One Summer: America, 1927

very well at ballparks.
    Jacob Ruppert was a rather odd and solitary man. He lived alone in his big family house, attended by five servants. He served four terms as a congressman, from 1899 to 1907, for the Democratic Party, but then seems to have lost interest in politics. He spoke with a German accent – he called Ruth ‘Root’, for instance – which was a little puzzling because he had lived his whole life in America, as indeed had his parents. He collected jade, books, ceramics, dogs, horses and art, and had what was called ‘America’s finest collection of small monkeys’. Though not adventurous himself, he was keen on exploration and in 1933 would sponsor an expedition by Richard Byrd to the Antarctic. Ruppert’s most arresting peccadillo was that he kept a second home in Garrison, New York, where he maintained a shrine to his motherin the form of a room containing everything she would need if she came back to life. This may go some way towards explaining why he never married.
    Wealth and a love of baseball were about all that Ruppert and Huston had in common. Despite these drawbacks, on the last day of 1914 Ruppert and Huston each paid $225,000 for a half-share of the Yankees – a staggering sum bearing in mind that Devery and Farrell had bought the team for $18,000 only a decade before. McGraw was elated – as well he might be. To any dispassionate observer, Ruppert and Huston were idiots.
     
    As it turned out, they couldn’t have come into baseball ownership at a worse time. One bad thing after another befell major league baseball in the following years. First, competition from the Federal League clobbered revenues. Attendance in American and National League parks dropped by a quarter during the two years of the Federal League’s existence. Then America’s entry into the First World War depressed attendance further. That was followed by the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed millions across the world and left most people severely disinclined to gather in public places. At the same time, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the 1918 major league season would be reduced to 130 games as a gesture towards the war effort. Total attendance that year fell to just three million – a decline of 50 per cent from ten years earlier. Finally, in 1919, Congress brought in the Volstead Act, which declared that Prohibition would begin in January 1920. That would remove beer sales from ballparks, eliminating a crucial source of revenue.
    Many teams barely clung on. No owner was in a more parlous state than the soon-to-be-notorious Harrison Herbert Frazee of the Boston Red Sox. Harry Frazee was really a theatrical impresario, but he loved baseball, too, and in 1916, with a partner named Hugh Ward, he bought the Red Sox – then the best team in the game. They paid $1 million, far more than they could afford. Very quicklyFrazee and Ward found themselves struggling to meet loan repayments.
    In the first week of January 1920, facing imminent default, Frazee did something that Red Sox fans spent the rest of the century obsessing over: he sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 in cash and a loan of $350,000. Although not so well noticed by history, but just as devastating to the team, Frazee offloaded sixteen other players to the Yankees between 1918 and 1923. The Yankees even acquired his general manager, Ed Barrow. In a sense, the Red Sox franchise moved to New York. Frazee sold out altogether in 1923. Coincidentally, Huston would sell out to Ruppert in the same year.
    Even more unnoticed by history was the timing of the Ruth deal. It is not at all a coincidence that the New York Yankees purchased Babe Ruth in the same month that Prohibition came into effect. Jacob Ruppert at the time of the Ruth sale was three weeks away from losing his brewery business. He urgently needed an alternative source of income. Now he was going to find out if it was actually possible to get rich from owning a baseball team, and he was going to do it by staking nearly everything on the most brilliant, headstrong, undisciplined, lovable, thrillingly original, ornery son of a bitch that ever put on a baseball uniform.
    It would be quite a ride.
     
    fn1 A year before Ruth turned professional, a group of businessmen formed a new, rival league called the Federal League, and tempted some of the leading players from the American and National Leagues to jump to the new league by offering them better salaries. The Federal