SHORT DESCRIPTION
He arrived in Boston as the throw-in on a three-player deal. Six years later he was sold for more than double the record — and demanded a cut.

SHOW NOTES
On September 10, 1918, twenty-five thousand people sat in Fenway Park waiting for game five of the World Series while both teams refused to leave their clubhouses. The owners had cut the players' shares by roughly three quarters. The commissioners had refused to meet them, then stood them up to go to the theater. When the president of the American League finally arrived at the ballpark, he was drunk and in tears. The players went out and played, an hour late — and in December were told that owing to their disgraceful conduct, they would not receive their World Series emblems.

One of the men in that clubhouse had just finished the strangest season any player has ever had: Babe Ruth, pitching every fourth day and playing the field in between, leading both leagues in slugging while going thirteen and seven on the mound.

This episode is Boston: the Baltimore waterfront and the reform school he entered at seven and left at nineteen; the $2,900 he cost the Red Sox as the throw-in on a three-player sale; four years as one of the best left-handers alive; the July afternoon he quit the team and went home; the 1918 strike; and the sale to New York. It's built almost entirely from what was printed at the time — including The Sporting News of January 1920, which took Harry Frazee's public explanation apart under the subheading "Figures Explode Frazee's Alibi," and predicted the disintegration of the Red Sox seventy years before anyone invented a curse to explain it.

Part one of two.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Declared incorrigible at seven, St. Mary's until nineteen, and Brother Matthias
• "Dunn's babe," and a $2,900 line in a three-player deal
• Twenty-three wins and a 1.75 ERA in 1916 — and punching an umpire in 1917
• May 6, 1918: a pitcher batting sixth at first base
• The day he quit, the shipyard that also wanted him to pitch, and the 2 a.m. return
• The World Series strike, and the emblems the players never got
• Twenty-nine and two-thirds scoreless innings — the record he was proudest of
• "Twenty thousand a year or I quit," announced in the fall of 1919
• The sale, the price list, and Barrow telling Frazee he was making a mistake
• What The Sporting News said about the alibi
• Harry Frazee, and why most of what you've heard about him is false

BY THE NUMBERS

• $2,900 — his share of the 1914 sale from Baltimore
• 1916: 23–12, 1.75 ERA, nine shutouts (still the AL record for a left-hander)
• 1918: .300 average, 11 home runs, .555 slugging — the highest in either league — and 13–7 pitching
• 29⅔ consecutive scoreless World Series innings, a record for 43 years
• $1,108.45 — the 1918 winners' share, the lowest ever paid a champion
• Over $100,000 — the 1920 sale, roughly double the previous record

SOURCES
The Sporting News, September 19, 1918; January 8 and 15, 1920; August 25, 1948. "When Boston Still Had the Babe: The 1918 World Champion Red Sox" (SABR), especially the chapters by Allan Wood, Dan Levitt and Glenn Stout. SABR BioProject. Archives accessed through the Society for American Baseball Research.

DISCLAIMER
Baseball Hall of Fame Lives is an independent production and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

KEYWORDS
Babe Ruth, Boston Red Sox, Harry Frazee, 1918 World Series, players strike, Ed Barrow, Harry Hooper, St. Mary's Industrial School, curse of the Bambino, Yankees, baseball history, Cooperstown