1918 Red Sox Babe Ruth Contract (VERY COOL)

[GrayGhost]

Originally Posted by thebigtrain

This youtube video shows a circa 1915 Hammond typewriter in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2htfA9NGCI

Notice what I mean about the way the keys really "ram" the letters into the paper on these old mechanical typewriters, almost to the point where the metal typeface "dents" the paper? Also notice how much more ink the lead typeface leaves on the paper?

The alleged 1918 Ruth/Frazee contract looks nothing like the youtube typewriter's product. Again, I'd bet good money that the Ruth contract is a fraud, and that the typewritten portions were done on a 1950s to 1960s era electric typewriter such as an IBM Selectric. Electric typewriters use a motor/spring system to "push" the key arms upward on to the paper, whereas the old mechanical typewriters rely on the key pressure of the typist- i.e, the harder one presses the key, the bolder and darker the printing becomes.

The dirty "a" on the Ruth contract has the same amount of dirt/smuding in the open space of the letter "A" every time it appears. In a mechanical typewriter, this "clogging" tended to correct itself, as the operator might strike the key harder/softer each time, tending to dislodge the dirt/ink clog.

But in an electric machine, the key strikes the paper with the same "force" every time, since it's being electrically brought up to the paper each time. The "strength" and boldness would be the same if you barely touched the key or if you pounded the key down with a small hammer, as the key itself is merely a switch which is pulsing current to the motor. Make sense?

I am by no means a complete authority/expert on this. I am an attorney, and had a fraud case a couple years ago involving an expert on typewriters/fonts etc. We had lunch/drinks several times during the trial, and I enjoyed hearing about his profession and training. I sent him the link to the Ruth contract, but he has not yet had time to respond.

TBT

Fascinating and it certainly does bring one to at least think that there is a major forgery that just sold for mucho dinero. I look forward to the experts opinion, hopefully soon.

[thebigtrain]

The way I see it with sports memorabilia is purely risk vs. reward. As long as people are willing to pay insane amounts of money for this stuff, there will also be forgers trying desperately to get their hands on said money. There's also a disturbing tendency among collectors to trust these major auction houses and authenticators, which plays into the foger's hands.

What amazes me is that many attorneys are themselves high-end collectors fail to "cross examine" the provenance and history of items they purchase. Take the poster earlier in this thread (who actually bid on this) who said "it was offered 13 yrs ago at Guernsey's" as a way to apparently vouch for its authenticity. Who cares about 13 years ago- my question is where was it for the 82 years before that? Did Grandpa find it in his sock drawer, did Barry Halper have it next to Cy Young's ipod or what? If it is real, could it have been stolen from the Red Sox? Why do so few collectors ever ask questions beyond "PSA says its good" or "it was at Guernsey's 12 years ago" etc.

In my office I have a single-signed Ruth, single signed Gerigh, single signed Tris Speaker, single signed Hornsby, and some lesser-known 20s and 30s players. All of them belonged to the great-uncle of the firm's founding partner, who was a sportswriter for the defunct Newark Evening News out of Newark, NJ. He obtained all the sigs in person in the locker rooms, and there are photos of him with several of these players. Guess what else? Most of these balls have been in the same display case in the firm for 50+ years, and they mostly looks brown, old, and crappy, as you'd expect an 80 year item to look. Probably many of the balls were already used when he had them signed (hell, watch the youtube clips of the '52 W.S. and see how long they use the same ball even then- it was prolly 100 X worse in the 20s and 30s).

That's why I call total BS on 99% of these impeccable white balls offered by the major houses with some college dropout "expert" putting a gold seal on a piece of paper saying its real. I demand more, much more. Forgery is not a terribly difficult crime to pull off, and the materials (iron gall ink and nib pens) are cheap and readily available. EVen if the forger shells out a grand on a nice old period A.L. or N.L baseball, the profit when same is inscribed by "Babe Ruth" or "Lou Gerigh" or better yet both of them is astronomical. As far as I'm concerned, without ironclad provenance, I'm not biting. Anything less and you're just a pure sucker.

[Big Dave]

+1000

[yanks12025]

Originally Posted by thebigtrain

The way I see it with sports memorabilia is purely risk vs. reward. As long as people are willing to pay insane amounts of money for this stuff, there will also be forgers trying desperately to get their hands on said money. There's also a disturbing tendency among collectors to trust these major auction houses and authenticators, which plays into the foger's hands.

What amazes me is that many attorneys are themselves high-end collectors fail to "cross examine" the provenance and history of items they purchase. Take the poster earlier in this thread (who actually bid on this) who said "it was offered 13 yrs ago at Guernsey's" as a way to apparently vouch for its authenticity. Who cares about 13 years ago- my question is where was it for the 82 years before that? Did Grandpa find it in his sock drawer, did Barry Halper have it next to Cy Young's ipod or what? If it is real, could it have been stolen from the Red Sox? Why do so few collectors ever ask questions beyond "PSA says its good" or "it was at Guernsey's 12 years ago" etc.


In my office I have a single-signed Ruth, single signed Gerigh, single signed Tris Speaker, single signed Hornsby, and some lesser-known 20s and 30s players. All of them belonged to the great-uncle of the firm's founding partner, who was a sportswriter for the defunct Newark Evening News out of Newark, NJ. He obtained all the sigs in person in the locker rooms, and there are photos of him with several of these players. Guess what else? Most of these balls have been in the same display case in the firm for 50+ years, and they mostly looks brown, old, and crappy, as you'd expect an 80 year item to look. Probably many of the balls were already used when he had them signed (hell, watch the youtube clips of the '52 W.S. and see how long they use the same ball even then- it was prolly 100 X worse in the 20s and 30s).

That's why I call total BS on 99% of these impeccable white balls offered by the major houses with some college dropout "expert" putting a gold seal on a piece of paper saying its real. I demand more, much more. Forgery is not a terribly difficult crime to pull off, and the materials (iron gall ink and nib pens) are cheap and readily available. EVen if the forger shells out a grand on a nice old period A.L. or N.L baseball, the profit when same is inscribed by "Babe Ruth" or "Lou Gerigh" or better yet both of them is astronomical. As far as I'm concerned, without ironclad provenance, I'm not biting. Anything less and you're just a pure sucker.

Sorry but it's Gehrig. Unless there was actually a lou gerigh

[thebigtrain]

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.

[Runscott]

I know I said I wish Peter Nash' name had not come up in this thread;however, I now expect a HOS 'article' with bigtrain's analysis appearing as Peter Nash insights.

thebigtrain, unless I'm misunderstanding this entire thread, the Clean Sweep auction did not include the typewritten contract. The auctioned item was the handwritten contract, and the typewritten one was shown for comparison purposes.

The typewritten contract was sold several years ago in a different auction, and it apparently still resides in the collection of the country's preeminent documents & manuscripts collector David Karpeles. I don't think JSA was involved (and maybe wasn't even yet in business) the last time this contract sold. Hopefully, Karpeles (who has 10 manuscript museums and owns an original draft of the Bill of Rights) did his due diligence and wasn't fooled by a forger using a 1950s typewriter, but I'll be interested to see if you can prove otherwise.

[Runscott]

I'm not a lawyer, but bigtrain's analysis of the handwritten letter makes sense. I was;however, a very busy typist for a number of years, and typed thesis papers in college for a typing business, using electric typewriters. I also had my own manual typewriters - a '70s portable and a great ancient Smith Corona. The typing in the $700K+ item looks manual to me.

[thebigtrain]

I re-read the beginning of the thread and admit I thought the two documents were sold together as a lot. I was mistaken. Only the "incentive" contract was sold recently by cleansweep auctions.

That said, I stand fully by the legal reasons set forth above (along with basic common sense) that the incentive (handwritten) contract sold by cleansweep is a forgery. Actually, since the "formal" boilerplate contract has been public knowledge for so long, it now makes even more sense that the handwritten one is a forgery, since a date (Jan 11) would have been known to the forger.

The Sox were also very busy the day before (Jan. 10)- check this out:

http://www.1918redsox.com/season.htm

It would've made more sense to date the forgery Jan 10, since that day was obviously one where "deals" were being made. But the forger must have known of the other contract from the old Guernsey auction and used the Jan. 11 date for consistency.

Another thing is that spring training was even shortened that year due to WWI, and all the owners feared lower gate receipts due to wartime hardships, male fans in military service, etc. Doesn't make sense that that would be a year Frazee would be offering "cookies" like this to Ruth, who was not yet a superstar at this time- in fact, he was well behind Mays and Bush in the mound's pecking order. That Ruth at this stage of his career had the "juice" to get a deal like this (which is admittedly unheard of in this time period) simply transcends believability. The forger simply didn't do enough research to make his document stand up to A.) the historical facts, B. the state of 1918 contract law, or C. basic common sense.

Some poor sap is 70 K poorer though