No. 1920.01.05 · Live Ball Era
The Sale of Babe Ruth
The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000, paid in installments. The Broadway story that explains the sale is a myth.
Babe Ruth in a Boston uniform in 1919, the season before the Yankees bought his contract. This is a publicity portrait, not a photograph of the sale.
Public domain. National Photo Company, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.
On January 5, 1920, the Yankees announced they had bought Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. The price was $100,000, paid in installments of $25,000 at six percent interest. A separate loan of $300,000 from Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert to Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park, followed that May. Ruppert held the mortgage until Tom Yawkey retired it in 1933.
The story everyone knows is that Frazee sold Ruth to finance the musical No, No, Nanette. That show did not open until 1925. Frazee was a theater man, and he did need cash, but the sale also sat inside his feud with American League president Ban Johnson and a more complicated set of debts than one production. The Nanette explanation is a myth that stuck because it is tidy.
The consequences were not tidy. Ruth became the player who changed the sport. The Yankees won their first pennant in 1921. The Red Sox did not win another World Series until 2004. Calling the sale a blunder is hindsight. On the day it was announced, it was also a choice to trade the best player in baseball for money and a mortgage.
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