The Black Sox Scandal

“The [Cincinnati] Reds beat the greatest ball team that ever went into a World’s Series,” said White Sox manager Kid Gleason after the final game of the series in 1919. “But it wasn’t the real White Sox. They played baseball for me only a couple or three of the eight days.”

One hundred years ago tomorrow, on September 28, 1920, the Sox trailed the first-place Cleveland Indians by only one game with three left to play when seven players, including some genuine stars, were suspended amid allegations that they had conspired with gamblers to fix the 1919 Series in favor of the Reds. The seven were starting pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, left fielder Joe Jackson, center fielder Happy Felsch, third baseman Buck Weaver, shortstop Swede Risberg, and backup infielder Fred McMullin (an eighth suspect, first baseman Chick Gandil, had retired after the 1919 Series).

SHOELESS JOE JACKSON

In the weeks following the Series, allegations of a fix had became widespread. This was not the first whiff of a gambling scandal affecting the national pastime. Far from it. In those days, betting on major-league games was roughly as popular as betting on NFL games became decades later. There was a lot of money involved, which inevitably led to the corruption of certain players. But previous episodes had been on a much smaller scale and were brushed under the rug rather easily.   

For a time, sportswriter Hugh Fullerton’s articles detailing his concerns about the Series were dismissed as mere sensationalism. “These yarns are manufactured out of whole cloth,” Sox owner Charles Comiskey said.   

Despite his public pronouncements, however, Comiskey had actually been suspicious from the beginning. He had even delayed sending out the players’ World Series checks until the initial controversy died down somewhat. From then on, he kept his fingers crossed. “I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World’s Series on the level,” he said. “And I would be the first to want information to the contrary.”

Comiskey grandly announced that he would pay $10,000 to anyone who produced proof of a fix. When a number of people came forward to take him up on it, though, he rejected all the information offered as “hearsay.”

But the matter ultimately couldn’t be wished away. By late summer of 1920, separate investigations had been launched by American League president Ban Johnson and, more ominously, a Cook County grand jury. Although the grand jury’s inquiry was into the influence of gamblers and gambling throughout baseball, it eventually focused on the White Sox players and their role in the events of 1919.

In the grand jury room, the players told their tale. It began in a New York hotel during the waning days of the 1919 regular season, where Gandil announced to several teammates that they could collect $20,000 for each losing game in the impending World Series, for a total of $100,000 (the Series was best-of-nine games at the time). It was a tempting offer—for although they were the best team in baseball, the Sox were among the lowest paid. Their nickname, “Black Sox,” was later used to refer to the scandal, but it actually originated in 1918 to describe the filthy uniforms the players wore to protest Comiskey’s refusal to pay for laundering.        

Cicotte had been promised a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games in 1919—but after he won his 29th, Comiskey ordered him benched for the remainder of the regular season. Before the grand jury, Cicotte confessed that he had taken part in the fix for $10,000 in cash, which he’d found under his pillow the night before Game 1. The next afternoon, he’d signaled to the other conspirators that the fix was on by hitting Cincinnati’s Morrie Rath with his second pitch in the first inning.

“It is hard to tell when a game is on the square and when it is not,” Cicotte advised the grand jury. “A player can make a crooked error that will look on the square as easy as he can make a square one.” As for his own pitching in the two games he had lost, Cicotte said, “You could have read the trademark on [the ball], the way I lobbed it over the plate. Why, a baby could have hit ’em. [Catcher] Ray Schalk was wise the moment I started pitching.”

Lefty Williams claimed that he had gone along only because of threats on his life. After Game 5, by which time it was apparent that not all of the agreed-upon payments were being delivered, the players had decided to double cross the gamblers and play Games 6 and 7 to win. They did win both games, and Williams testified that a stranger had visited him the night before Game 8 to tell him that he would be killed if the Sox won again. The next day, Lefty had failed to make it through the first inning, becoming the first pitcher to lose three games in a single World Series (this record went unequaled for 62 years). 

Happy Felsch admitted that he had been paid $5,000. “I could have got just about that much,” he said ruefully, “by being on the level if the Sox had won the Series.” A .275 hitter during the regular season, Felsch had hit .192 in the Series. 

Fred McMullin, a benchwarmer who could not have affected the outcome, had been let in on the plot after overhearing Gandil and Risberg talking about it in the Sox clubhouse. Promised a full share in exchange for keeping quiet, he’d received nothing. 

Buck Weaver also hadn’t gotten a penny, but he admitted that he had attended meetings with the others and had failed to blow the whistle on them. He had played superbly throughout the Series; his 11 hits were second only to Jackson’s 12 among players on both clubs. 

Joe Jackson testified that he’d been promised $20,000 but had collected only $5,000. A virtually illiterate country boy from South Carolina, Jackson was Ty Cobb’s only rival as the finest hitter of the era; his .356 career mark remains the third-highest of all time. He had batted .385 in the Series. “Shoeless Joe” stood at the pinnacle of his career when he and the others were suspended—in 1920, he hit for a .382 average, with 105 runs scored, 12 homers, and 121 RBIs. He was well on his way to the Hall of Fame before the scandal intervened. 

Cicotte, Williams, Felsch, and Jackson all agreed that they had received but a fraction of the money promised them. They believed that the rest had been siphoned off by Gandil and his roommate Risberg. “I told Williams after the first day it was a crooked deal all the way through,” Jackson said. “Gandil was not on the square with us.”

Gandil, whom Cicotte called the “master of ceremonies” for the scheme, denied everything. He had batted .233 in the Series, with most of his hits coming late in games that had already been decided. He had turned down Comiskey’s offer of a contract for 1920 and had retired from baseball—according to Jackson, because he could no longer face the others and because he had plenty to retire on.

Risberg had managed only two hits in the Series for an average of .080, while experiencing a variety of lapses at shortstop.

 

It is difficult to imagine today how traumatic the Black Sox revelations were at the time. Americans still had unqualified faith in their institutions, perhaps the most sacred of which was the national pastime. The nation’s sense of betrayed trust was captured in the single sentence that a young boy is supposed to have uttered to Jackson on the courthouse steps: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” 

A gambler named Arnold Rothstein was supposed to have pulled all the strings. He was said to have made hundreds of thousands betting on the Reds, but he would have made two or three times as much if the fix hadn’t been so blatant as to drive the odds down to even money. Called to testify when the scandal broke, Rothstein came away from his encounter with the grand jury unscathed, and went on to a long career in organized crime in New York before being shot to death in a dispute over a poker game. 

On October 22, 1920, the grand jury returned indictments against the eight players, former featherweight boxing champion Abe Attell (purportedly Rothstein’s liaison to the players), former pitcher Sleepy Bill Burns, and a handful of others. Fixing a baseball game was not illegal in Illinois, so the men were indicted for conspiracy to defraud the public and to do injury to Charles Comiskey’s business.

The trial, which began in June 1921, quickly proved a farce as the grand jury’s records disappeared, witnesses recanted their earlier testimony, and the confessions of Cicotte, Jackson, Williams, and Weaver also turned up missing. Not surprisingly under the circumstances, the defendants were acquitted. When the charges against them were dismissed on August 2, the players were carried off to a nearby restaurant on the shoulders of courtroom spectators and even jurors for a post-trial party.

Though raucous, the celebration was short-lived. The day after the trial concluded, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis declared that the eight Black Sox would be banned from baseball for life. “Regardless of the verdict of juries,” Landis intoned, “no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ballgame are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.” 

Desperate to restore the public’s faith in the integrity of the game and its players, baseball had ordained Landis, a federal judge, as its first commissioner in November 1920. This slightly built, stern-faced fellow with a mane of snow-white hair had been granted absolute authority over all aspects of the national pastime, along with the assurance that his decisions would not be subject to appeal. He retained these powers until his death in 1944.

Landis and his successors saw to it that none of the eight Black Sox ever held a job in organized baseball again. As late as 1953, Buck Weaver was still writing to commissioner Ford Frick, pleading for reinstatement. None of his letters was ever answered.  

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