One-page typed letter, dated September 22, 1920, sent to the New York Yankees by the Royal Bank of Canada concerning a recent loan transaction. In full: "Gentlemen: Referring further to your letter of the 20th instant, when forwarding you the collateral note blanks yesterday I was not fully conversant with the transaction in connection with which you intend to use these. We expect that your special loan of $20,000 will be retired in full at maturity." Signed by "E. B. McInerney" as an agent of the Royal Bank of Canada. The name "Ruth" (Babe Ruth) is written on the reverse in black fountain pen by an unknown hand.

This letter refers to a complicated series of loans between the Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the Royal Bank of Canada, all of which relate directly to the sale of Babe Ruth's contact by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee to the Yankees on December 26, 1919. The Red Sox received $100,000 for Ruth, with $25,000 paid in cash and the remainder to be paid in yearly installments of $25,000, with each note due on November 1st of 1920, 1921, and 1922, respectively. The initial $25,000 that Frazee received in cash, was not nearly sufficient to cover his debts. Faced with this mounting financial pressure, he immediately began borrowing money, using the three Yankees notes as collateral for his loans. Yankees owners Jacob Ruppert and T. L. Huston took an active interest in helping Frazee raise capital, and also took out loans from the Bank of Scotland. The "special loan" referred by the Bank of Scotland in this letter is one that the Yankees secured by using one of the notes given to the Red Sox for the sale of Ruth as collateral (that is made clear in a separate lot in this auction relating to this document). The letter (8.5x11") displays two vertical and three horizontal folds, as well as light toning and a few edge tears. 

This letter, along with nearly every other surviving document relating to the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, originates from the estate of Ed Barrow, who was manager of the Boston Red Sox at the time of the transaction, and soon after became the longtime business manager/general manager of the New York Yankees. Many years after Barrow's death, legendary collector Barry Halper purchased Barrow's entire business archive from the Barrow family, which included dozens of documents relating to Boston's historic sale of Ruth. (Barry Halper's collection is considered by many to have been the finest private baseball memorabilia collection ever assembled.) In 1999, Halper sold nearly his entire collection at auction through Sotheby's in New York (the collection was so vast that it took over a week of twice-daily live auctions and three months of weekly internet sales to liquidate it). Lot 560 in the live-auction portion of the sale featured a large collection of documents relating to the sale of Ruth, from which this letter, as well as every other "sale of Ruth" document featured in this auction, originates. The entire content of Lot 560 in the 1999 Sotheby's Halper Collection auction has been consigned to our 2023 Spring and Summer Classic auctions by the original purchaser, making this just the third time since 1919 that these historically significant documents will have traded hands.