Buy Now, Reap Later With Ruth and Belle

In 1920, when Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $125,000 (and a passel of loan guarantees), it was the most expensive deal in the history of baseball, but it was widely held to be an example of how stupid the grand old game had become fiscally. I mean, who was worth $125,000?

Babe Ruth was, of course. He was more than a player, he was a god. He was a revolution. He changed the way the game was played forever.

The Red Sox had been dumb enough to consider Ruth a pitcher. Of course, he was. He held World Series pitching records. He led in complete games in 1917 with 35. He pitched in 20 games in 1918 and won 13. He also led the league with 11 home runs that year. (His team, the Red Sox, hit only four more for a club total that year of 15.) But the Red Sox management persisted in seeing him only as a weekday pitcher and occasional pinch-hitter and relief outfielder.

The Yankee management was under no such delusions. They put a bat in Ruth’s hands right away and told him to mothball the curveball. His first year with the Yankees he hit 54 home runs, four times as many as any other player in history had hit.

How extensive was Ruth’s revolution on the game? Well, in 1918, the Chicago White Sox hit nine home runs. But that’s nothing. The Washington Senators hit five, the St. Louis Browns hit five. The league as a whole hit only 98.

You know how many home runs were hit in the American League in 1996? Well, last time I looked, it was more than 2,700.

Ruth changed the entire philosophy of the game. There were detractors. John McGraw, who liked to score runs one at a time and was the architect of the bunt and hit-and-run method of scoring, sneered, “If the bum plays every day, he’ll hit into a hundred double plays,” which caused Ruth, according to his biographer, Robert Creamer, to retort every time he hit a home run, “How’s that for a double-play ball, Mac?!”

But the game of baseball in general and Boston in particular was mad at the seller. In order to back a Broadway show (“No, No, Nanette”), Frazee had mortgaged the team’s soul. To this day, there are die-hard Boston fans who date that unfortunate incident as the one that guaranteed the Red Sox would never again win a World Series.

We dissolve now to 1996, and another blockbuster transaction has changed the face of baseball again.

This time the Cleveland Indians are the culprits. They did not exactly trade Albert Belle away. They just let him go with a shrug.

No one’s really mad at them. This time, public resentment is directed toward the buyer.

It’s kind of complicated reasoning. With baseball, it usually is.

But the picture was this: Unlike Babe Ruth, Albert Belle was a free agent. In Ruth’s day, there was no such thing. A player belonged to the club that first signed him in perpetuity, a little unconstitutional refinement called the “reserve” clause. Ruth didn’t own himself or the rights to his services. In fact, when he demanded a percentage of the selling price, people thought he had some nerve. I mean, who did he think he was--Babe Ruth?!

Like a lot of people with a unique talent, Ruth was an undisciplined, self-indulgent lout on occasion. But he made Yankee Stadium the fountainhead of sport. He saved baseball. Every kid in the country worshiped him. If such a word can be applied to a game, he was a genius at it.

But now, 76 years later, in a crazy kind of way, the transfer of Albert Belle from one American League team to another has elements of its own revolution about it.

To begin with, it resulted in baseball having peace in the house for the first time in more than a decade.

The plot was that Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, an outspoken proponent of baseball’s having a salary cap to keep the game economically viable, suddenly offered slugger Belle $55 million for five years.

This was considered a classic demonstration of a “have” franchise tightening the screws on the “have nots,” the so-called small-market venues.

Baseball’s indignation was endemic. Reinsdorf’s name resounded with accusations of “Judas!” “Traitor!” “Hypocrite!”

The backlash was violent and immediate. Most of the 18 major league owners who had voted, at Reinsdorf’s insistence, to turn down labor’s proposal, shifted their vote overnight and voted with the union in defiance of Reinsdorf.

So, one of the first things the Reinsdorf-Belle concord resulted in was interleague play. If you don’t think that’s revolutionary, you don’t know baseball. Baseball is an 18th century sport entering the 21st century. It’s part of its charm.

Although the animus is directed against the buyer instead of the seller this time, the transaction proves again that capitalism has no conscience, only a bottom line.

In a sense, it’s a giant merger--just as the Ruth deal was. It’s like Time-Warner taking over Turner Broadcasting, Delta merging with Continental. Reinsdorf sees this valuable property sitting there with a sign on it--and he outbids the world. All he knows is that if he signs this 50-homer corporation with his own 50-homer corporation, Frank Thomas, Comiskey Park becomes the new seat of power in baseball, the House-That-Belle-Rang. They should be the greatest one-two combination since Ruth-Gehrig.

The French have a saying for it: “The more things change, the more they are the same thing.”

Cleveland General Manager John Hart was bitter. “How can Jerry Reinsdorf, who’s been a proponent of capping the line, bust the market in this way?”

Easy, Reinsdorf could tell him. He can even paraphrase the poet John Donne: “Never send to know for whom the Belle tolls, it tolls for me.”