“It Ain’t So: A Might-Have-Been History of the White Sox in 1919 and Beyond”

The author’s second book, It Ain’t So: A Might-Have-Been History of the White Sox in 1919 and Beyond, is scheduled to be released by McFarland Publishing in Fall/Winter 2009.

In 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox famously conspired to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned from organized baseball for life. But what if the Black Sox scandal had never happened? Using computer simulation, this book provides an alternative history of the American League, the White Sox, and the banned players from 1919 through 1932 while chronicling the White Sox organization’s real-life struggles to rebuild its roster.

Introduction

Approximately three weeks before the start of the 1919 World Series, members of the Chicago White Sox began formulating a plot to throw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds for $100,000, setting in motion a chain of events that would alter Organized Baseball’s landscape forever. Within a year of the fix, seven members of the White Sox were suspended, pending further investigation, which affected the outcome of the 1920 American League pennant race (Chick Gandil was not among them because he retired after the 1919 season). Within two years of the fix, eight White Sox were banned for life by baseball’s first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who issued this infamous decree on August 3, 1921. “Regardless of the verdict of juries, 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 players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

Since then, historians have wondered aloud about many unanswered questions: Could the Reds have beaten the heavily-favored White Sox had the latter not thrown the World Series? Could the White Sox have captured the 1920 A.L. pennant had the core of the team not been suspended during the last week of the season? Could the White Sox have challenged the Yankees for American League supremacy in the early 1920s? Where would Joe Jackson rank among the game’s greats had he the benefit of a full, uninterrupted career? And what of the other players who were banned?

To that point in baseball history, the White Sox were considered one of the best teams ever assembled, and Ed Barrow insisted they were, indeed, the best. They had three future Hall of Famers in second baseman Eddie Collins, pitcher Red Faber, and catcher Ray Schalk, and it can be argued that, at the very least, Jackson and pitcher Eddie Cicotte were borderline Hall of Famers who more than likely would have been elected had they enjoyed a few more productive seasons. Centerfielder Happy Felsch, third baseman Buck Weaver, and pitcher Lefty Williams had MVP-caliber talent and perhaps outside shots at a Hall of Fame berth as well.

Rob Neyer feels the White Sox would have challenged the Yankees for the A.L. pennant for at least the first three years of the new Yankee dynasty and I agree. “If not for the suspension of six of their best players,” Neyer wrote in his Big Book of Baseball Lineups, “the White Sox would likely have competed with the Yankees for American League pennants from 1921 through 1923, and perhaps beyond.”

And while it’s impossible to know whether they would have captured the 1920 A.L. flag, it certainly would have been more likely had they a full roster to compete with an Indians team that boasted only a half-game lead at the time of the suspensions, and won the pennant by only two games.

This book attempts to answer the above questions and more. I shed no new light on the gambling scandal, and if that’s what you’re looking for I highly recommend Gene Carney’s book, Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded; Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men out; Susan Dellinger’s Red Legs and Black Sox: Edd Roush and the Untold Story of the 1919 World Series; and William A. Cook’s The 1919 World Series: What Really Happened.

This book is a combination of both fact and fiction, alternating between what really happened and what might have happened. It includes both the actual history of the American League and an alternate history that begins with the 1919 World Series and ends with the 1932 season when the last member of the “Black Sox,” shortstop Swede Risberg, “retired.”

While this book attempts to answer many of the questions left behind by the Black Sox scandal, there’s no way I can definitively say that I, or anyone else for that matter, know what the answers are. The following account is merely one of an infinite number of possibilities. But it’s the only one I have to offer. I hope you enjoy it.

Click here for more detailed excerpts.