NOTES #268

NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN

Observations from Outside the Lines

By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)

#268 September 24, 2002

OUR MOVEABLE FEAST’S DARKEST DAYS

It is fitting that the sport which needs no clock, also is not locked into any calendar. Baseball plays seasons, which begin when the weather permits, and ends when the last games are over. Our moveable feast in baseball since 1903 is the World Series, which we call October’s Game, even though it once began September 5 and ended on September 11.

That was in 1918, when a World War was raging and even more deaths were caused by a flu epidemic, both of which discouraged large public gatherings. So when the Series returned to October in 1919, all seemed right in the country of baseball again. That was, of course, a grand illusion.

This issue began with a question: who deserves the credit for uncovering the “Black Sox Scandal,” the tossing of the World Series for gamblers, in 1919? The more I probed, the more I felt like an investigator myself.

What really happened in October 1919 is not simple to tell. Everybody knows Eight Men Out, but that punishment, being banned from baseball for the rest of their lives, suggests that eight Sox players were equally guilty and committed the same crimes. But it is much more complicated than that.

O what a tangled web we weave / When we first practice to deceive (J.R. Pope.) The web that was spun around the 1919 Series trapped most famously Shoeless Joe Jackson. It is not easy to weigh the evidence about Jackson with objectivity. His own story changed. Fans watching Joe on the diamond that October, if they were already suspicious that the fix was in, saw things very differently than the fans who loved watching their star. And that problem of bias still exists, as we try to look back through the eyes of others, reading account after account.

So what began as a short essay on the man who blew the whistle on the whole thing, evolved into a full-scale, full-issue look at the darkest days in the history of baseball. And it’s just Part One. 1919 might well have been the last World Series, if events broke differently and earlier. Instead, our Moveable Feast kneels on deck, as we whet our appetites with the playoffs. Here is hoping that between innings, you enjoy another look back, as much as I enjoyed digging it out from a wide and wild variety of sources.

 

HIS PEN WAS MIGHTIER THAN THE COVER-UP

Hugh S. Fullerton, Sr. — heard of him? He is the writer who was most instrumental in bringing to light the “Black Sox scandal” after the fixed 1919 World Series.

I’m sure I ran into Hugh Fullerton in my reading about the Black Sox over the last forty years or so, yet when I got wondering recently who was the “Woodward & Bernstein” of 1920, no names came to mind — I had to toss the question out to the SABR-L, where it was promptly answered by several fellows with memories better than mine. (Jules Tygiel was first to reply.)

With another Series wandering toward the on deck circle of our consciousness, I decided to dig around some to see if I can give Fullerton some of the credit he deserves.

Hugh S. Fullerton was born in 1873, and according to the reliable Norman L. Macht in the not-always-reliable The Ballplayers (Arbor House, 1990), he was “the best-known baseball writer in the country” for the first quarter of the 20th century. “A titan of the Chicago press box” (Macht), Fullerton graduated from Ohio State College and started writing in Cincinnati in 1889. He moved to Chicago seven years later. His role in the Black Sox scandal rated one line in The Ballplayers. He went on after that to write several books, including some fiction. “One of the founders of the BBWAA, he was awarded the J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 1964.”

David Q. Voigt

In David Q. Voigt’s “Brief History of American Baseball” in The Baseball Encyclopedia (8th Edition), “news of the [Black Sox] scandal broke” — period. In Voigt’s longer version, in Total Baseball (3rd Edition), “breaking news stories of that scandal overshadowed stories of the 1920 pennant race” — period. I was starting to get upset with David Q. Voigt, whom I met and whom I greatly admire, when I turned to some of his own histories in my library.

In American Baseball, Vol. II, Voigt quotes Fullerton often in describing how the early game evolved — with Fullerton lobbying for “more dash, less mechanical work, more brains by individuals and fewer orders from the bench.” He argued in print for more discipline to curb rowdyism, but also gave a voice to the players who felt stifled by the system. Voigt ranks Fullerton with Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice and Franklin P. Adams — all- star company — as individual stylists. “In 1919 it was Fullerton’s detective work that unraveled the web of fact and rumor and exposed the crooked work of the ‘Black Sox.'”

Rumors of the fix were “widespread and detailed,” and were not confined to the playing field and locker room. A hundred reporters must have heard them, but Hugh Fullerton was “inquisitive” and “tracking down rumors was a joy of [his] life.” His “tireless digging” was assisted by Christy Mathewson, who had covered the Series for a New York paper. Matty became Fullerton’s “expert witness,” diagramming each questionable play.

When Fullerton’s articles appeared, with Matty’s diagrams and Fullerton’s own discoveries about the fix, the fixers and the money, they were widely read, and largely dismissed as “improbable muckraking.” After all, he was attacking an American, if not a sacred institution. But his charges led to four independent investigations — even Bill Veeck of the Cubs “hired detectives to dig into the tale,” with large monetary rewards being offered for hard evidence. With teams of sleuths sent out by the NL, AL, White Sox and Cubs, the lid was soon lifted and the rest of the story is familiar.

Other Baseball Historians’ Takes

How has Fullerton fared with other baseball historians? In Our Game: An American Baseball History (Holt, 1991), Charles C. Alexander gives him and Matty due credit. “Comparing notes, [they] marked seven plays by the White Sox as highly suspect. In several articles over the winter, Fullerton not only questioned the honesty of the Series but discussed specific plays by specific players that had convinced him that something was amiss.”

According to Alexander, Comiskey learned of the throwing of the series from a gambler named Harry Redmond; rather than go public and wreck his team, he “flamboyantly offered a $10,000 reward” (some sources have $20,000, but most say $10,000) to anyone with information. (He also delayed sending his players their losing Series shares!) In The World Series, Cohen & Neft state that after Game Two, catcher Schalk was certain that the Series was being tossed, and told manager Gleason, who told owner Comiskey, who told NL President Heydler (because Comiskey and AL prez Ban Johnson were feuding), but Heydler told Ban Johnson anyway.

Fullerton’s editorial crusade was all uphill, because there was a strong sentiment and belief, widely held, that baseball was just too hard to fix. Alexander cites several “experts” who had espoused this view, including Monty Ward. (I have suggested that its unpredictability made baseball very attractive to the gambling scene, but its apparent honest face was surely a factor as well.) But Fullerton insisted that all it took was “honest players not squealing on their corrupt teammates” — a strike against Buck weaver’s case, I suppose, and I’m not sure that I agree with him, but it’s a good point to ponder. What about the silent majority of the White Sox, and their manager?

In Baseball, An Illustrated History (Knopf, 1994), Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns state that Fullerton smelled something fishy before the first Series pitches were tossed. The rumors were flooding the streets, because the money being bet was shifting rapidly away from the Sox, to the Reds. (Aylesworth & Minks, in The Encyclopedia of Baseball Managers, have the odds swinging before Game One from 3-1 Sox to 8-5 Reds.) They quote one NY gambler saying, “You couldn’t miss it. The thing had a rot. I saw smart guys take even money on the Sox who should have been asking five to one.” Fullerton wired all the papers with whom he was syndicated: ADVISE ALL NOT TO BET ON THIS SERIES. UGLY RUMORS AFLOAT.

This raises the question of whether Fullerton really knew about the fix before Game One — his hotel lobby was filled with gamblers (Ward & Burns.) In any case, he had strong suspicions, so he (and Matty) were looking for evidence from the start.

Ward and Burns note that Fullerton’s crusade started in his column following Game Four, a 2-0 Cicotte loss. Cicotte had pitched a terrific game, but made a wild fielding throw to open the doors for the Reds, who won when a high fly ball was carried by the wind over Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was playing in. Fullerton wrote: “There is more ugly talk and more suspicion among the fans than there has ever been in any World Series. The rumors of crookedness, of fixed games and plots, are thick. It is not necessary to dignify them by telling what they are, but the sad part is that such suspicion of baseball is so widespread.”

What happened during the Series made Fullerton’s case harder to make. The gamblers did not deliver the promised big bucks. Some money was delivered, but a fraction of what was promised. Probably after game five, the White Sox realized that they were being had, and decided to strike back by winning the Series and claiming the bigger prize money the old-fashioned way — by earning it. Down four games to one, they took Game Six, 5-4 with Gandil knocking in the winning run. Then they took Game Seven, behind Cicotte’s pitching and Jackson’s hitting, 4-1. But Game Eight slipped away early — it was Lefty Williams’ third loss — as the Reds pounded out 16 hits in a 10-5 rout.

According to Ward & Burns, something else happened. The White Sox change of pace in games Six and Seven must have panicked the gamblers, who had huge sums down on the Reds to take the Series. Arnold Rothstein, “Mr Bankroll,” “is said to have arranged for a Chicago thug … to pay a call on Lefty Williams, who was to pitch the eighth game.” The thug, “Harry F.”, made Lefty an offer he could not refuse — he threatened his life, and that of his wife, if Lefty was still on the mound after the first inning. Lefty kept the threat to himself, and was pulled with one out after giving up four straight hits, but avoiding his own.

In The World Series (Dial Press, 1979), Cohen and Neft state that “One gambler told writer Hugh Fullerton before the [8th] game, ‘All the betting’s on Cincinnati. It’s going to be the biggest first inning you ever saw.'” (Cohen and Neft’s book was my second source for checking out the play-by-play about those triples. The book has a solid reputation.)

Ward & Burns report Fullerton’s parting shot after the Series. “There will be a lot of inside stuff that is never printed.” And he called on the club owners to call off the World Series, to make 1919 the last — because he felt the game was now in the control of gamblers. Instead, life went on, and would have continued with the 1919 fix being swept neatly under the carpet, if Fullerton had stopped writing about it in October 1919.

Dorothy Mills tells me that she and her late husband Harold Seymour “worked hard on the Black Sox chapter, ‘Baseball’s Darkest Hour,’ for Baseball: The Golden Age,” which I still need to acquire for my library. Somewhere in their extensive research they confirmed the death threat to Lefty Williams’ life and wife, and she notes that Lefty’s wife confirmed this, years later. SABRite Francis Kinlaw tells me that Harvey Frommer’s 1992 book Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball has Williams testifying about the death threat. William A. Cook’s The 1919 World Series: What Really Happened? has the detail that Williams would have been shot while on the mound if he didn’t comply.

The Problem of Buck Weaver

What about Buck Weaver? One of the documents Ward & Burns include in their book is a letter from Buck to Commissioner Ford Frick in 1953. At age 63 (he would die three years later), Buck Weaver was still trying to clear his name with MLB. He insisted that he “knew nothing,” “played a perfect series,” and when he sued, after he was banned from baseball, that he deserved the pay for the last year of his contract (for 1921), he won, which (in Buck’s view) proved that he was right and Comiskey wrong. Of course, Landis never dealt with Buck as a separate case. Buck might have argued that he was standing up for a high principle: loyalty to his teammates, right or wrong. He would not “squeal” on them any more than he would talk about clubhouse secrets to the press. He might have insisted that such trust was as important as the ability to bunt, and if players were expected to “spy” on each other, they would be policing the game — that was management’s job, not labor’s. I think any player’s union would argue the same way.

Buck could not have argued team chemistry — the Sox were not at all close-knit. The Chicago Historical Society — more on their web site below — says there was “constant infighting, marked by jealousy and verbal abuse.” The Sox were poster boys for workplace harassment. CHS: The team was divided into two cliques, one led by 2B Eddie Collins, the other by Chick Gandil. Collins’ faction was educated, sophisticated, and able to negotiate salaries as high as $15,000; Gandil’s less polished group, who earned an average of $6,000, bitterly resented the difference.”

When you put the Black Sox Scandal under a microscope, I think you must conclude that while the eight men out were all involved, and paid for their “services,” there were certainly different degrees of guilt. Cicotte and Williams both losing two games is just not on a scale as utilityman Fred McMullin (who batted just twice — a useless pinch single in a 9-1 loss; and he made the final out with two on, in a 4-2 Reds win. According to The Sporting News, Conlon Collection 1039, McMullin took Gandil’s spot as chief liaison with gamblers in 1920; “the conspirators were forced to throw key games under threat of being exposed.”) If you think that the punishment fit the crime — banishment because they all accepted money from gamblers — then where does that leave Buck Weaver, who not only received no money, but played a terrific Series?

If you think Weaver should have been banished because he knew what was going on but said nothing — some believe Jackson did the same — do you also think that none of the other Sox knew what was happening? What about the catcher, Ray Schalk, whose signs were repeatedly shook off or ignored by Cicotte and Williams? Or Kid Gleason, the manager? A number of sources report Schalk physically fighting with Williams under the grandstand, after Game Two, and then complaining to Gleason. According to The Sporting News, Conlon card 1033, Schalk refused to talk about the scandal, even decades later. “Let it die.”

And what Charles Comiskey himself, who was known to gamble himself. Is it thinkable that Weaver and others felt going to Gleason and/or Comiskey was unnecessary, because what was happening on the field (and in the betting parlors) was so obvious? The only real question was, which players were in on the scheme? And it may well be that Gandil and probably Williams were the only ones who were sure about that.

And it appears that Cincinnati players were also approached by gamblers, and said nothing — see “Reminiscing” below — maybe it was so commonplace that it was literally unremarkable.

Buck Weaver may not have justice, but he does have his own web site, so there’s hope. I recommend www.gingerkid.com

History and Fiction — Often Confused

I have more baseball history books, some quite large, which do not mention Hugh S. Fullerton at all. They seem to mention the Black Sox scandal itself only grudgingly. Typically, the eight men out are listed as if they all were equally guilty, as if they all grew rich by conspiring, successfully, to throw the Series. History books are funny that way.

I also have at hand a novel about the 1919 Series. Brendan Boyd wrote Blue Ruin in 1991, and I recommend it, even though I am not going to review it here. It is a terrific read and full of research — you really feel taken back to 1919. In Blue Ruin you will meet the gamblers more than the players — it is all about the money, not the baseball. By its end, you will know the gamblers’ names as well as the eight men out.

Boyd writes of Fullerton: “Hugh took baseball very seriously. He’d been covering it in Chicago for years … To him it represented everything America was supposed to be, but wasn’t. He resented the way it had begun to be manipulated. What bothered him most was the blatancy of it all, the assumption that moneyed interests could conspire to keep it quiet.”

Boyd describes Fullerton locking himself up in a storage closet and banging out his indictment, then being told a few days later, “We can’t use this,” without further explanation, by his Herald & Examiner editor. He has Fullerton travel to New York to get his charges in print. When I asked about this on the SABR-L, Trey Strecker replied that the Chicago paper did reject Fullerton’s work, worrying about libel suits. So Fullerton broke the story, “Is Big League Baseball Being Run for Gamblers?,” in the December 15, 1919, issue of The NY Evening World.

You would expect that article to be in one of the Fireside books edited by Charles Einstein — but none of Fullerton’s work is in there. It’s not in John Thorn’s Armchair Book of Baseball, either. It’s omission must be considered conspicuous.

Incidentally, the term “Black Sox” predates the scandal, and is a particularly appropriate name for it. If the root of the fix was Comiskey’s tightness with his money and his deceitful ways with his employees, “Black Sox” sums that up. Comiskey was so cheap, he decided to take the cost of laundering the uniforms out of the players’ paychecks. In response, the Sox refused to wash their unis — which got quite dirty. Hence the name. (The rest of the story? One version is that Comiskey gave in, paid for the laundering, then deducted the cost from the Sox’ World Series’ shares! Another has him removing the uniforms from the lockers and fining the players.)

A web site worth visiting is www.chicagohs.org — Chicago’s Historical Society. There you can click on links to learn all kinds of things about the Chicago Fire, Al Capone, the Stockyards, and of course, the Black Sox Scandal. On Comiskey, the site notes that he once promised them a big bonus for delivering a pennant. They did, and were rewarded with a “case of cheap champagne.”

Shoeless Joe

In the country of baseball, Shoeless Joe Jackson remains a controversial figure, made sympathetic by Field of Dreams and a forgiving 1998 Bob Feller and Ted Williams, who appreciated fine hitters. (Ted’s case, originally in Total Sports, can also be found in the 1998 SABR National Pastime and the SABR-L Archive.) Joe’s absence from the Hall of Fame, despite his credentials, has gotten a lot of attention because of the Pete Rose affair. If the players involved were all Fred McMullins (McMullin was a utility infielder who bullied his way into the conspiracy), well, the throwing of games would have been much harder — but the scandal would have been much less sensational. With Joe Jackson’s name, the event became huge — the O.J. Simpson case of its day.

Besides that great nickname, Joe Jackson had a swing that, it is said, Babe Ruth emulated. He batted his way out of the mills of South Carolina into the country’s imagination, with a .408 average his first full season, 1911. He never hit below .300 after that, and his .356 lifetime is a well-known stat. Less known facts: he played more games for Cleveland than Chicago; he broke into MLB with the A’s; he was traded to Cleveland in 1910 even-up for Bris “The Human Eyeball” Lord, who went on to hit .310 in 1911 and .256 lifetime — exactly 100 points under Joe; Jackson was traded to the Sox mid-season 1915 for Braggo Roth, two other players and the curious sum of $31,500; an accident a few years before the scandal almost ended Jackson’s career — he played just 17 games in 1918; he hit .382 with twenty triples in 1920.

Not only was Jackson famous, so was his trademark bat, 48 oz Black Betsy. He apparently named other bats, too — Old Ginril, Big Jim, and Caroliny — and according to Burt Sugar in Rain Delays, Jackson imputed virtues and shortcomings into each one of them. He took his bats south with him for the winter, saying, “Bats are like ballplayers — they hate cold weather.”

I remember being impressed by Lloyd Johnson’s list of seven facts that need to be remembered when Joe Jackson’s case is argued (the list appears in Bill James’ The Baseball Book 1990.)

1. During the series, three triples were hit to left field where Jackson was playing. (Triples normally are rarely hit to left field; almost all triples go to right field and right-center.)

2. In Game 2, Jackson held third base on a ground ball to short with less than two out.

3. In the fourth game, Jackson made a throw on which Eddie Cicotte was charged with an error, leading to a damaging run.

4. In the games which were lost by the Sox, Jackson hit poorly with men in scoring position.

5. Jackson signed a confession.

6. Jackson also told a sportswriter, Westbrook Pegler, that he had “only poked at the ball” in the key games.

7. Jackson accepted $5,000 with the knowledge that the series was being fixed.

On the other hand, in his testimony before the Grand Jury, Jackson argued that he did nothing deliberate on the diamond that led to White Sox losses. Yes, he took the money. Yes, he knew about the plot, but did not attend meetings. (Lots of people hate meetings and avoid them if possible.) Sean Holtz, webmaster of The Baseball Almanac, has posted Jackson’s entire testimony. I read it, beginning to end, and was impressed with Jackson’s answers to the grilling. You can look it up: www.baseball-almanac.com/ws/vrl1919ws.shtml

You can also look up a terrific website that is dedicated to Shoeless Joe: www.blackbetsy.com One interesting “fact” you’ll find on a long list there, is this: “Joe asked to be benched for the Series to avoid any suspicion that he was involved.” If this is true, then Kid Gleason surely knew of the fix from the start. The play-by-play of each game is at this site, too. I decided to check on the three triples to left, #1 on Johnson’s list above.

The first games in Chicago were sold out, and fans stretched like a warning track from left to right, maybe ten deep, and any hit into them was a ground-rule triple. That may have been the case with the first of seven Cincy triples in the Series (Gm 1, 4th inn.), hit over Jackson’s head by a pitcher, whom he was playing shallow — not so unusual. One account I read had the hit going to the fence; another, “into the crowd.”

The next triple (Gm 1, 7th inn.), both sources agree, rolled into the crowd in right for the automatic three bases. And the next — the second in Game 1 (8th inn.) by winning pitcher Dutch Reuther who went 3-3 — went to the fence in deep center.

Kopf’s triple in Game 2 (4th inn.), knocking in two runs in a 4-2 Reds’ victory, by one account went “to the fence in left,” while in another, was “a clean triple to left-center.” Hmm. The second account is the www.blackbetsy.com web site.

Edd Roush’s long hit (Gm 5, 6th inn.) went either into the left-center gap, or deep center. In any event, CF Felsch finally got it, so he was closer — and this became a triple only when the throw to the infield was not handled cleanly. One account notes that the scorer was generous in not charging Felsch with a muff. The last two Reds’ triples of the Series (Neale in Game 6, 4th inn., and Kopf in Gm 8, 5th inn.) both went to right, although one source has the latter hitting the fence in right-center, and the other source has it hugging the RF line! No matter, there were most definitely not “three triples to left.”

Recalling that Jackson was only an average fielder anyway, it appears to me that in the thrown games, Jackson made a number of very good plays, and cannot be blamed for “three triples to left.” On Johnson’s third point, Cicotte messed up, not Joe. On point five, recall Joe was illiterate and using Comiskey’s lawyer. Today, I’m not that impressed with Johnson’s list.

More speculation: if Jackson just said No to his teammates when they offered him money, but took $5,000 when Lefty Williams threw a fat envelope in his room (Lefty & Shoeless were close, some sources say roommates, but for the Series they roomed with their wives, who were also friends) — how to explain this? One way would be to figure that the crooked Sox wanted Joe on their roster, to make it less likely that Comiskey would clean house. Comiskey probably did want a cover-up, of course. And Jackson, if he was playing clean in the Series, probably took the money and shut up (even though it upset his wife that he did) because, like all the Sox, he felt underpaid. If there are envelopes filled with money flying around, and one lands on my bed, hey, my good luck.

A side note on the money: apparently Cicotte was the only one who insisted on some money up front — before the Series; so he wound up with $10,000, while most of the others were stiffed with $5,000. (Cicotte’s salary in 1919 was $5,000.) However, Jackson’s testimony makes you wonder if it was the gamblers, or Gandil, who did the stiffing. The players had only Gandil’s word that he was passing along all the money he was given — $5,000. But there was suspicion that Chick was pocketing the other $15,000 due, himself. Gandil was not returning for the 1920 season, he would not have to face his teammates once the Series ended. Did he take the money and run? He certainly was a wealthy man after October 1919.

The other “Black Sox” players are less famous, even after Eight Men Out, but still live on in the history books. Few recall that they were all acquitted by a Chicago grand jury, along with the gamblers, for lack of evidence. (Fortunately for the gamblers, there was no Kenesaw Mountain Landis who could force them into honest work.) Chicago clearly wanted to believe, and say, “it ain’t so.” So Fullerton’s toughest sell was at home.

I first read about Arnold Rothstein in The Great Gatsby. What? Common knowledge that this guy fixed the 1919 Series and made over a million doing it (according to Boyd, not Fitzgerald)? Indeed, Rothstein is mentioned in most of the histories. The villain was immortalized in literature; Fullerton, the hero, became a footnote.

But for just a moment, let us give Hugh Fullerton his due. His integrity and tenacity — and his typewriter — set baseball on its ear. A brushback pitch the game needed. And let’s not forget to mention two others who also, at some risk, used their newspaper columns to pressure MLB to investigate the Series: Ring Lardner (one of several writers Fullerton discovered, according to Hugh’s bio on the Hall of Fame’s web site), and James Isaminger. Hardly any of the history books mention them.

Reminiscing

About half of the former players interviewed by Lawrence S. Ritter in his classic The Glory of Their Times were active in 1919. Only two of them talked to Ritter (on the record) about the Black Sox, or maybe more did but their stories were edited out because, well, October 1919 was not a glorious time for baseball. Ritter begins his chapter on Edd Roush, the great Cincinnati outfielder, with the famous quote from The Great Gatsby, “the faith of fifty million people” line that Ken Burns used in his film.

Like many Reds players and fans, Edd Roush thought his team won the Series fair and square — until the confessions came out, a year later. He recalled hearing stories about Sox catcher Ray Schalk accusing Lefty Williams, and disgruntled Sox players beating up gamblers who failed to deliver. At some point in the Series Roush was told by a stranger, “They didn’t get the payoff, so from here on they’re going to try to win.” The same stranger later told Roush that some of the Reds were being paid. Roush reported that to manager Pat Moran, who got excited. There was a team meeting held on the spot. Moran asked Hod Eller if he’d been asked to throw today’s game.

”Yep,” Hod said, and Roush recalls “you could hear a pin drop.” Eller continued: “I said if he didn’t get damn far away from me real quick he wouldn’t know what hit him, and the same went if I ever saw him again.”

Roush: “I don’t know whether the whole truth of what went on there with the White Sox will ever come out. Even today [Glory was first published in 1966] nobody really knows exactly what took place. Whatever it was, though, it was a dirty, rotten shame. One thing that’s always overlooked in the whole mess is that we could have beat them no matter what the circumstances!

”Sure, the 1919 White Sox were good. But the 1919 Cincinnati Reds were better. I’ll believe that till my dying day.”

So will William Cook, author of The 1919 World Series: What Really Happened (McFarland, 2001), who argues at book-length that the Reds would have won even if the Sox were trying to win, too.

Heinie Groh: “I still don’t see why the White Sox were supposed to be such favorites to beat us in the 1919 World Series. … Our pitching was just as good as theirs, for sure.

”Well, maybe the White Sox did throw it. I don’t know. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. It’s hard to say. I didn’t see anything that looked suspicious.” [Groh played 3B for the Reds in all eight games.]

Roger Peckinpaugh, interviewed by Donald Honig in Man in the Dugout [also in A Donald Honig Reader], recalled being told by Nemo Leibold, a White Sox player, that the “monkeying around” and “shenanigans” continued in 1920. “You never knew when they were going to go out there and beat your brains out or roll over and play dead. Somebody was betting on those games, that’s a cinch. When they wanted to play, you had a hard time beating them, that’s how good they were.” That gives some credence to the belief that the Sox, feeling (and being) grossly underpaid by Comiskey, had discovered ways to supplement their legitimate incomes. Some writers believe that baseball has always had serious problems with gamblers — before and after the Black Sox. But the scandal of the 1919 World Series fix made the risk clear.

 

For the memories of a White Sox fan who was 15 when he watched the 1919 WS from the bleachers, see “I Remember the Black Sox,” in James T. Farrell’s My Baseball Diary, originally published in 1957. There you will find the roots of “Say it ain’t so” from an eyewitness. Two years after the ban, Jackson, Risberg and Williams tried barnstorming, and the coach of Farrell’s high school team signed on to play with them. He brought Lefty over to pitch batting practice against Farrell and his teammates. “He threw us all straight balls and let us hit. He did not talk to us.” The barnstorming trip was a failure.

A Lesser Scandal

In the Peckinpaugh interview is an unrelated story that I want to relate. Roger was recalling how disliked Ty Cobb was around the league, and told of how the manager of the Browns, Jack O’Conner, told his third baseman to play back against Nap Lajoie, who trailed Cobb by a few points on the last day of the 1910 season. Peckinpaugh recalls Lajoie belting a triple, then noticing the deep 3B, and bunting for hits the rest of the doubleheader, going 8-for-8, but still finishing a point back.

I bring this up because wasn’t this a bit like throwing a game? Nothing big was at stake. Peckinpaugh: “We all knew what was going on, but it was none of our business. Lajoie didn’t say anything. If they wanted to give him base hits, he would take them.” When League prez Ban Johnson found out, according to Peckinpaugh, he saw to it that O’Connor lost his job and was booted out of the American League. Did Johnson have money riding on Ty Cobb winning the batting crown? Just kidding!

Aftermath

Anyone could make superstar

If that ugly saloon-keeper’s kid

Who winked like a con man

Could wash the sport’s black sox clean

– from “Bambino,” in Romancing the Horsehide

Babe Ruth is given much credit for renewing fan interest in baseball after the scandal, much as the McGwire-Sosa HR Duel in 1998 is given credit for bringing back fans turned off by the 1994-95 strike. The 1920’s used to be called “The Golden Age of Sports” — the country found heroes not only in baseball, but in boxing, college football, and many other sports. Of course, the country was also on the rebound from the first World War (and that flu pandemic), and the twenties truly roared.

What of the main figures in the Black Sox scandal? Charles Comiskey — whose “primary sin,” according to Jules Tygiel in Past Time (Oxford U. Press, 2000), was not his tight budget or his slavish management style, but his “subsequent efforts to protect his team and investment by covering up the scandal and undermining the prosecution of the participants” — by, by all account, broken by the scandal. “Although he died a wealthy man in 1931, his estate totaled far less than it might have had the Black Sox scandal not occurred. The priest who delivered his funeral sermon attributed his death to ‘a broken heart'” (Tygiel.)

Torn from his trademark and trade

Banished to roam the countryside

Aching with all his soul

For a reunion that would never happen

– from “Shoeless Joe,” in Romancing the Horsehide

In his Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Paul Dickson traces the “Say it ain’t so, Joe” story to the Chicago Herald and Examiner — Hugh Fullerton’s paper — in which Joe’s reply, “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is” is also reported. But Jackson never admitted any guilt after the scandal, by most accounts, and denied saying anything to anyone after leaving the courtroom. (J.T. Farrell’s account seems much more likely — fans calling out “It ain’t true, Joe,” as he left the ballpark for the last time. The saying is a fixture in our language as “an expression of disbelief or hoped-for denial” (Dickson), but it does not convict Jackson.

Jackson returned to South Carolina, where he surely was welcome to play on the mill and semi-pro teams, when he wasn’t working at his dry-cleaning business, which succeeded. When he passed away in 1951, he was warmly regarded by his friends and neighbors.

Eddie Cicotte, who “did it for the wife and kiddies,” wanted to buy a farm for security. Instead, “he worked many years for the Ford Moter Company in Michigan before he retired.” (Jack Kavanagh in The Ballplayers.) He passed away in 1969.

THE REST OF THE STORY

Believe it or not there is more to this story. Much more. But it will have to wait until next issue. By then I will have more on Hugh Fullerton, after the scandal. I will have a review of Eight Men Out, after my research, and will include excerpts from my report on Elliot Asinof from when he visited Cooperstown in July 1999; if you can’t wait for that, it’s in issue #193 in the Notes archive.

As I was winding this issue down (I thought), I happened to spot in The SABR Review of Books (Vol 2, #1, 1987) a little piece by A.D. Suehsdorf, which both reviewed two books, and compared the cases of Joe Jackson with “Shufflin’ Phil” Douglas. The books were Say It Ain’t So, Joe! by Donald Gropman (Little, Brown, 1979) and One Last Round for the Shuffler by Tom Clark (Pomerica Press, 1979.) There, Suehsdorf writes, “Coverage of the Black Sox mess [in Gropman’s book] is accurate, though standard. By now, there is probably nothing to add to Asinof’s Eight Men Out and Veeck’s Hustler’s Handbook, or, for that matter, John Lardner’s authoritative “Remember the Black Sox?” in a 1938 Saturday Evening Post.”

Asinof’s book has been out of my local library, but I happen to own a fresh, unopened copy of Hustler’s Handbook. I opened it to Chapter 11, “Harry’s Diary — 1919,” and was just stunned with what I found. (Harry is Harry Grabiner, who was the White Sox’ team secretary in 1919. Bill Veeck worked with Harry when they both worked for Wrigley’s Cubs. When Veeck bought the White Sox, he went looking for the diary, and found it, almost literally buried away, hidden, in the catacombs beneath the old Comiskey Park.) Anyway, Veeck’s tale is amazing, and includes one tiny little hint that the Series had been fixed at least once before 1919 — in 1918!

But most of Veeck’s chapter (it’s over 40 pages) deals with the power plays that resulted in Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis winding up in the new Commissioner’s job. Which prompted me to go searching for David Pietrusza’s book on Landis, Judge and Jury, which, like Veeck’s book, has been on my on-deck shelf too long. I hope to have some of that in next issue, too.

I cannot escape the feeling that there is no end to what can yet be uncovered about what happened in October 1919. Woodward and Bernstein, Fullerton and Ring Lardner and James Isaminger must have all felt the same way in their investigating. I’m not sure at what point I got hooked, but I confess that I am. I hope at least some of this is new to the readers of Notes. I have tried to give those whose juices might now be flowing, lots of sources to check out.

Finally — and I mean it this time — next time I take off my reporter’s hat and will give my own opinion on what happened. By then, the playoffs will be in full swing, and we will be anticipating Our Moveable Feast, 2002. Just the distraction I need!