Americans are energized by great sports moments like the Chicago Cubs’ 2016 World Series victory, Michael Jordan’s first NBA title in 1991, the miracle USA hockey triumph at the 1980 Olympics and Muhammad Ali’s stunning defeat of boxing champion Sonny Liston in 1964.
Sports can also bring despair from on-field miscues and disappointing losses, often from self-inflicted failure. Such flubs can be the product of one blockbuster miscue, or come from a continuum of bad policy. Whether caused by bad decisions or greed, sports blunders are often provocative and widely debated. The one-time blunder that stands above all others was reported by the Boston Globe on Jan. 6, 1920, and it changed baseball history.
Just what is a sports blunder? It is a huge, foreseeably bad mistake that has a major effect on a player, a team or sports history. This rules out ordinary on-field plays like popping out or fumbling a football. That is just sports karma, unless it comes from a foreseeably bad managing or coaching decision.
Fans everywhere have their own favorite blunder stories. The Cubs still have not lived down the 1964 Lou Brock trade to St. Louis that energized the rival Cardinals for 16 seasons. The Bears allowed free agency to prematurely break up the greatest team in Chicago football history, the revered 1985 Bears. And the late Bill Wirtz famously kept Blackhawks home games off broadcast television thinking it would force greater ticket sales.
Passing up Jordan in the NBA draft was a massive one-time blunder. But the biggest single sports blunder of all was probably the Boston Red Sox sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees on Dec. 26, 1919, announced the following month. Ruth was already America’s premier athlete, yet they sold him anyway for mere cash, a move that affected the Red Sox, Yankees, baseball and even America for decades to come. It was a sports blunder of epic proportions.
Boston owner Harry Frazee had sold his superstar outright for $125,000. In addition to being awful, the move was hatched by a poor motive unrelated to baseball. Frazee (who was born in Peoria, Illinois) was a successful Broadway producer with many hits to his credit. In 1920, he needed money for a pending production called My Lady Friends, which later morphed into a hit musical called No, No, Nanette in 1925.
Before the fateful sale, the Red Sox had appeared in three World Series with Ruth, winning the title in 1918. Ruth was already a dominant pitcher, but then he slammed 29 homers in 1919, more than doubling the American League single-season record and portending much more to come.
Right after his sale, Ruth crushed a staggering 59 home runs for the Yankees in 1920, then played on seven New York World Series teams, winning four, including the infamous 1927 “Murderers’ Row” squad. New York got Ruth and “the house that Ruth built,” while the Red Sox were left with the famous “Curse of the Bambino” and failed to win another World Series until 2004.
Upholding ‘No Blacks’ policy
The Ruth gaffe may have been the biggest one-time sports blunder. But perhaps no sports misadventure was worse than baseball’s continuing malevolent scheme to keep the big leagues segregated.
Chicago federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis served as the game’s first independent commissioner from 1920 until 1944. He steadfastly upheld the unwritten “no Blacks” edict that had endured since Moses Fleetwood Walker left the game in 1884. He denied keeping Black players out on purpose, he just implied they were not good enough. Yet the Negro Leagues thrived with such legendary stars as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Double Duty Radcliffe.
Then Landis died in office on Nov. 25, 1944, and soon thereafter, on Aug. 28, 1945, baseball icon Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a minor league deal. In 1947, with the support of Rickey, Robinson broke the Major League color barrier.
A flood of Black big leaguers followed Robinson from Paige to Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks and legions more. Interestingly, as a result of Landis’ death and Rickey’s foresight, Major League Baseball was integrated a full seven years before the Supreme Court did the same for our public schools with its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Subsequently, the Cubs broke their own Billy Goat Curse by winning the World Series in 2016. In a way, the Cubs continue to help vanquish the game’s all-whites blunder, too. After all, the only remaining Major League ballpark that Robinson played in is Wrigley Field, now a virtual portal to baseball and American history.
Eldon Ham is a member of the faculty at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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