statistics—batting or scoring average, wins and losses, yards gained, touchdown passes thrown, earned run average, blocked shots—people will still debate and usually disagree about who’s the best hitter, pitcher, shortstop, centerfielder, running back, quarterback, pass receiver, point guard, center, tennis player, or golfer. Or they may argue about specific teams (Yankees vs. Red Sox, Lakers vs. Celtics) or maybe teams from different eras (Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers vs. the recent version led by Brett Favre) or about players from different eras (Nicklaus or Woods, Laver or Federer, Koufax or the Big Unit). Let’s face it, sports fans can argue about almost anything, including whether the odds on an upcoming game are fair or accurate. It really is endless.

There is, however, a more interesting arena in which to debate when it comes to sports, and that’s the great WHAT IF? In other words, what if a certain player hadn’t been traded, a coach had taken a different job, a league had not expanded or merged and thus certain franchises had never existed, or what if it was the other boxer who won the championship fight? This kind of speculation is far more fascinating because it delves deeper than who’s-the-best? debates. The reason is simple. If just one part of history is changed, then the domino effect takes over and many other things will subsequently change as a result. In fact, there are some events that, if they had happened differently, might well have affected the entire career of a player, the history of a team, or the direction of a sport.

What If the Babe Had Kept His Red Sox? examines a number of high-profile situations that could have been very different if just one part of the equation had been altered. Just think about the consequences if Babe Ruth had remained with the Boston Red Sox his entire career instead of being sold to the New York Yankees in 1920. Look at how many things would have been affected—the early history of two great franchises, the career of the most widely known baseball player of all time, Yankee Stadium, Murderers’ Row, the Curse of the Bambino, and the home run records considered sacred all these years. That’s the What-If domino effect.

Not surprisingly, What-Ifs like this can be found everywhere. Did you know, for instance, that the legendary Vince Lombardi was offered his dream job to coach the New York Giants after the 1960 NFL season? What if he had accepted and left the Green Bay Packers? Or suppose Muhammad Ali, in the midst of dancing around the ring in his first fight against Sonny Liston, had been caught by a devastating punch and KO′d? How would the history of boxing and the personal history of the most recognizable sports figure in the world have changed? What if the Dodgers and Giants had not gone west in 1958, but had instead moved to new stadiums and remained in New York? The ramifications would be felt to this day.

Everyone knows that Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play big league baseball in more than sixty years when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. But what if some enterprising owner had said to hell with the gentlemen’s agreement and signed black superstars Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in the mid-1930s? Would that have thrown baseball into complete turmoil? Or consider this. What if Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus had just been mediocre professional golfers instead of the charismatic superstars they became in the 1950s and ’60s? Without that dynamic duo leading the way would professional golf have grown so quickly into the mega-dollar sport it is today?

These are just a few of the topics covered in the following pages, which will take a close look at some of the most intriguing what-ifs in the annals of sport. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, they will certainly give you grist for additional debate and speculation. And that, really, is why this intriguing question is posed so much in the first place. What if . . .

1

The Boston Babe

On December 26, 1919, the New York Yankees received a belated Christmas gift. They completed a deal that would bring Boston Red Sox pitcher/outfielder George Herman Babe Ruth to New York. The Yanks had purchased the young slugging sensation for the then unheard-of price of $125,000, more than double the highest price ever paid for a ballplayer. The deal between the New Yorkers and Boston owner Harry Frazee wasn’t all that simple. There were more reasons for it than people think, but the bottom line was that it brought the Babe to New York, where he would proceed to turn the baseball and sporting world on its ear, and begin in earnest a record-setting career that also launched a Yankee dynasty which seemed to never die. It also left the floundering Red Sox with collateral damage that would come to be called The Curse of the Bambino, and which wouldn’t end until the Sox finally won the World Series in 2004. Babe Ruth is still mentioned with great reverence today and continues to be, in some ways, the face of the Yankees.

But what if the Babe had kept his Red Sox?

In a sense, Babe Ruth was an unlikely hero, an unlikely superstar, and most unlikely—at least at the beginning—to become arguably the greatest baseball player of all time. He came from proverbial humble beginnings, and by the time he was seven years old, his parents could no longer handle him. So they sent him to the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, which was, in essence, a reform school run by Catholic brothers in Baltimore. This happened back in 1902 when not only the Babe but baseball itself was in its early days. It would have taken one helluva soothsayer to predict that this out-of-control youngster would grow into a national hero and, in the eyes of some, the man who saved baseball.

By now the story is well known to real baseball fans. At St. Mary’s, Babe came under the tutelage of Brother Matthias, the school’s disciplinarian, who took a liking to the incorrigible kid and subsequently introduced him to baseball. Before long it was apparent that young George Ruth was a natural, and by 1914 Jack Dunn, who owned the minor league Baltimore Orioles, had signed the nineteen-year-old to a contract with plans to use him as a left-handed pitcher. Dunn also became the teen’s legal guardian. Legend has it that on the first day of spring training, as Dunn took his rookie out to the mound, someone yelled: Hey, look at Dunnie and his new babe.

And so a nickname for the ages was born, followed soon after by a very talented ballplayer. By early July, the young Babe had a 14-6 record, but the Orioles were losing money fast and on July 8, Dunn sold the Babe, along with pitcher Ernie Shore and catcher Ben Egan, to the Boston Red Sox for $8,500. Ruth signed a two-and-a-half year contract valued at $3,500 a season to pitch for Boston. Three days later he beat Cleveland 4-3 for his first big league win. He would finish the year in the minors, but beginning in 1915 the Babe quickly established himself as the best young left-handed pitcher in the majors, compiling records of 18-8, 23-12, and 24-13 over the next three seasons. And in those latter two campaigns, 1916 and 1917, he finished with earned run averages of 1.75 and 2.01, respectively. That’s how good he was.

But the big guy—and at 6’2", 190 pounds, he was big for a ballplayer in those days—could also do something else very well. He could hit better than any other pitcher in the league and better than many of his teammates. On May 6, 1915, the Babe blasted his first big league home run against the Yankees at the old Polo Grounds. He would hit four that season, which is nothing to brag about today, but in the dead-ball era, that was good enough to lead the Red Sox. And it didn’t hurt that his team also won the pennant.

Led by a very strong pitching staff, Boston would take three pennants over four years, winning the World Series in both 1916 and 1918. The Babe was 3-0 in the pair of Fall Classics, setting a record along the way by throwing 29 straight scoreless innings, and having a combined 0.87 earned run average. By 1918, the Sox realized they had something special in the big guy, something other than his valuable left arm. His pitching record was just 13-7 because he was now spending more time in the outfield. The team wanted his potent bat in the lineup. He played enough to get 317 at bats and lead the American League with 11 home runs while hitting an even .300. Not counting his mound appearances, he played 59 games in the outfield and another 13 at first base. With the Sox dominating the American League and Ruth emerging as a huge star, the question in 1919 was how much he would pitch and how much he would play the outfield.

THE WORLD OF HARRY FRAZEE

Harry Frazee owned the Boston Red Sox from November 1916 to July 1923. That isn’t a long time in baseball years, but fans in Bean-town even today know his name and continue to rank him as the biggest villain in Red Sox history. Why? It’s easy. He’s the guy who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees and brought upon the Red Sox the infamous Curse of the Bambino, which would haunt the Sox from 1920 to 2004. Many people think that Frazee sold the Babe to the Yanks to finance the Broadway show No, No, Nanette. But it was-n’t quite as simple as that.

The Illinois-born Frazee always had a penchant for show business, and in those days that meant Broadway. By 1907 he had built his first theatre in Chicago and then, in 1913, he opened the Long-acre Theatre on Broadway in New York. He also acquired a theatre in Boston and subsequently produced a string of hit shows. When his latest offering, Nothing but the Truth, was a success on Broadway in late 1916, Frazee decided to do something else with the profits. He bought the Red Sox on November 1, from Joseph Lannin, for the sum of $675,000. As it turns out, he didn’t pay in full. He gave Lannin some of the cash and the rest in the form of notes. But he owned the team and one of the stars he inherited was a young left-handed pitcher, Babe Ruth.

I have always enjoyed the game, Frazee said after the purchase. Now I think I shall have a chance to show what I know about handling a baseball club. I think that by giving the public a first-class article, I am bound to hold their support. And this goes double for Boston, by all odds the greatest ball town on earth.

The Sox, of course, had just won the World Series when Frazee bought the team, and they duplicated that success two years later. So he had bought his way into one of baseball’s best. But in 1918, the season had ended a month early because of the United States’ participation in World War I. Frazee and the ballclub lost revenue, and it didn’t help that his string of hits on Broadway and elsewhere suddenly became a string of flops.

There was a portent of things to come shortly after the championship season of 1918 ended. In December, Frazee sent two of his best pitchers, Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard, along with outfielder Duffy Lewis to the New York Yankees in return for four lesser players and cash. One source says it was $50,000, another just $15,000. But one thing was certain: Frazee needed cash and one way to get it was to sell ballplayers. His team felt the loss of these players the following year, plummeting to sixth place with a 66-71 record. Not only did the Sox lose top hurlers in Shore and Leonard, but Babe Ruth only pitched enough to compile a 9-5 record. The rest of the time he was in the outfield, where he quickly emerged as the American League’s premier slugger.

The Babe set a new major league home run record by blasting 29 round trippers, also leading the league with 114 RBIs while batting .322. And he did it in just 130 games. Even more amazingly, he got those hits off the old dead ball. The previous home run record had been 27, set by a National Leaguer named Ned Williamson way back in 1884, when the rules of the game were somewhat different. The next best total in 1919 was just 12 and several players hit 10. No wonder the Sox decided that Ruth should play in the outfield.

The Sox were now losing, and Harry Frazee was still in debt, so after the season he began talking again with the New York Yankees’ co-owners, Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Colonel Tillinghast Huston, about their taking the big guy off his hands. The deal was completed in late December and announced on January 5, 1920. The Yankees had paid the huge sum of $125,000 for the Babe, more than twice what had been paid for any ballplayer to that time. In addition, the two co-owners agreed to loan Frazee anywhere from $300,000 to $350,000.

When Frazee told his manager, Ed Barrow, about the Yankees’ offer, adding, I can’t turn it down, Barrow is said to have replied, You think you’re getting a lot of money for Ruth, but you’re not.

THE REAL REASONS

Over the years, many Red Sox fans have lamented Frazee’s interest in financing Broadway shows and the resulting loss of Babe Ruth to New York. In truth, there were a number of elements that led to Frazee approaching the Yankees and subsequently making the deal. For starters, the Red Sox owner had a long-running dispute with American League founder and president Ban Johnson. Their dispute came to a head in the summer of 1919 when pitcher Carl Mays bolted from the Sox. Johnson wanted him suspended, but Frazee turned around and sold him to the Yankees. Somehow, this dispute resulted in the American League being divided into two opposing factions—the Yanks, Red Sox, and White Sox versus the other five clubs, which became known as the Loyal Five due to their deference to Johnson. Thus when Frazee decided to move Ruth, the Loyal Five wouldn’t deal with him. He could only turn to the Yanks or White Sox. There was one story that the White Sox offered Shoeless Joe Jackson and $60,000 for Ruth, but Frazee wanted strictly a cash deal. He needed the money more than another star player that he’d have to pay.

Then there was the Ruth factor. The Babe was simply not easy to handle. His upbringing at St. Mary’s had been rough; once he found success in baseball, though, he was like a kid in a candy store. He wanted more of everything—food, drink, women, fun, and money. He was tough enough to contain during the 1919 season, but after it ended he began talking about forging a new career in the movies. In Oakland, for a series of post-season exhibition games, he began talking money, saying things like, A player is worth just as much as he can get, and citing Detroit’s Ty Cobb as a player who got all he could. Cobb responded by calling the Babe a contract violator and Ruth promptly challenged Cobb to a fight, adding, I wouldn’t say anything against Cobb if he held out for $100,000, so why should he say anything about me? He ought to be tickled to see any player get as much as he can . . .

By that time, Frazee probably saw the Babe as a player he couldn’t control and one who was going to bleed him for every last dollar he could get. And after Babe blasted those 29 home runs, he was obviously going to ask for plenty. At the same time, there was little doubt about his talents. During a spring training game in April of 1919 against John McGraw’s Giants in Tampa, Florida, the Babe connected on a pitch from George Smith and sent the ball high and far over the right-centerfield wall, and into a hospital yard next door. After the game, Giants rightfielder Ross Youngs, who saw the ball land, went out and stood on the spot. Someone found a surveyor’s tape and measured. The ball, it was said, traveled 579 feet. No wonder the Yanks were willing to pay so much.

So the Babe joined the Yankees, walloped 54 home runs in 1920, and then another 59 the following year. He quickly became the biggest attraction in baseball and, after the Black Sox scandal of 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of taking bribes to throw the World Series and subsequently banned from baseball for life at the conclusion of the 1920 season, it was thought to be the Babe’s prodigious home runs that brought many disillusioned fans back and, in effect, saved baseball. But . . .

WHAT IF FRAZEE DIDN’T NEED THE MONEY?

In 1919, America was on the brink of that unprecedented boom period known as the Roaring Twenties. It was a great time for both sports and entertainment, especially in the larger cities. There wasn’t a better time—and wouldn’t be again for more than a half century—for sports heroes to emerge. Boxing had Jack Dempsey, football had Red Grange, tennis had Bill Tilden, golf had Bobby Jones, even horse racing had a star in Man o’ War, and, last and best, baseball had the Babe. It was also a time in which Broadway flourished, as new composers came on the scene and shows that are now classics started their runs on the Great White Way. Before the decade ended with the great stock market crash of 1929, the movies would even begin to talk.

It would seem, then, to be the perfect time for a Broadway entrepreneur like Harry Frazee to make his fortune. The problem was that it came a bit late. No, No, Nanette didn’t hit Broadway until 1925 and would net Frazee about $2.5 million. By then, Frazee had not only sold Ruth, but also shipped Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Bullet Joe Bush, Joe Dugan, Sad Sam Jones, Herb Pennock, and Waite Hoyt to the Yankees, where a number of them joined the Babe to help create the first Bronx Bombers’ dynasty and ultimately the team known as Murderers’ Row. But what if Frazee had yet another string of hits in 1918 and 1919, and didn’t need money? What if he had held on to Babe Ruth, told the big guy not to worry about money, that he would be paid in full for his talent?

If the Babe had not made the trip south from Boston to New York, the course of Major League Baseball may have been different, and the history of the game altered. There are a number of ways to look at this, from the standpoint of both the Yankees and the Red Sox, from the record book, and from the history of baseball itself. Put them all together and this is a fascinating supposition.

The evidence shows that Harry Frazee was never the kind of baseball owner a team would prefer. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he obviously cared more about his theatrical endeavors than about building a great baseball team. People may have been fooled by the fact that the Red Sox were a great baseball team when he bought it. But once he began unloading talent, the team sagged and would be a second-rate club throughout the 1920s, a bad baseball team that left the loyal fans of Boston with a continuing case of the what-might-have-beens.

But had Frazee taken the advice of baseball people, like manager Ed Barrow, he certainly would have kept the Babe in the fold. And perhaps he would have done it had his shows continued to prosper immediately after the war ended. Then he certainly would not have come out with the kind of statements that suggested he was justified in selling off his star player. Today we call it spin.

Twice within the past two seasons Babe has jumped the club and revolted, Frazee said. He refused to obey the orders of the manager and he finally became so arrogant that discipline in his case was ruined.... He had no regard for the feelings of anyone but himself. He was a bad influence upon other and still younger players.

Had Frazee only known!

THE BABE IN BOSTON

Anyone with half a baseball brain could have seen the amazing talent in Babe Ruth right from the start. When he shattered the home run record with 29 in 1919 while still going 9-5 on the mound, it was more than apparent that he was special. And then, as now, Red Sox fans were rabid about their team. The club drew more than half a million fans in 1915 and nearly that many a year later. Recovering from the war, more than 417,000 fans came to Fenway in 1919. But once the Babe was gone and the team began losing, attendance dropped markedly. By 1921 only 279,273 fans pushed through the turnstiles and two years later paying customers were down to 229,688, an average of fewer than 3,000 a game. This is something that definitely would not have happened if Babe Ruth had remained in Boston.

Had the Babe remained, chances are that Frazee would have also kept the rest of the club intact, especially his fine pitching staff. With guys like Bullet Joe Bush, Herb Pennock, Carl Mays, and Waite Hoyt forming a Red Sox rotation, and the Babe hitting home runs, the Sox may well have had a chance to dominate the American League again in the 1920s. At the least, they would have revved up the heated Red Sox/Yankees rivalry a lot earlier. Once the Babe and those top pitchers were gone, the Sox had only one place to go. So that is the first trickle-down from Frazee dealing his players. He broke up a very good team and it didn’t have to happen.

As for the Babe, there’s little doubt that the Sox would have done the same thing the Yankees did and made him a full-time outfielder. He was already moving down that road when he was dealt. The young Babe was the consummate five-tool player of his time. He could do it all—hit for average, hit for power, field, throw, and even run. Before he put additional weight on his large frame later in his career, the Babe was pretty quick on the basepaths and in the outfield. And with his keen sense of the game he knew how to steal a base when he had to. Had he remained in Boston, Ruth the batter would certainly have turned heads at Fenway during the 1920s. But would he have turned them as much as he did in New York?

First there was the Fenway Park factor. The venerable old stadium was opened in 1912 and, like so many of the old ballparks, it had rather gargantuan dimensions. For a southpaw swinger like the Babe, it was only 314 feet to the seats down the right field line. But from there the wall jutted out sharply and it took nearly a 400-foot poke to get the ball into the seats in right center. Dead center was some 488 feet from home plate. Remember, these early parks were built during the dead-ball era when home runs weren’t a big part of the game. Having a huge outfield made the gap hitters more effective and it seemed in the early days that there were as many inside-the-park home runs as four-baggers that cleared the fences.

But Ruth was different. He was big and strong, swung a very heavy bat, and didn’t choke up. He had small hands for a man his size and thus the handles of his bats were thinner than most, which probably helped his bat speed, a term not used back in his day. In addition, he had a big swing with a slight uppercut. Most of the top hitters of the day took level swings with the object being to make solid contact and hit the ball hard and to a place where the fielders wouldn’t get it—the old Willie Keeler hit ’em where they ain’t theory. The consummate hit was a hard line drive. But the Babe, as teammate Joe Dugan once observed, swung from Port Arthur, Texas, on every pitch. And many of his homers were high, deep, majestic drives that not only cleared the outfield wall, but sailed far over it.

But if the Babe had played his entire career in Fenway Park he would still have been a great hitter and most likely the premier slugger and home run hitter of his day. But he may not have been quite the Sultan of Swat that he became with the Yankees. Remember, once he went to the Yankees he played three seasons at the Polo Grounds. Both the Yankees and Giants were using the old bathtub-shaped ballpark then and the right field fence was just 256 feet down the line. While centerfield was a country mile away, right field was a much more inviting target than the corresponding dimension at Fenway.

Then there was Yankee Stadium. The legendary House That Ruth Built opened in 1923 after the Giants asked the Yanks to leave the Polo Grounds. They were actually bent out of shape because the other New York team was outdrawing them at the gate. So the Yankees built their own ballpark. And since the Babe was already attracting all kinds of attention with his home runs (54 in 1920 and 59 in 1921), the team is said to have wanted a ballpark to suit his prodigious talents. Thus right field at Yankee Stadium was just 295 feet away. And while left center and center at the original Stadium were 460 and 490 feet deep, right field and what would become known as the short porch was an inviting target for left-handed sluggers, and none was better than the Babe.

Suppose Fenway Park and its deeper right field dimension cost the Babe five homers a year. If so, Babe still would have retired as the all-time home run leader, but would not have had his magical 714 career total. The most he might have hit in a season would have probably been in the 55 home run range. The 60 he slammed in 1927 was such a gold standard for so long, even after Roger Maris hit 61, that it really helped make the Babe a legend. But if the most he hit had been 55, then Jimmie Foxx would have become the single-season record holder with his 58 in 1932 and would have been tied by Hank Greenberg in 1938. Before the Great Depression was over, the Babe would have been in third place.

As for his career total, without the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, the Bambino might have lost about 75 home runs from his career total. That would have left him around the 639 mark for his career. He would have still retired as the all-time leader, but