This is the day, 104 years ago, it was announced that Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, had sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. There are a lot of points of light in baseball history. Never one brighter than this.
The deal had been consummated days earlier. But this was the day, Jan. 5, 1920, that Ruth becoming a Yankee was in headlines, and really was in lights. No one knew it at the time, not even in Boston and in New York where the sale made the most noise, but this was the moment when baseball really started to become the national pastime in this country, because of the man who is still the biggest and most flamboyant star the game has ever produced.
This isn’t just a New York thing, not just a sports thing. It is an American thing.
A few years later the Yankees would move into Yankee Stadium, known then and forever as "The House That Ruth Built." Over the next 15 years, the Yanks would win seven American League pennants and four World Series, and even though they weren’t in the Series every year, it must have seemed that way.
There were other stars on that Yankees’ team, one whose lineup would eventually be called Murderers Row. But Ruth -- The Babe, the Sultan of Swat, The Bambino -- towered above them the way he towered above the sport, especially in the 1920s, which would be called a Golden Age of American sports.