A mathematical operation to put this article in context. What is the $ 125,000 the New York Yankees paid the Boston Red Sox for Babe Ruth? According to the website «usinflationcalculator», they would be about 160 million euros of our days, an “Mbappian” figure in itself but to which we must add an important corrective factor: the relative costs were then much lower. Ultimately, what did the Massachusetts franchise do with such a fortune? Pay tocateja Fenway Park, its stadium, built in 1912 and on which weighed a three-decade mortgage.
On this date in 1919, the Curse of the Bambino begins. The Yankees and Boston Red Sox reach agreement to move future Baseball Hall of Fame pitching slugger Babe Ruth to New York. Here’s George Herman still with the Sox:
— Honest☘️Larry (@HonestLarry1) December 26, 2021
Imagine that Florentino Pérez had paid for his pharaonic work at the Bernabéu with the sale of a single footballer. Well, that’s what Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston team, did. Imagine now that this player, the creator of three important titles in previous years – the Baseball World Series that could be the Champions League – spit as a farewell. “You will never win again”. And the Boston Red Sox, who had won five of the top fifteen major league hookups, were 86 years without lifting a trophy. It was the curse of the Bambino, George Herman Ruth Junior: a rowdy and unbearable guy who is considered the greatest athlete of all time.
This is not an exaggeration of the signer, but an honorary title granted to him by the Associated Press in 1999, when it established a vote among the specialists of different disciplines who crowned Ruth ahead of Michael Jordan (there are plenty of introductions) and Jim Thorpe, the native Potawatomi who earned two Olympic golds in track and field, was a star of college football and excelled in professional baseball. The lens of that choice was genuinely American, okay, but it gives an idea of the cyclopean dimension of Babe Ruth.
The funny thing is that the star did not want to leave Boston and even less to sign for the Yankees, in those calendas a mediocre team that barely overshadowed the Giants and Dodgers. But it turns out that Frazee was a theater producer in need of cash to finance his plays, who were going through a bad box office moment on Broadway, and also that he was fed up with Ruth’s demands, that had achieved three championships between 1914 and 1918 but that it came from failing in the 1919 season despite the fact that its constant requests for salary increases were attended by the Red Sox.
Babe Ruth did not change her lifestyle in Manhattan. Most of his income was wiped out on apocalyptic revelries and it was common for a club employee to had to pick it up at dawn in any gambling den, bar, brothel or game room to take it directly to training. The Yankees continued with the policy of paying him weekly, because as a young man, in his native Baltimore, he bet the entire annual record in one sitting … and neither did his habit of pulverizing records on the pitcher’s mound or with the bat, showing off prodigious versatility and making New Yorkers the greatest baseball team of all time.
In his first season, that of 1920, he nearly doubled his own homerun record: from 29 to 54. He played fifteen consecutive seasons in New York, where he won four World Series. The first, in 1923, the year in which Yankee Stadium was built because the demand for tickets to see it play far exceeded the capacity of the ancient Polo Ground. The mythical Bronx precinct, still standing after a complete remodel in 2009, is still known as “The House That Babe Ruth Built.” Although it seems crazy, signing a great star can be cheap.
3-1-1920
Record transfer
The Boston Red Sox owner announces the transfer of his star, Babe Ruth, for whom the Yankees would pay an astronomical $ 125,000.
The curse of the Bambino
The Massachusetts state franchise, to which Ruth had given three titles, went more than eighty years without winning the World Series again.
Athlete of the Century
In 1999, the Associated Press chose America’s greatest athlete of the 20th century and he was crowned ahead of Michael Jordan and the versatile Jim Thorpe.
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