Free The Selling of the Babe by Glenn Stout

partnering with Huston, a former United States Army engineer and captain, and buying the Yankees for $480,000 in 1915. At the time, Johnson pledged to help his ball club, a promise Ruppert expected him to make good.
    Yet when Johnson had steered Frazee to Connie Mack in the off-season and Frazee came away with the guts of Mack’s ball club, Ruppert complained: he would have loved to make a bid. Two years before, Ruppert had felt put out when Tris Speaker was sold to Cleveland before he knew about it. Now Johnson tried to pacify him and helped engineer a deal that delivered once valuable second baseman Del Pratt to New York, now temporarily considered damaged goods after being charged with throwing games. He then helped arrange a trade that delivered outfielder Francesco Stephano Pezzolo—better known as Ping Bodie—from the A’s to the Yankees. It didn’t match Frazee’s haul, but it helped keep the Yankees competitive and keep Ruppert quiet.
    That was becoming more important by the day. Ruppert, who essentially took over the club when Huston went overseas in the service, understood New York. Despite his affected German accent, he was New York to the core—he knew the Italian American Bodie would be an instant draw among New York’s growing class of Italian immigrants. And he also understood that with Prohibition in the air, this was no time for a beer baron to be buying only barley. Looking ahead, he realized that in another year or two baseball might be his only business. Thus far he’d already lost nearly a quarter of the club’s purchase price, as a poor record and the onerous rent he paid the Giants made it hard to make money.
    Ruppert needed the Yankees not only to win, but also to win the New York box office from the Giants. To do that, he needed a star, and Ruth was the best young star out there, an intriguing player who could help on both the mound and elsewhere—a particularly precious commodity in 1918.
    He’d been paying attention, and entering the 1918 season, although Ruth had hit only 9 career home runs, four of them had been against the Yankees, three in the Polo Grounds, where the right field porch was perfect for Ruth’s pull-hitting, all-or-nothing, swing-from-the-heels stroke. It was a small sample size, to be sure, but so dramatic that everyone had already noticed. In Fenway Park, with its distant right field fence that, except for directly down the line, was 370 or more feet from home, Ruth’s drives, while impressive, resulted in outs, proverbial home runs in an elevator shaft. In New York … well, he made you wonder what he would do if given the opportunity. The Polo Grounds simply fit Ruth as a hitter in a way that Fenway Park never did. For his career, Ruth would amass a slugging percentage of .583 in Fenway Park—the worst, by far, of any park in which he played more than 10 games. In the Polo Grounds, he would slug .828. Although Yankee Stadium would also be kind to Ruth, no place would prove kinder than the Polo Grounds. Besides, New York fans, with little else to root for, had taken to Ruth. It probably didn’t hurt that the young pitcher was of German extraction, either. At the time, German Americans were New York’s dominant immigrant ethnic group.
    Moreover, from the first time he played there, Ruth and New York seemed to fit each other. Fans responded to him in a way in New York they never quite did in Boston, and Ruth thrived under the attention. In Boston, he was like a big gawky kid in a store full of glassware, always bumping into something. There was too much scrutiny, too much tsk-tsking. In Boston, being famous was like being under a microscope and made Ruth feel claustrophobic; everybody knew his business. It was truly a small town, parochial in all the worst ways. In New York, fame brought anonymity and freedom … not to mention an endless supply of women even more eager to ignore social strictures.
    If