The Black Sox Scandal

Some of the Chicago White Sox players confessed to taking a bribe to lose the 1919 World Series on purpose, but they never admitted to actually underplaying. And the collective memory about this whole scandal is very different from how it all played out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
And before we get to our episode, we have a
fun announcement, which is that while we are in Chicago

(00:22):
for our Chicago stop on our tour, we are going
to do a fun thing with museum Hack, which I'm
so excited. Yes, listeners to our show have have heard
about museum Hack before. We are doing a scavenger hunt
at the Art Institute of Chicago. It's going to be
at two pm on the twenty six of October. There
is more information about it on our website or on

(00:43):
the museum Hack website. We've been kind of working on
this behind the scenes after a while and just got
to the point that we were ready to announce it.
So if you are, especially if you're already in Chicago, Uh,
that's going to be I think a fun time for
us the day after our live show there. I am
very excited because it is no secret that I love
a museum and I love and I love the way

(01:06):
that they get people to engage with art and history
and I'm so enthused about this whole thing. I have
the wiggles, yes, And so often on our tours we're
in a place for so little time that we don't
get to have some kind of stuff like that, So
I'm glad we built that in with this one. So anyway,
our website missed. In history dot Com, you'll find more
information about that. And now we will get into the

(01:27):
actual meat of today's episode, which also was coincidentally about Chicago.
We have at least one more episode this year. We
are right in the middle of the anniversary of the
World Series, and that's the one that led to the
Black Sox scandal, after some players from the Chicago White
Sox they took a bribe to lose it on purpose.
There are some players who confess to taking this money,

(01:50):
but whether some are all of them really played their
best after taking the money is hotly debated. Still, like
you can go and read some articles that are still
satistical analyzes of various people's like batting averages during the
season and then what it was like during the World
Series and what did that mean about whether they were
really trying to lose or not. And we're not talking

(02:12):
as much about that today, well, because that's one of
those things that there are so many factors involved in
how anyone in any profession, whether you're a professional piano
player or a professional athlete or anything, how you perform
on any given day is the result of a lot
of different factors. So it's almost impossible to break down
any sort of definitive yes, no answer, whether anyone like

(02:36):
kind of shrugged it off yep. Which all that is
also part of what happened when this all came to trial.
So yeah, there's a lot of discussion about it. So
the collective memory about this whole scandal is also really
pretty different from how it all played out, especially if
your familiarity with it is from stuff like watching Field
of Dreams, Like, uh, some of it's given this really

(02:58):
romanticized air sometime it also i think imagined because of
this whole idea of baseball being a wholesome pastime, that
it's imagined as happening as a more innocent time. But
really this was happening alongside a lot of the other
stuff we've talked about from nineteen nineteen, like Red Summer
and the First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids and
a lot of widespread labor disputes, including the Amalgamated Steel

(03:22):
Strike of nineteen nineteen, which we haven't actually talked about
on the show before. And there's also this imagined version
that baseball was more innocent before this happened. But as
we're going to talk about, none of that is really
the case at all. So first of all, we're gonna
lay some groundwork and give you some context. It is
a myth that baseball was the invention of one single person.

(03:42):
Abner Doubleday, who was a major general in the Union
Army during the Civil War, is often credited as having
created the sport in Cooperstown, New York, in eighteen thirty nine,
but he wasn't in Cooperstown at that time. He was
at West Point. He also never said that he invented baseball.
Had a art from all that baseball existed before eighteen

(04:03):
thirty nine, when, according to the story, Abner double Day
invented it. Variations of it developed in multiple United States
cities in the eighteenth century. They were largely inspired by
the English games of rounder and cricket. Uh there, I
mean there are also other There are Native American ball
games that involve balls and sticks in some way, but
they have more in common with like lacrosse and basketball,

(04:25):
and baseball really ties back to those English games more.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, baseball was known
not as an adaptation of an English game, though, but
as an innately American sport, and it had also become
extremely popular. The New York Mercury described it as the
national pastime on December five, eighteen fifty six. The idea

(04:47):
that the sport had been double Day's creation was intentionally
spread by a commission that was established to research baseball's
origins in the early twentieth century. The commission gave Doubledaid
the credit in nineteen oh a eight, and by that
point he had been dead for fifteen years, so he
was not around to set the record straight. Part of
the commission's goal in propagating this myth was to reinforce

(05:10):
this American origin story for the sport, because baseball had
taken on a symbolic significance that had come to be
imagined as uniquely embodying American values like loyalty, patriotism, hard work,
team play, and sporting behavior, and also community spirit and
civic pride. As cities and towns became home to their

(05:30):
own baseball teams and developed rivalries with their neighbors. In
our previous podcast on Walt Whitman, we talked about how
Whitman tried to both reflect upon and shape the consciousness
of the United States through his writing in the nineteenth century,
and this included baseball. Whitman's biographer Horace Traubel recalled a
conversation they had in eighteen eighty nine in which Troubl

(05:53):
called baseball quote the Hurrah game of the Republic, and
Whitman replied, quote, that's beautiful, the Harague game. Well, it's
our game. That's the chief fact in connection with it.
America's game has the snap go fling of the American atmosphere,
belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as
significantly as our constitutions laws. Is just important in the

(06:17):
sum total of our historic life. The idea of baseball
was also connected to the assimilation of immigrants into what
was regarded as mainstream white American life, and the words
of sportswriter Hugh Fullerton quote, baseball, to my way of thinking,
is the greatest single force working for americanization. No other
game appeals so much to the foreign born. Nothing, not

(06:41):
even the schools teaches the American spirit so quickly or
inculcates the idea of sportsmanship or fair play as thoroughly.
As is clear from a lot of episodes in our archive,
the United States has never thoroughly lived up to these
ideals that baseball was meant to embody and the same
as true or baseball itself. There was really never an

(07:03):
idyllic time when baseball was wholesome, clean, pure, and unencumbered
by the same social issues that were affecting the rest
of the nation. For example, racial segregation in baseball got
it start in eighteen sixty seven, and Major League baseball
was officially segregated twenty years later. Baseball struggled with labor
rights issues as well. Today, major League baseball salaries ranged

(07:26):
from five hundred fifty thousand dollars to thirty five million
dollars a year. But at first baseball was a strictly
amateur sport. Then that meant that only people who could
afford not to work could afford to play baseball, although
some people were paid in secret even though it was
against the rules. Gradually, though baseball became a professional sport,
the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first fully professional team

(07:48):
in eighteen sixty nine, and the National Association became the
first professional baseball league two years later. Baseball became an
industry that still presented itself as a national pastime instead
of a business, sidestepping the idea that playing baseball for
a living was work, and professional baseball did this pretty successfully.
In nine two, after most of the events that we're

(08:11):
talking about today, the U. S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled
that Major League Baseball did not violate the Sherman Antitrust
Act because even though professional baseball involved teams traveling from
state to state, which players were paid for their work
and spectators were paying to watch, that this did not
constitute interstate commerce. While playing professional baseball is work, baseball

(08:34):
players didn't have a lot of rights or protections as workers.
For example, players often signed contracts with teams that covered
a specific number of seasons, but a reserve clause meant
that they were still tied to that team, sometimes in perpetuity,
until they were formally released, even if they were not
actively playing anymore. Often, contracts stipulated that players could be

(08:55):
sold or traded to other teams without any say in
the matter, and these contracts placed a lot of restrictions
on players without giving them much job security. Many included
attend a release clause, which allowed teams to terminate contracts
with little notice and without cause. All these contractual stipulations
meant that players didn't have a lot of negotiating power

(09:17):
a lot of the time, and they also weren't paid
well enough to support themselves after their time as a
player was over. Baseball teams didn't have pensions or retirement plans,
and a lot of players started playing ball professionally when
they were young. They had little to know education or
training and other work, so when age or injury or
some other circumstance led to the end of their baseball career,

(09:39):
they didn't have another way to support themselves, and they
were thought of as being too old to not already
have a way to earn a living. I'm not saying
there are no more labor issues in baseball or any
other professionals were, but some of these have improved somewhat
since then. An assigned from these issues there was the
gambling and corruption. The blacks Box weren't the first players

(10:01):
to be banned from baseball either temporarily or permanently because
of gambling. The National Association that we mentioned a few
moments ago lasted for less than five years, in part
because widespread gambling raised questions about the sports legitimacy. In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it wasn't particularly
frowned upon for players to bet on their own games,

(10:22):
and it was also common for gamblers to pay players
for tips like insider knowledge about who was recovering from
an injury or which players were expected to take the
field that day. Basically any little tidbit of information that
might give one better an edge when making wagers. Some
gamblers essentially had players on their payroll on an ongoing

(10:43):
basis for this purpose, and long before the black Socks scandal,
the influence of gambling on the sport went beyond paying
for information and into bribing players to influence the outcome
of the game. Paying players to throw a game goes
back at least to eighteen sixty five, when a gambler
paid a player for the New York Mutuals to make
sure that their opponent won in the next day's game.

(11:06):
In nineteen o five, Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Rube Woodell injured
his shoulder and missed the end of the season, including
the World Series. People raised some suspicions at the time
about whether that injury was genuine or not, and then,
in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal, allegations surface
that he had been paid seventeen thousand dollars to fake

(11:26):
an injury and sit out of the World Series. In
ninety seven, former White Sox shortstop Charles Risberg, known as Swede,
told the Chicago Tribune about a string of fixed games
during the nineteen seventeen season. According to his account, the
White Sox and the Detroit Tigers played two doubleheaders that September.
The Socks won all four of them, purportedly because the

(11:48):
Tigers had been paid to lose them. Risburg also said
that in nineteen nineteen, the White Sox through three games
against the Tigers as a sort of thank you. And
these are just examples, so and several players from the
Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the World
Series in exchange for money. This wasn't a plot that
just sprang out of nowhere. Sullying and otherwise pristine and

(12:11):
above board sport basically this kind of behavior had been
going on for so long, essentially unchallenged, that multiple players
from the White Sox thought they could fix the World
Series and get away with it. We will talk more
about it after a sponsor break. The Black Sox scandal

(12:34):
followed the end of World War One. The United States
had entered the war in April of nineteen seventeen, and
at first the sport of baseball continued on, with the
White Sox winning the World Series that November. But by
nineteen eighteen things had changed. A lot of players had
either volunteered to join the military or had been drafted.
In July of that year, Secretary of War Newton D.

(12:54):
Baker issued a work or Fight Order, which required men
who were eligible for the draft to either join the
military or work in an industry that was critical to
the war, rather than in non essential vocations. Baseball wasn't
specifically described as non essential, but it was definitely perceived
that way, and baseball players who didn't enlist or go

(13:16):
to work in a critical industry faced increasing criticism. Some
who did go to work in a critical industry also
spent more time playing for the company ball team than
working Toward the war, effort. The major leagues considered suspending
games altogether, but instead shortened the season and held the
World Series at the start of September rather than later.

(13:37):
In the fall, the Boston Red Sox defeated the Chicago
Cubs four games to two. Germany surrendered in World War
One on November eleven, en Although the Treaty of Versailles
that formally ended the war wasn't signed until the following year,
this meant that the war was over in time for
the nineteen nineteen baseball season to at least in theory,

(13:57):
get back to normal. Normal for the White Sox involved
some tensions between players and management. Elliott Asanov's book Eight
Men Out, which was published in nineteen sixty three, was
the go to source about the Black Sox scandal for decades,
and he made the claim that White Sox owner Charles
Komiskey was vastly under paying his team and that this

(14:17):
grudge led to several players willingness to participate in this scheme.
But really, the White Sox payroll at the start of
the season was a little over eighty eight thousand dollars,
which was more than ten thousand dollars higher than their
nineteen nineteen World Series opponent, the Cincinnati Reds. Some of
the White Sox players were the highest paid in the
league for their positions. What the White Sox did have

(14:40):
was huge pay disparities, with some of its best players
making the smallest amounts of money. Eddie Collins, who played
second base, was paid fourteen thousand, five hundred dollars a year,
but the average salary of the players who were implicated
in this conspiracy to throw the World Series were paid
more than ten thousand dollars less than the so Money

(15:01):
and grievances with Komiskey were surely a factor in all this,
but it was a lot more complicated than basically the
players being so low paid that they had no choice
other than to take this bribe. Some depictions of the
Black Sox scandal also make it seem as though the
players were hapless rubes drawn in by conniving gangsters, but
really it was the players who first proposed this scheme.

(15:23):
Arnold Gandel known as Chick, who played first base, and
picture Eddie Sikat were the instigators of this plot. They
reached out to gamblers, including Joseph Sullivan known as Sport.
In September of nineteen nineteen. Then Gandel and Scott recruited
other players to help them with the fix. At the time,
a White Sox victory was thought of as pretty much

(15:43):
a sure thing. The Cincinnati Reds were champions in their league,
but the White Sox were considered to be the far
superior team. Odds of a White Sox win were set
at five to one, so people who bet that they
would lose had the potential for a huge payout. As
a surprising number of bets rolled in against the White Sox,
some of them surprisingly large, Rumors started to spread that

(16:06):
something fishy was going on. Syndicated sportswriter Hugh Fullerton wired
a note to all the papers that were printing his
work which read, quote advisal not to bet on this series.
Ugly rumors afloat Early in Game one, Eddie Succott was
pitching for the White Sox and he hit Red's player
Mari Wrath, and that was reportedly a signal to betters

(16:26):
that White Sox players were going to throw the game.
As agreed. The White Sox did lose that game with
a score of one to nine. Insiders were immediately suspicious.
Some of them had heard rumors of a fix in
the works before the game had even started. White Sox
manager William kidd Gleason thought the team just had not
been playing the way he'd seen them play all season,

(16:47):
and that concerned him. He went to Komiskey about it,
and Comiskey went to American League president Van Johnson, but
at that point nothing came of their concerns. The White
Sox lost game too as well, but then they won
Game three, and that game Dicky Kerr was pitching, and
he was not in on this conspiracy to throw the series.
So it's possible that the conspiring players just were not

(17:10):
able to perform badly enough to offset his pitching. But
it's also possible that they were trying to send a
message to the gamblers because after Games one and two,
they had not received their promise payouts for throwing the games,
and they wanted their money. The World Series continued on
from there, with the Reds winning games four and five,
and then the White Sox winning games six and seven.

(17:32):
Then the Reds won the series with Game eight, winning
five games to the White Soxes three. I was doing
the thing where my husband and I were in the
car and I was recapping everything that I had written
for this episode, and normally, uh, it would end in
game seven. So I kept naming more games that had
been one or loss than he was, like, how many

(17:54):
games were there? It's gonna be the best of nine.
This fishions about the White Sox performance had continued all
through the World Series. Kmiskey, g Lisa, and others tied
to the White Sox management tried to investigate. Afterward, Comiskey
went to maclay Hoyne, who was the state's attorney for
Cook County, Illinois, and as Hoyne related it, Comiskey told

(18:17):
him that he thought some of his players had jobbed him.
In his word, Comiskey asked for help in figuring that out.
It was clear that something had happened, and eventually Gamblers
confirmed to Comiskey that the series had been rigged, but
he and others in the team's management thought it would
be in their best interests to keep things quiet. They
even signed new contracts with players who had been part

(18:39):
of the scheme, with those players getting raises as part
of the deal. Others, though, were not so interested in
covering up the fix of the World Series. Sports journalists
saw the same suspicious disparities and how the White Sox
had been playing during the World Series versus how they
had been playing during the regular season. Hugh full Lerton,

(19:00):
in particular, had a notebook full of suspicious plays that
he had kept track of during the games. Fullerton published
an article in The New York World on December twelfth,
nineteen nineteen, titled Big League Baseball being run for gamblers,
with ballplayers in on the deal. The next day, Callier's
I published an article by Frank O. Klein stating that

(19:22):
White Sox catcher Ray Schalk had named several teammates who
would not be part of the nineteen twenty season, implying
that it was because they had thrown the World Series.
The players he named were pitchers Claude Lefty Williams and
Eddie Saccott, first baseman Chick Gandle, infielder Fred McMullen, shortstop
Charles Swede Risburg, and outfielders Oscar Happy Felsh and Joe

(19:44):
Jackson That's also known as Shoeless Joe. You might think
these allegations would have immediately ended the players careers, but
they did not. Most returned to the field during the
nineteen twenties season. With many of those same players named
Inklins articles allegedly can tinuing to fix games. This was
to the immense frustration of their teammates who were not

(20:05):
in on this fix, who made comments to the press
about how the dirty players weren't trying or were actively
working against the players who were actually trying to win.
In August of nineteen twenty, the White Sox were first
in the league and seemed poised to win the pennant,
but suddenly lost seven games in a row. Three were
against the Boston Red Sox, which before that point was

(20:27):
in fifth place. And while it is totally possible for
a great team to suddenly hit a losing streak, multiple
players who weren't implicated in the nineteen nineteen fix were
convinced that their teammates were once again throwing games. After
one of the Boston games, pictured, Dickie Kerr had a
heated encounter with Buck Weaver and Swede Risburg, telling them quote,

(20:48):
if you told me you wanted to lose this game,
I could have done it a lot easier. But eventually,
even though there had been no consequences before this point,
the nine World Series fix did lead eight members of
the Chicago White Sox to be banned from Major League
Baseball for life. We will talk more about that. After
a sponsor break in September of a grand jury investigation

(21:18):
in Cook County, Illinois was looking into allegations of a
potentially fixed game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies,
which had been played the month before. American League President
Ban Johnson encouraged Presiding Judge Charles A. McDonald to include
the allegations of a fix in the World Series to
this investigation, and soon that was the grand jury's primary focus.

(21:42):
Grand Jury proceedings are generally kept secret in the United States,
but in this case they were not. Newspapers carried reports
detailing exactly what was going on, some of which included
word for word testimony, and his words spread that baseball
players were confessing to having taken a bribe to throw
the World Series. The general public felt deeply betrayed. There

(22:04):
was the possibly apocryphal exchange with Joe Jackson outside the
courthouse when someone described as a newsboy, a reporter, or
a random child, depending on the version of the story
you hear, plaintively said quotes say it ain't so Joe.
A few years later, f Scott Fitzgerald included a fictionalized
version of Arnold Rothstein, who was believed to have financed

(22:24):
this whole scheme in The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby's words,
he had played with the faith of fifty million people.
On September ninety eight, players were indicted for conspiring to
defraud the public and injure the business of Charles Chemiskey
and the American League. They were the same players who
had been named in Collier's I back in nineteen nineteen,

(22:47):
along with the addition of George Weaver known as Buck,
who played third base. Weaver maintained his innocence for the
rest of his life, saying he had not taken any
money and had played his best during the series. Sacha Williams, Jackson,
and Felsh all admitted to the grand jury that they
had taken the bribe. Jackson's testimony included that he had

(23:07):
been promised twenty thousand dollars but had only gotten five thousand.
The four confessing players also implicated the others in their testimony,
but they didn't admit to actually throwing the game once
the bribe had been taken. Lefty Williams also named several
gamblers who were involved, some of whom were also indicted.
But then the nine election disrupted these proceedings, with Republicans

(23:31):
asking Democrats in Illinois and much of the rest of
the country. The new prosecutors taking over at the County
States Attorney's Office, found that the case that they were
inheriting from the previous administration needed a lot of work.
The previous prosecutors had been relying on the players who
had confessed to turn state's evidence, so they had not
really built much of a case beyond that. But by

(23:54):
this point those players had secured legal representation, and they
clearly had no intention of testifying against their teammates. As
this was happening, former federal judge Kennasa Mountain Landis was
appointed as the first Commissioner of Baseball. He took office
on December twelfth, y replacing the three man National Commission
that had governed Major League Baseball previously. He was appointed to,

(24:17):
in the words of National League President John Hadler quote,
rule with an iron hand. Prosecutors hoped to delay the
trial to allow them some more time to build a
better case than the one that they had inherited, but
in February of one. Judge William E. Denver, denied a
motion to postpone and set a very speedy trial date instead.

(24:39):
The state's attorney's office didn't feel like the case was
winnable in the time that they had to pull it
all together, so State's Attorney Robert E. Krow dropped all
the charges. But then they paneled a new grand jury,
which reindicted all the original defendants plus five more gamblers.
The prosecution had an interesting challenge ahead of it in
Illinois at the time. If two parties planned to commit

(25:00):
an unlawful act that was enough to support a charge
of conspiracy, it did not matter whether they had actually
carried out their plan, and the unlawful act itself was
a different charge. So if two people conspired to kidnap someone,
for example, they could still be charged with conspiracy regardless
of whether they actually did it. If they did, the
kidnapping itself would be considered a separate crime. So that

(25:23):
aspect of Illinois law was helpful to the prosecution, because,
like we talked about at the top of the show,
it's really difficult to prove that eight players really lost
some baseball games on purpose. The ones who had confessed
had confessed only to taking the bribe, not to throwing
the games. And you can come up with all kinds
of reasons to explain somebody's poor performance in a baseball game.

(25:45):
But the situation was still complicated because a conspiracy is
a plan to commit an unlawful act, and at the time,
there wasn't anything unlawful about losing a baseball game on purpose.
That's why the indictments were framed as a matter of
fraud and injury to the business of the team's owner
and the league. But even this was on kind of

(26:05):
shaky legal ground. There was another game fixing case in
California that had been thrown out of court when prosecutors
tried to make a similar argument. These were not the
only challenges that the prosecutors were facing. Hearsay evidence was
admissible before the grand jury, but not in a criminal trial,
and a lot of the testimony given before the grand

(26:25):
jury was hearsay. Also, most of the people involved who
weren't ball players didn't live in Illinois, and some of
them just didn't bother to show up for court. Of
the indicted gamblers, the only ones to stand trial were
Carl Zorke, David Zelzer and Ben and lou Levy. I
read various amusing accounts of when you have someone who

(26:46):
is a criminal who lived somewhere else and you want
them to come to court in another state. They had
some challenges trying to make that happen. In the end,
the prosecutors star witness was Bill Burns, also known as
Sleepy Bill, who was a former Major league pitcher who
had gone into the oil business. He and Billy Maharg
had served as go betweens between the players and the

(27:07):
gangsters who were financing this whole scheme. The most famous
of these financiers was Arnold Rothstein, who he mentioned earlier,
but he was not indicted or tried in connection to
this plot. A lot of people think he was like
the major source of money for all this not a
thing that was conclusively proven. The trial started in June
of before a jury of white men who all said

(27:30):
they were not baseball fans, and in the end, after
deliberating for less than three hours and taking one vote,
they found all the defendants not guilty on all counts.
There are a lot of accounts that say that this
was because all of the evidence was stolen ahead of
the trial, so that there was nothing to go on,
and the original transcriptions of the grand jury testimony were stolen,

(27:54):
but these were transcriptions that had been made from shorthand
notes that were kept during the proceedings. Those no still existed,
so they were just retranscribed for the trial. Nobody seemed
to have any doubt about whether the second round of
transcriptions was accurate or valid. The defense did not raise
any questions about whether they were as part of their defense.

(28:15):
The prosecution was shocked at this outcome, and so were
a lot of other people. There's been a lot of
speculation into why the jury reached the verdict that they did.
After all, four of the players had confessed to taking
the bribe, and Bill Burns and Billy Mahag had made
confessions on the gamblers side. Those confessions were read at
the trial. However, because hearsay evidence wasn't admissible, the transcripts

(28:40):
had to be edited to remove references to things that
other people had said. Those names were all replaced with Mr. Blank,
and this rendered the transcribe testimony both confusing and frankly boring.
The case against the players also rested on the idea
that their actions in the world series had harmed the
business Charles Komiskey and of their league, but White Sox

(29:03):
club secretary Harry Gravener testified that the team's revenues had
actually gone up in nine. It's possible that the mostly
blue collar jury sympathized with the mostly blue collar players.
Joe Jackson, for example, didn't know how to read or write,
and he started working in a textile mill in his
early teens. There's also been some speculation that this was

(29:24):
a case of jury nullification, which is basically when a
jury returns a not guilty verdict in spite of believing
the defendant to be guilty because they believed that the
law was unjust or immoral, or otherwise to send some
kind of moral or emotional message about the case. But also,
in the words of one anonymous juror, quote, we thought

(29:45):
the state presented a weak case. It was dependent on
Bill Burns, and Burns did not make a favorable impression
on us, but Major League Baseball and the White Sox
specifically didn't really care that they had been found not guilty.
Comiskey suspended seven of the players in definitely after the
verdicts were read. Eddie Saccad had already been suspended over
a paid dispute, and then Kenna saw Mountain. Landis banned

(30:08):
all eight men from Major League Baseball for life, and
his words quote, regardless of the verdict of juries, no
player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains, proposes,
or promises to throw a game, No player that sits
in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers
where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed,

(30:29):
and does not promptly tell his club about it, will
ever play professional baseball. This last bit that Tracy just
read was his reason for denying Buck Weaver's repeated requests
to be reinstated. Although we've maintained that he had taken
no money and had played fairly, he had known about
the fix, and he hadn't spoken up. Landis's lifetime ban

(30:50):
of the players circled back around to that idea of
baseball that as something that was uniquely important to American culture,
and Landis's words quote, Baseball is some thing more than
a game. To an American boy. It is his training
field for life. Work. Destroy his faith in its squareness
and honesty, and you have destroyed something more. You have

(31:11):
planted suspicion of all things in his heart, which to
me means this was as much about protecting the sport
of baseball as it was to protecting men's feelings. The
same sentiment was echoed in other writing, as well as
printed in the St. Louis Globe Democrat quote, if Judge

(31:32):
Landis can keep the game of baseball on a high
plane of sports ethics, he will do far more for
the boys of America than he has ever done or
can ever do on the federal bench. Nor could he
do more for the country as a whole, because the
standard of integrity of the boy becomes also his standard
as a citizen. Meanwhile, much of the news coverage of
the scandal and the trial and its aftermath tried to

(31:54):
place the blame on this for outsiders, specifically Jewish people
in immigrants. This once again reinforced the idea that baseball was,
in quotation marks pure, or at least it would have
been if not for this outsider influence. After their lifetime
banned from the sport, several of the eight players tried
to clear their names or filed civil suits, many of

(32:17):
them claiming that they were owed back pay under the
terms of their contracts with the White Sox. This included
Joe Jackson, whose case came to trial in Milwaukee in
During the trial, he repeatedly denied that he had given
the grand jury testimony that he was on record as
having given. In spite of that, I mean just saying
over and over, I didn't say that in front of

(32:37):
the grand jury, even though it's right there in the transcript.
The jury found in his favor. They awarded him more
than sixteen thousand dollars, and the foreman later explained that
this was because White Sox management had known about the
fixing scheme when it signed to the contract with him,
therefore it had no grounds to back out of the
deal over it. Later the judge, though, was outraged at

(32:59):
this rule ing and vacated the settlement and charged Jackson
with perjury. Of the civil suits that were filed, Jackson's
was the only one that went to trial. In addition
to the eight Black Socks, over the next few years,
Kenna saw Mountain Landis banned another ten players for life
because of their involvement in gambling. He also banned William D. Cox,
president of the Philadelphia Phillies then in Landis proposed the

(33:24):
addition of rules prohibiting gambling to the formal rule book
of Major League Baseball. Today, this rule twenty one is
required to be posted in every clubhouse. It prohibits various
types of misconduct, including gambling. Under this rule, players, umpires,
club and league officials, and other employees are ineligible for

(33:44):
one year if they bet on a baseball game that
they don't have a duty to perform in. If they
bet on a game that they do have a duty
to perform in, they are ineligible for life. These and
other efforts did not restore baseball to a pristine heyday,
because that had never really existed. But Landis's efforts reinforce
the idea that there had been, and ultimately they made

(34:06):
the sport more respectable, at least for a time. One
of the articles that I read as I was working
on this was from ESPN, and the author talked about
how the editor had said, I want you to write
um an article that's about like the major moments in
baseball gambling scandals, and the writer was like, well, there's

(34:27):
kind of a problem with that. It's basically two broad periods.
There's the first broad period, which is just a cesspool
of greed and corruption and then decades passed and it's
Pete Rose and like that's all you have to go
on there. Anyway, We've had various folks asked us to
talk about this over the years, Um, and it is

(34:49):
just a wacky story to me. I have so many
favorite moments, including shoelace Joe Jackson being angry that he
did not get his whole bribe. Yeah, Minus, like I
never said that, because you did. It's right there, they
transcribed it. What you got next? Ms Tracy Well, Um,

(35:13):
I was out on vacation for a while and I'm
still sort of catching up with the email inbox. So
in lieu of listener mail today, I want to talk
about something we have not talked about for a while,
which is that we have a T shirt store for
our show, and a lot of the stuff that we
have in the store are things that people said they
wished we had T shirts of, but in some cases

(35:36):
we've never told anyone we actually have that T shirt now.
So you can find a link to the store from
our website, or you can go directly to t public
dot com. Slash stuff you missed in history class. That's
all one word all spelled out. Some of the shirts
that people have said they wished that we had that
we do have now. One of them is a shirt

(35:58):
for everybody who has listened to every episode of the
show ever, and that one says I have a pH
d in s Y MHC, which I find delightful. After
our History of Doughnuts episode, somebody said that we they
wanted a shirt about how um we read a thing
that was about curlers being outlaw cakes. So we have
a Crawler T shirt that says Outlaw Caches on it.

(36:21):
We also have the much requested Lunar Beaver's shirt, which
looks like it's patterned after a band's tour shirt. Um.
And then going going all the way back to uh
to when we did the Virginia Acar episode, we have
a look at the Baby's shirt. Those are just examples,
and then you can also get these things on stickers
and mugs, et cetera. Uh. We so rarely mentioned that

(36:44):
we have a store, but we do. We do. Since
I've I still I came back to work and I
was like, I've got so much that I need to
catch up on, and I just kept looking at the
listener mail inboxes like Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna get
to the listener mail, UM, but take a minute talk
about our store. Oh, we do love getting listener mail.
We love to hear from folks. UM. If you are

(37:05):
about to write and tell us about somebody's RBIs from
this UM sporting scandal, I probably read that article. We
just did not spend as much time focused on that
in this episode. But if you want to write to
us about this or any other podcast where history podcasts
at how stuff Works dot com. And then we're all
over social media at missed in History and that's where

(37:28):
you'll find our Facebook and Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. And
you can find our website at missed in History dot
com and it currently has a link up in the
menu to our store. So you can also subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, the i heart Radio app,
and anywhere else that you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(37:50):
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
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