No other major league baseball team has such a grimy ghost in the attic of its history. Even in the glow of the Chicago White Sox's return to the World Series, the franchise is again haunted, and always will be, by what happened in 1919.
Had eight members of that season's White Sox team not conspired with gamblers to lose the World Series, the term "Black Sox" would not be in baseball's vocabulary. But what is often forgotten is that those Eight Men Out, the title of Eliot Asinof's classic book and the film directed by John Sayles, almost got away with the fix. Despite all the whispers during that Series and the 1920 season, baseball gambling in that era was not criminally explored until suspicions concerned, oddly, the uptown Cubs.
Before a game at Wrigley Field on Aug. 31, 1920, thousands of dollars were reportedly bet on the last-place Philadelphia Phillies because of a suspected fix. When the Cubs lost, 3-0, a Cook County grand jury was convened to investigate that Cubs game as well as baseball gambling in general. Testimony by Cubs second baseman Buck Herzog and two Boston Braves players then prompted the grand jury to pursue the Black Sox whispers. On Sept. 25, the Chicago Tribune's front-page headline blared, "Inside Story of Plot to Buy" the 1919 Series. The grand jury subpoenaed Arnold Rothstein, a millionaire gambler who had reportedly put up US$100,000 in bribe money; Abe Attell, a gambler who had been the world featherweight champion; and Sleepy Bill Burns, a Texas oil man.
chicago eight
The names of the eight White Sox players soon began surfacing: the hitting star Shoeless Joe Jackson, the ace pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, third baseman Buck Weaver, shortstop Swede Risberg, center fielder Happy Felsch, first baseman Chick Gandil and the utility infielder Fred McMullin.
The White Sox had won the 1917 World Series from John McGraw's New York Giants and were 3-1 favorites to win the 1919 Series before the odds surprisingly swung to the Cincinnati Reds as 8-5 favorites. With the Series expanded to best-of-nine, the White Sox surrendered, five games to three, as Cicotte lost the opener, 9-1, and Williams was the losing pitcher in three games, including the 10-5 finale.
Except for Gandil, who mysteriously had not reported for spring training, all those White Sox players, vastly underpaid by their penurious club owner, Charles Comiskey, were battling the Cleveland Indians for the 1920 American League pennant. But early in the final week of the season, Cicotte was the first to crack, admitting to Comiskey, known as the Old Roman, that he got US$10,000 for being a crook.
"Don't tell it to me," Comiskey reportedly barked. "Tell it to the grand jury."
In his grand jury testimony, Cicotte identified Gandil as the ringleader and told how he had found US$10,000 under his pillow. When Jackson was called to testify, he reportedly said, "They promised me US$20,000 and paid me US$5,000." Lefty Williams also confessed. On Jackson's way out of the courthouse, according to the Chicago Herald & Examiner, a youngster said, "It ain't so, Joe, is it?" and Jackson replied, "Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is."
When Shoeless Joe was asked later to confirm that story, he was quoted as saying, "The only one who spoke was a guy who yelled at his friend, `I told you he wore shoes.'"
Before Jackson had testified, even before the eight indictments, Comiskey had suspended the eight players, including Gandil, indefinitely. That evening the honest White Sox players, notably second baseman Eddie Collins, catcher Ray Schalk and pitchers Red Faber and Dickie Kerr (who won twice in the 1919 Series), gathered at a Chicago restaurant to celebrate the indictments.
"Hardly any of us have talked with any of the fellows, except on the ballfield, since the season opened," one of the honest players, requesting anonymity, told a Chicago Tribune reporter. "Even during spring training, our gang stood in one group, waiting a turn to hit, and the other gang had their own group."
baseball's first commissioner
Without the indicted "other gang," the White Sox had to call up minor leaguers to plug their lineup; the Indians soon clinched the pennant. Six weeks later, the major league club owners selected baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a white-haired, firm-jawed federal judge in Chicago who had fined Standard Oil US$29 million in a 1907 antitrust case. During the winter, the grand jury records, including the confessions of Cicotte, Jackson and Williams, somehow disappeared. At the trial in the summer of 1921, the lack of hard evidence resulted in the jury's one ballot for acquittal. Four months earlier, Landis had put the eight indicted players on baseball's ineligible list, and the day after the acquittal, he issued a statement.
"Regardless of the verdicts of the juries," it read, "no player who entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed and does not promptly tell the club about it, will ever play professional baseball."
Landis' edict was the root of the "no gambling" rule that has kept Pete Rose on the ineligible list and out of the Hall of Fame for more than 15 years.
It also created the grimy ghost up there in the White Sox attic, the grimy ghost that will always haunt the franchise's history, the grimy ghost that keeps "Black Sox" in baseball's vocabulary.
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