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particularly when Frazee started making wild offers for talent, trying to tempt the Senators into selling Walter Johnson for a reported $60,000. At a time when every owner in the game was cutting salaries, offers like that made playing hardball at contract time more difficult.
    But without Johnson’s assistance, Lannin and Frazee hadn’t made the smartest deal, either. Although at the time the sale was announced it was presumed to include Fenway Park, that wasn’t the case—the Taylor family, who under General Charles H. Taylor and his son John owned the Boston Globe and had built Fenway and before selling the team to Lannin, retained stock in the ballpark and even some voting shares in the club. An already complicated deal was, in reality, even more complicated, and the convoluted ownership structure of the team would wreak havoc on the franchise for most of a decade. Determining exactly who owned what without the assistance of an army of lawyers would eventually prove almost impossible.
    That didn’t bother Johnson. Aptly described by Charles Somers as someone who “never forgets an enemy,” when Frazee purchased the Red Sox he became enemy number one to Ban Johnson. After Johnson initially tried to convince Lannin to back out of the deal, saying, “Lannin will be given every opportunity to reconsider,” Johnson now sat back biding his time, trying to work Frazee into a corner and taking advantage of his money when he could.
    Frazee had showed up at baseball’s Winter Meetings in late 1917 eager to spend and anxious to let everyone else know it. Where the other owners saw fear and anxiety, Frazee saw opportunity. He alone was optimistic about the upcoming season.
    To survive in the theater, you had to have that attitude. You had to believe every show was destined to be a hit and tell people that, even when you knew better. Besides, the public was fickle. He knew that more than one surefire smash had closed after only a few shows, and a fair share of dogs somehow found an audience and ran for months. Today’s hot actor was yesterday’s old news, and an ingenue could be thrust into a starring role and become a sensation.
    No one in the theater lacked nerve. But baseball was different. In that world Frazee’s aggressively optimistic temperament made every other team appear as if it were in retreat.
    After winning the pennant and the World Series in 1913, a pennant in 1914, and then fighting off the Federal League, the A’s Connie Mack was left with one of the highest payrolls in baseball. Nevertheless, his club finished last in the following three seasons and in 1917 he lost more than $60,000. At the winter meetings, Mack was looking to sell and Frazee, smarting over finishing second in his first year as owner and bullish on baseball’s ability to thrive despite the war, was in the mood to spend.
    Johnson, more or less directing league affairs like a puppet master, steered Frazee to Mack. Johnson was already plotting Frazee’s removal and getting Mack some of the Boston owner’s money first was part of the plan.
    Frazee couldn’t resist and the two eventually made two deals. The Red Sox added outfielders Amos Strunk, catcher Wally Schang, pitcher Joe Bush, and infielder Stuffy McInnis, players who could have made the starting lineup for any team in baseball, while Mack received $60,000. After the Yankees howled that the deal was lopsided, Boston sent over a couple more players, most notably longtime third baseman Larry Gardner. Cumulatively, the deal was richer, by far, than the Speaker sale a year before, easily the biggest in the history of the game, something Frazee underscored in a telegram to the Boston papers that called the deal “the heaviest financial deal ever consummated at one time in the history of baseball.” Advanced baseball statistics underscore Frazee’s haul. In terms of WAR (wins above replacement), Frazee added nearly 10