Harry Frazee
Encyclopedia : H : HA : HAR : Harry Frazee
Harry H. Frazee (1881 - June 4, 1929) was an American theatrical agent and producer and owner of the Boston Red Sox from 1916 to 1923. He became one of the most infamous baseball team owners in Major League Baseball, originally from anti-semitism, and then long after his death from being blamed for the Curse of the Bambino.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, Frazee bought the Red Sox from Joseph Lannin in 1916 for about $500,000. The Sox won a World Series title in 1918. The health of the Sox took a famous plunge after that season, however. The team finished in sixth in 1919, and the team started selling off its players to the New York Yankees, most notoriously Babe Ruth after the 1919 season. After the sale of Ruth, the team crashed into the American League cellar and would not finish above .500 until 1934. More famously, the Red Sox would not win another World Series until 2004, the third longest drought in World Series history. The Chicago Cubs currently have the longest drought, dating to 1908. The Chicago White Sox had the second longest; after winning the 1917 World Series, they would not claim baseball's throne again until 2005—a year after the Red Sox finally won another World Series.
Frazee also backed a number of New York theatrical productions (both before and after Ruth's sale), the best known of which is probably No, No, Nanette.
Frazee's role in the Ruth trade
Frazee's reputation would continue to suffer blows after his death. He was subject to an unflattering portrait in Fred Lieb's 1940s account of the Boston Red Sox, which insinuated that he had sold Ruth to finance a Broadway musical. This alleged reason for Ruth's sale would become a central element in the lore of the alleged "Curse of the Bambino". (Eventually the lore would name No, No, Nanette as the musical for which Ruth was sold, though that musical debuted five years after Ruth's sale.)The truth is somewhat more nuanced and dates to a long-running dispute between Frazee and American League founder and president Ban Johnson. Frazee had been the first owner in the league's history who hadn't been essentially handpicked by Johnson, and Johnson tried on numerous occasions to cancel the franchise after Frazee bought the team. One reason was that Johnson thought Frazee was a Jew and thus degraded the "noble" sport of baseball. This charge was repeated in the 1920s by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent. In fact, he was a Presbyterian, but he never deigned to respond to the charge.
The dispute finally boiled over in the summer of 1919 when pitcher Carl Mays jumped the team. Johnson ordered him suspended, but Frazee instead sold him to the then-moribund Yankees. Johnson had promised Yankee owners Jacob Ruppert and Cap Huston to get them better players, but Johnson never followed through. The Mays flap divided the American League into two factions--the Yankees, Red Sox and White Sox on one side and the other five clubs, known as the "Loyal Five," on the other.
Under the circumstances, when Frazee finally lost patience with Ruth (see below), his options were severely limited. Under pressure from Johnson, the Loyal Five rejected Frazee's overtures almost out of hand. In effect, Johnson limited Frazee to dealing with either the White Sox or the Yankees. The White Sox offered Joe Jackson and $60,000, but the Yankees offered an all-cash deal--$100,000. Frazee, Ruppert and Huston quickly cut a deal, and Ruth became the property of the Yankees on December 26, 1919.
Fenway Park
The Ruth trade cemented the Red Sox-Yankees alliance, which was ironic given their historically bitter rivalry. A few months later, the two teams drew even closer together in a dispute over Fenway Park.When Frazee bought the Red Sox, Fenway Park was not part of the deal. Instead, he rented it for $30,000 per year from the Fenway Realty Trust. A majority of the trust's stock was controlled by the Taylor family, publishers of the Boston Globe. The Taylor family had owned the Red Sox from 1904 to 1911 and actually built Fenway in the first place. They still held a small ownership interest. This put Frazee in a very difficult spot at first. If Johnson ever revoked the franchise, it would be relatively easy for a new owner to get a lease for the park. In August 1919, Frazee began negotiations to buy out Lannin and the Taylors and place the team and Fenway Park in his hands. In this way, if Johnson ever yanked the franchise out from under Frazee, any prospective owner of a Boston American League team risked being left without a place to play.
However, Frazee had stopped paying installments to Lannin because of a dispute over who owed Boston's share of MLB's settlement with the Federal League. In the spring of 1920, Lannin finally made good on a threat to slap a lien on the Red Sox. Since the lien barred Frazee from trading players or buying Fenway without Lannin's permission, Lannin effectively controlled the team. Lannin also threatened to sell his interest in the Fenway Realty Trust, which would have opened the door for a new owner to buy into the park if Frazee lost the franchise. Eventually, Lannin and Frazee reached a settlement. Lannin agreed to pay the Federal League bill and would not oppose Frazee's purchase of Fenway. In return, Frazee resumed payments to Lannin. On May 3, Frazee and Taylor signed a deal to pay off the existing mortgage and make Frazee sole owner of Fenway Park.
As an additional security measure, Frazee secured a $350,000 loan from the Yankees and used a second mortgage on Fenway as collateral.
Other deals with the Yankees
Popular legend holds that the Ruppert loan forced Frazee to trade nearly every player of value to the Yankees for literally nothing in return, running the team into the ground. In truth, the "Loyal Five" refused to make any deals with Frazee even after Ruth left for the Bronx. With the White Sox' reputation in tatters following the Black Sox Scandal, Frazee was left with little choice but to deal with the Yankees. While the trades were not seen as particularly one-sided at the time, a turn of luck made them look like Yankee heists. While the players sent to New York were often stiffs who turned into stars, the ones sent to Boston suffered a rash of injuries.
However, when the Independent article came out, any chance Frazee had of rehabilitating himself evaporated. Although he was forced to sell to a syndicate of Midwestern businessmen fronted by Johnson crony Bob Quinn, he held out for $1.2 million--nearly double what he paid for the team in 1916. Ironically, the Red Sox had some of their worst seasons ever under Quinn's ownership after one of his principal investors died.
Death
In 1929, Harry Frazee died of kidney failure in his Park Avenue, New York City home at age 48 with his wife and son at his side. He is interrred at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. Lou Gehrig and Ed Barrow are two additional baseball luminaries who are interred at Kensico.
“You Can’t Blame Harry Frazee!”
In 2005, ESPN Classic aired an episode in called The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame... series in which it examined the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees and explained why Frazee cannot be held as the scapegoat:
- 5. World War I. With rosters depleted because of the war, Ruth saw action as both a pitcher and outfielder; the latter made him the home run hitter he would become. After the players returned, Ruth became bigger than the team because his home runs were the talk of baseball and he no longer wanted to pitch.
- * This reason is questionable, because the war ended shortly after the 1918 season ended. By the time the 1919 season began, baseball's rosters were restored. Ruth's 1918 total of 11 home runs, while high for the time, would not have been "the talk of baseball" -- though the 29 homers he hit in 1919 were. If the Sox wanted Ruth to go back to pitching, while only batting in games in which he pitched, they could have ordered him to do so, although he could have fought this. But the war would no longer have been a viable reason. It's likely that the length of Ruth's home runs, and the fans' reaction to them, might have led to the switch anyway.
- 4. Ban Johnson. The president of the American League since its debut in 1901 effectively limited Frazee to the Yankees and White Sox as the only teams with whom Frazee could make a deal by pressuring the other five teams (the Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Philadelphia Athletics, St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators) not to make any trades at all with Frazee.
- 3. Babe Ruth's antics. He often spent evenings out in bars, often drunk only hours before games. He also jumped the team several times, the final straw being in the final game of the 1919 season.
- 2. Ed Barrow. Frazee's right-hand man, Barrow served as general manager and field manager. Like Frazee, Barrow also knew how much of a troublemaker Ruth was. When Frazee wanted to send Ruth to the Yankees, Barrow, for reasons unknown, said the Yankees didn't have any players he wanted. In a bizarre twist of fate, Barrow left the Red Sox after the 1920 season to become general manager of none other than the Yankees and built the team to World Champions by 1923 by acquiring as many as seven players from the Red Sox (four of whom had won the World Series in Boston in 1918).
- 1. Babe Ruth's holdout. Ruth forced Frazee's hand by holding out after the 1919 season, demanding $20,000 per year—twice as much as he had been making during the season. During the holdout, he planned other ventures, such as becoming a boxer and going into acting. Frazee was upset over the holdout because he had given Ruth bonuses after both the 1918 and 1919 seasons. Finally, with Ruth's demands so high and after several occasions in which Ruth had already jumped the team, Frazee felt he had no choice but to ship Ruth out.
External link
- [A "Curse" born of hate], by Glenn Stout, discussing and criticizing the various attacks against Frazee.
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