When the Cincinnati Reds won their best-of-nine in the
World Series against the Chicago White Sox, few fans could have imagined that
the contest would still be remembered a century later. But then again, few
would have thought that America’s Pastime could be tarnished by gamblers and
players willing to “throw” the games.
The “Black Sox” scandal, for all intents and
purposes, represents a dividing line between early baseball and how it would be
played throughout the rest of the 20th century. Baseball had been
touched by gambling before, but never had a substantial part of any team been so
complicit nor the stakes so high.
A full narrative of this black mark on the game is
beyond the scope of a limited blog post such as this one. Suffice it to say
that it richly earned the description by Douglass Wallop, best known for the novel
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (quickly adapted into the hit
Broadway musical Damn Yankees): “a labyrinth, an incredible maze of
double-crosses upon double-crosses, of broken promises, of guileless stupidity
among the players, of artful, cruel deceit among those who manipulated them—gamblers,
baseball executives, and public officials alike."
Not long after the end of the series, White Sox owner
Charles Comisky got wind of the scheme. But rather than dismantle a potentially
championship squad, he only chose to punish the plot’s ringleader on the team, Chick
Gandil, by him a contract without a raise. The others in on the scheme were
also offered raises, with three—including the team’s best hitter, “Shoeless
Joe” Jackson—given large ones.
Long-festering suspicions, initially fanned by Chicago
sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, were given renewed force late in the 1920 season,
when another betting scandal on a meaningless August Chicago Cubs-Philadelphia
Phillies game prompted an inquiry into events from the year before. After weeks
of stories that violated the cardinal rule of grand-jury secrecy, indictments
were handed down against the eight players that the press had taken to calling
“the Black Sox.”
By that time, the scandal compelled team owners previously
reluctant to act against gamblers on their teams lest it harm their squads to
establish the office of commissioner, or “czar,” of baseball to reestablish
trust in the game. For the next two decades, the job was filled by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge highly regarded for his integrity who also
happened to be a Chicago Cubs fan.
The acquittal of the Chicago eight might have led
other people to reinstate them, however reluctantly. But expulsions of players
in the minor-league Pacific Coast League in another betting scandal—individuals
who had also escaped conviction—gave Landis the precedent he needed to banish
the Black Sox for life.
Landis’ stated religious and political views
predisposed him against anyone involved with gambling, but ambiguous
circumstances could allow him room to maneuver. After credible reports emerged
that future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker had conspired to throw a
game between their teams in 1919, Landis ruled that the pitcher making the
accusation was driven by a personal grudge, and Cobb and Speaker were allowed
to finish their careers. It is interesting to note, however, that neither
player—each blessed with considerable knowledge of the game—ever served in
their retirement as either a manager or front-office executive.
Owners might have sometimes chaffed against the complete
autonomy they had been forced to give Landis when they hired him, but his
integrity allowed the game to benefit from the explosion of interest in the
game that followed the emergence of Babe Ruth as an everyday slugger. After his
death, none of his successors would be allowed to operate so independently, and
the commissioner’s office increasingly became a tool of the owners.
The fallout of the scandal was such that betting on
baseball—and, by extension, association with gamblers—became, in effect, the
specter haunting the sport. Just how damaging that could be was seen in 1989,
when Pete Rose ended up banned from the sport for betting on the team he
managed, the Cincinnati Reds.
Even before that, the baseball community shuddered
when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended the Detroit Tigers’ Denny McLain for
half the season for participating in a bookmaking operation.
Kuhn’s statement
to the contrary, it also appeared that the outcome of the 1967 American League
campaign—a pennant race in which the Tigers lost to the Boston Red Sox—may have
been affected when a mobster broke the two-time Cy Young Award winner’s toes,
sidelining him for the crucial last few weeks of the season.
The cultural impact of the “Black Sox” scandal was
also considerable. Since the late 1980s, audiences have focused squarely on the
tarnished World Series through two film adaptations: John Sayles’ Eight Men
Out (from a nonfiction account by Eliot Asinof) and Kevin Costner’s Field
of Dreams (from W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe).
But two earlier novels used these controversial games
as a symbol of the corruption of American innocence. Bernard Malamud’s first novel,
The Natural (1952), ends with Roy Hobbs not only striking out with the
pennant on the line, but also with slugger being greeted outside a courthouse
by a street urchin with “Say it ain’t so, Roy”—an unmistakable echo of another
real-life youngster who begged the White Sox’s Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
The name of Hobbs’ team, the New York Knights, hints
at the mythological overtones of Malamud’s modern allegory. Hobbs is consumed
by a quest, a dream, as is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Not long after making the acquaintance of his new
neighbor, narrator Nick Carraway is startled when this “elegant young
roughneck” tells him privately that the eccentric figure to whom he has just
been introduced is “the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”
Carraway’s mind boggles at the thought: “I remembered,
of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought
of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the
end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start
to play with the faith of fifty million people —with the single-mindedness of a
burglar blowing a safe.”
Meyer Wolfsheim, the character who sparks these
thoughts, was based on Arnold Rothstein, a New York underworld figure who denied
any connection to the World Series fix. While Fitzgerald surely would have
banked on the association that astute readers of the time would have made
between the real and fictional characters, he was also after larger game.
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