of a foot injury preventing Stahl from serving as a player-manager, rumors suggested that the two men had strong personal differences. Following a bitter quarrel with Johnson, McAleer sold his holdings in the Red Sox. His feud with Johnson turned out to be a lifelong affair, despite efforts taken by their mutual friend, Charles Comiskey, to smooth over the rift. While McAleer never publicly discussed the disagreement that spurred his retirement, he supposedly relayed his version of events to Frank B. Ward, a sports reporter with The Youngstown Daily Vindicator, with the understanding that the details remain confidential until McAleer's death. Although other sources tell a different story, Ward wrote that McAleer termed his "break" with Johnson as the result of a "betrayal" of trust. McAleer indicated that his controlling interest in the Red Sox entitled him to make all major decisions regarding the organization, Ward wrote. This view of McAleer's powers, however, was not shared by the club's manager, Stahl, the article added. To further complicate matters, Stahl's father-in-law, a Chicago-based banker, was reportedly a shareholder in the Red Sox. After one particularly heated exchange between Stahl and McAleer at the close of the 1912 season, Stahl went to Chicago to confer with Johnson. The article indicated that, after this meeting, Johnson sent McAleer a "sternly worded" letter, which may have been designed to preserve his relationship with Stahl and Stahl's father-in-law. According to the article, Johnson later confided to McAleer that he owed Stahl's father-in-law money and therefore felt obliged to take Stahl's side in the dispute. McAleer, however, took the admonition from Johnson as a betrayal of their friendship, refused to accept Johnson's explanations, and promptly retired, Ward wrote. This version of events is largely corroborated by the early research of baseball historian David Fleitz. Baseball historians Dewey and Acocella, however, described a markedly different scenario in which Johnson secretly sold off McAleer's shares while McAleer was away on a 1913 world tour with Comiskey, New York Giants manager John McGraw, and members of the Red Sox team. According to this account, McAleer's conflict with Stahl was followed up by his involvement in a feud between two pairs of players – Tris Speaker and Joe "Smoky Joe" Wood, on one side, and Heinie Wagner and Bill Carrigan, on the other. The conflict had a "religious dimension" and was described in the press as "pitting Masons against members