This is the twentieth in a series of examinations of baseball-related legends and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of all the previous baseball legends.

In honor of the opening of the 2010 baseball season, each legend installment this week (and next) will be a baseball one, spotlighting legends from one of the eight playoff teams last year. Today the featured team is the Boston Red Sox.

Let’s begin!

These first two legends are tied together to the point where I’m doing one big legend rather than two smaller legends, okay?

BASEBALL LEGEND: Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to (among other things) finance a musical called No No, Nanette that proceeded to flop!

STATUS: False

BASEBALL LEGEND: The White Sox offered Joe Jackson and $60,000 for Babe Ruth before the Red Sox sold him to the Yankees.

STATUS: I’m Going With True

The main thing that you need to take out of the landscape of the world of American League baseball in 1919 is the following – there was a serious rift between the teams in the American League.

Ban Johnson was the President of the American League and he had a lot to do with making the American League comparable to the National League, the “Senior Circuit,” including the raiding of the National League turn of the century when the National League had decided to put caps on the salaries of their players.

The eight teams in the American League in 1919 were the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Washington Senators, the Detroit Tigers, the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Ban Johnson ruled the league with an iron fist, and he made it very difficult for people to buy a team if he did not approve of them. Hell, he actually owned a piece of the Indians!!

This control loosened a bit in 1917 when Harry Frazee purchased the Boston Red Sox. Johnson was not a fan of Frazee, and almost from the start seemed to want to drive Frazee off.

Meanwhile, the owners of the New York Yankees, Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston, were not exactly fans of Johnson. When they purchased the Yankees in 1915, Johnson promised them that he would help them purchase good players, but in fact he actually specifically BLOCKED them from acquiring players, including the great Tris Speaker, who Johnson funneled from Boston to Cleveland, a team that Johnson owned an interest in (the Yankee owners did not know this at the time).

In addition, Charles Comiskey, famed owner of the White Sox, who was once such great friends with Johnson that he helped ESTABLISH Johnson’s position, had soured on Johnson and the two were no longer friends.

So those three teams were on the outs, with the other five teams (known as “The Loyal Five” at the time) also set against the three “Insurrectos.”

Things escalated in 1919 when Boston pitcher Carl Mays, angry with the Red Sox over contract negotiations and the fact that the Sox (1918 World Champions) seemed likely to miss the playoffs (and therefore Mays would have little chance of getting a World Series bonus), left the team. The rumors were that Mays was hoping to “force” the Red Sox into trading him to a contender. Frazee was somewhat surprised that other contending teams WERE offering him good money for his malcontent.

Frazee then traded Mays to the Yankees in the Summer of 1919.

Johnson, however, did not want to see future players using such a strategy to force trades, so he suspended Mays and refused to allow him to play for any other team while suspended.

They went to court over the suspension, and ultimately Johnson lost and Mays was allowed to pitch for the Yankees. That was the first major “loss” for Johnson as President.

However, this “victory” also further solidified the tension between Frazee and “The Loyal Five.”

So when, at the end of the 1919 season (a season where the Red Sox finished sixth out of eight teams), when his star player, Babe Ruth, demanded that his salary be doubled to $20,000, well, Frazee decided to get rid of Ruth, but as you could see, the teams he could deal with were limited.

Please note, though, that people over the years have exaggerated the extent that “The Loyal Five” would not deal with the Red Sox. These guys were loyal to Johnson (some more so than others), but they were not stupid. If a player like Babe Ruth was available, they all weren’t going to let him pass by.

Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, for instance, at the very least was very much “in” on acquiring Ruth from the Red Sox.

That being said, it is fair to say that the other two teams in Frazee’s “group” had an advantage when dealing with Frazee.

And the Yankees in 1919, as they do know, had a very big advantage when it came to money, which was what Frazee was most interested in.

An interesting offer came from Comiskey and the American League champion White Sox, though. He offered up his star player, Shoeless Joe Jackson, as well as $60,000 for Ruth.

However, even at the time (December of 1919), there were rumors that Jackson and some of his teammates were involved in throwing the 1919 World Series (heck, before the Series BEGAN there were extensive rumors!).

So Jackson was not the prize that he would necessarily seem with his .351 batting average, .422 on base percentage and .506 slugging percentage.

This does not mean that Frazee turned down the deal for that reason, though. After all, the Yankees’ offer for Ruth was for over $100,000 in cash, plus three $25,000 notes that would be paid out over the next six years PLUS a $300,000 mortgage on Fenway Park (Frazee had just purchased the park, which obviously took a lot of money, but he felt it was a necessity, as now if Johnson were to push him out as owner of the Red Sox, the new owners would have nowhere to play).

At the time, Frazee actually made a strong argument as to why he made the deal…

I should have preferred to take players in exchange for Ruth, but no club could have given me the equivalent in men without wrecking itself, and so the deal had to be made on a cash basis. No other club could afford to give me the amount the Yankees have paid for him, and I don’t mind saying I think they are taking a gamble. With this money the Boston club can now go into the market and buy other players and have a stronger and better team in all respects than we would have had if Ruth had remained with us.

You have to admit, that’s a pretty strong argument.

Of course, Frazee did NOT spend the money on his club, at least not to the extent that he said he would, and the Red Sox became worse and worse over the next few years.

It did not help matters that with the Black Sox scandal of 1920, now suddenly Frazee really couldn’t do business with Comiskey, either, so the Yankees remained his best available trading partner, and the two teams made a series of trades over the next few years that, while at the time not exactly lopsided, all seemed to end up in the Yankees’ favor, helping them to begin their famous dynasty, while the Red Sox fell all the way to last place in 1922 and 1923.

Ruth becoming even MORE famous as a Yankee sure didn’t help matters, either.

Frazee was finally pushed out in 1923 in favor of a ownership group led by Bob Quinn, a friend of Johnson’s. Quinn’s teams, though, did just as poorly, finishing last throughout most of the 1920s – it would not be until Tom Yawkey bought the team that the Red Sox returned to respectability (oh, and Frazee’s old rival, Johnson, also was pushed out as American League president in 1927, so Frazee didn’t need to feel too bad).

Frazee was also a major investor in the world of the theater.

Perhaps his most famous production was the musical, No, No, Nanette, a 1925 hit (that has been revived and turned into films more than a few times) that featured the song “Tea for Two,” which is STILL famous today…

There are lots of rumors and half truths when it comes to Frazee’s involvement in the theater and its relationship with the Babe Ruth deal.

First off, the one thing that I can undeniably say is false – that No, No Nanette was not successful.

It was a hit when it opened in 1925.

Somehow, the story got out there that Frazee had sold Ruth to finance No, No Nanette, which then flopped.

However, in the years since, the story has gone through various permutations, including the “debunking” that No, No Nanette was funded by the sale of Ruth by noting that the musical debuted in 1925, over five years after Ruth was sold.

Historian Leigh Montville, though, made the nice discovery that No, No Nanette was ADAPTED from a NON-musical play called My Lady Friends, and that play DID open near the sale of Ruth (and was produced by Frazee).

So when people said that Ruth’s sale financed a play, they likely meant that, not No, No Nanette.

This all said, though, Frazee was involved in producing plays and making theater. He also purchased the Harris Theater in New York in early 1920. His money that he made from the Ruth sale went in all of these things. He produced two other plays in the early 1920s, Dulcy and Her Temporary Husband. Presumably, then, the Ruth sale financed THOSE plays, too.

So while yes, the Ruth sale likely DID help finance these plays, we

A. Don’t know how much money went to either play

and

B. certainly don’t know that the need to finance these plays were a MOTIVATION for the sale of Ruth (I know I’ve never seen anything saying otherwise).

So it is more than a bit of a stretch to argue that the sale of Babe Ruth was so Frazee could produce any given play, and certainly not so that he could specifically produce No, No Nanette.

Michael Lynch’s great book from 2008, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League, goes into great detail about this era, if you’re interested. Thanks to Lynch for the great research into these events (and thanks to Leigh Montville’s 2006 book, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, for that great info about the play that No, No Nanette was based on!).

BASEBALL LEGEND: A condom company used a drawing of Ted Williams’ picture to promote a sports-themed brand of condoms.

STATUS: True

It’s a cool thing if your picture is used on the front of a box of Wheaties.

On a condom wrapper, not so much.

ESPECIALLY when you are not even reimbursed for the use!!!

Up until the 1950s, purchasing prophylactics were still pretty much “hush hush.”

But in the 1950s, the sale of condoms became much more “above the counter,” and a great example of this is “Champ Condoms,” a sports-themed brand of condoms (designed for the prevention of diseases, they say).

Here’s one with a golfer on the front…

But the best is this baseball one….

Look familiar?

Here’s a picture of Ted Williams…

Here they are together…

Pretty crazy, huh?

Williams was never paid for the usage of his likeness, and really, publicity laws of the day were so weak he likely never would have had a chance to push the case, so he had to just deal with it.

We know it didn’t bother him TOO much, though, because in 2004, Heritage Sports Auctions was auctioning off a (authenticated) AUTOGRAPHED Ted Williams condom!

I can only imagine how odd of a conversation it must have been getting that condom signed!!

Thanks to the Baseball Reliquary for the picture of the condom!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com

Tags: "Tea for Two", Babe Ruth, Ban Johnson, Bob Quinn, Boston Red Sox, Carl Mays, Champ Condoms, Charles Comiskey, Chicago White Sox, Clark Griffith, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Dulcy, Harry Frazee, Her Temporary Husband, Insurrectos, Jacob Ruppert, Joe Jackson, Leigh Montville, Michael Lynch, My Lady Friends, New York Yankees, No No Nanette, Philadelphia Athletics, Shoeless Joe Jackson, St. Louis Cardinals, Ted Williams, The Loyal Five, Tillinghast Huston, Tom Yawkey, Tris Speaker, Washington Senators