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fame as something other than what they had been before. Neither would have existed without the other. For now, however, neither man was looking much past the upcoming season.
    It is something of an accident that Frazee even owned the Red Sox in the first place. Ban Johnson ran major league baseball like a private club and Frazee, who many thought was Jewish due to his strong ties to both the theater and New York, simply wasn’t part of the in crowd. But two years earlier, just before the start of the 1916 season, then Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin, a hotel man, flush with confidence after winning a world title in 1915 and in the wake of the collapse of the Federal League, decided to cash out. Besides, his major investor, Charles Somers, was out of money and Lannin never really had the cash to buy the team in the first place.
    Ban Johnson sensed weakness. When star outfielder Tris Speaker balked at signing a reduced contract and held out, the league founder pulled the trigger on Lannin. Johnson cut a deal with the Indians—which Johnson owned a part of—to trade Speaker for pitcher Sad Sam Jones, infielder Fred Thomas, and, most notably, $50,000, the biggest transaction in baseball at the time, but still a bargain for Speaker. Only then did he tell Lannin, and the club owner had little choice but to accept the deal—he didn’t have the money to say no. Although the Red Sox, buoyed by the performance of a host of younger players, including Ruth, won another pennant and a world championship for Lannin in 1916, owning the Red Sox had been nothing but a headache. He was losing money and saw war in America’s future. Claiming he was “too much a fan” to put up with the game’s hardball politics, he decided to get out. Johnson himself pondered buying the Red Sox, or at least having a straw man buy it for him and cut him in.
    There is an old adage in Boston that the city’s three favorite pastimes are sports, politics, and revenge. Now Lannin, having experienced the other two, decided it was time for revenge.
    Up to this point, Johnson’s fingerprints were on every sale of an American League team—he usually picked the buyer, sometimes set the price, ordered the seller to the table, and often provided the financing through one of a series of financial angels, all of whom owed Johnson their loyalty when it came to deciding league matters. The result was a lucrative little fiefdom.
    This time, however, Johnson miscalculated. Lannin was still stinging over the Speaker deal and when he decided to sell the Red Sox, he cut Johnson out. He ignored entreaties from people like Joe Kennedy, the grandson of infamous Boston politician Honey Fitz, and found his own buyer—Harry Frazee.
    Frazee had been angling for a ball club since at least 1909, when he first inquired into buying the Red Sox, and in subsequent years had made noise about buying Boston’s National League team, the Braves, as well as the Cubs and Giants, but baseball’s cliquish power structure put Frazee off. They didn’t trust him—that he was “too New York” was a slur—and it didn’t help when he paired with boxer Jim Corbett and began managing the boxer Kid Chocolate, and put the money up for the famous bout between Jess Willard and black champion Jack Johnson in 1915. Why, he even employed black actors . In a lily-white sport, Frazee was a wild card.
    He convinced an associate, Hugh Ward, to kick in some funds and offered Lannin $675,000 for the Red Sox, far more than anyone else. That was enough to get Lannin out of debt and walk away with a profit—particularly the way the deal was structured. Lannin was so eager to sell, he took only half the money up front—Frazee could pay the balance on the installment plan.
    The deal was done before Johnson even heard about it. He was livid at being cut out and kept in the dark, and almost from the start did everything he could to muck things up,