I was just looking again at the handwritten "incentive clause" and am prepared to call 100% B.S. on this entire lot.
First off, the description from cleansweep:
(1) An extremely rare verifiable 1918 Babe Ruth signature on a document as a Red Sox player; (2) Harry Frazee, the infamous Red Sox owner who sold Ruth to the Yankees to finance No No Nanette, on the same document as Ruth (possibly the only one) and (3) An incentive agreement from before 1920 with the game's most important and famous player ever - we believe this may well be the only known incentive document from this early in circulation, certainly the only one with Babe Ruth. As a matter of historical reference, Ruth only won 13 games as a pitcher in 1918, starting only 19 games, making the winning totals in this agreement impossible to accomplish (he did however lead the league with 11 home runs, his first home run title (of 12 total). Babe Ruth, 100 years after he first took the mound with the Red Sox in 1914, remains the transcendent figure in the history of baseball and is a household name to this date. Offered is one of the very best and earliest Babe Ruth signed documents in existence. JSA LOA.
Now lets turn to paragraph 11 of the
printed contract:
"All of the terms and conditons herein have been fully considered by each of the parties hereto, and this agreement embraces the entire agreement between the parties, and any agreement not contained herein shall be void."
This is commonly known in contract law as a "merger clause," meaning that the written document (in this case, the formal printed contract) represents the entire agreement between the parties. No outside evidence may be introduced to show prior or "side" agreements not contained in the final, formal, contract.
This is an interesting case, as the handwritten "incentive contract" is also dated Jan 11, 1918, and clearly states terms and conditions not contained in the formal contract. If the handwritten Frazee "incentive document" was executed prior to the printed contract, it would be considered "parol evidence" under contract law, in that it is a separate document that expressly differs/disagrees with the "formal" contract. If it was executed after the printed contract, the merger clause might render it moot. Either way, the entire situation makes little to no sense.
For those of you who say "ok smarty pants lawyer, that's fine today but this was the good ole' days of 1918 etc," well, you've never been to law school. Law libraries are full of contract cases going back to the 1500s, and the parol evidence rule has origins in old English common law. Furthermore, courts in the 1918 era tended to be much more "sticklers" for things like this than courts today- by that I mean they were much less forgiving of errors, and tended to be quite rigid in applying the law to the facts. People were every bit as ruthless and litigious in the old days as today, and in some respects more so.
Thus, could Frazee have known about the parol evidence rule, and offered Ruth this deal knowing if it went to court he wouldn't have to pay up? Or could Frazee as a non-lawyer have simply done this "on the fly" without knowing it was not binding upon him?
The other huge question is why Frazee didn't simply have this "incentive" portion of the handwritten letter typed into the printed version? There is plenty of blank space between the printed "boilerplate" to fit the "incentive" language in the printed contract (or simply to write it in by hand in the empty space of the printed contract). But clearly, they had a typewriter!
Well, January 11, 1918 was a Friday. Presumably Frazee had access to lawyers, either in person or by telephone. Presumably Frazee had consulted with lawyers as a team owner, and was not a naive, uneducated person- at the time this was signed he (Frazee) was 37 years old. Clearly he was not an ignorant or reckless man, he didn't end up owning the Red Sox by chance.
Also interesting how the auction house description states "this may be the earliest known incentive contract." Um, yeah, suuuure. The oldest professional sports incentive contract ever found in existence on Earth just so happens to involve Babe Ruth, Harry Frazee and the 1918 Red Sox
It also happens to have "incentivized" a minimum number of wins that Ruth did not achieve that year, thus making the document itself curiously moot. Almost as if the person who wrote it KNEW ALREADY that Ruth would not win 24 games that year
The B.S. meter is starting to sound full alarm here. I think this entire lot is pure garbage, and some extremely naive and foolish sucker just flushed a ton of $$$ down the toilet for items that just a small amount of basic research & common sense show are highly unlikely to be authentic. But hey, JSA green lighted it, and they're the "experts" LOL.