Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even earn the label crime of the century.But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.
I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author.And in each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. This is Crimes of the Centuries.
From the moment jury selection began June 16th, 1921, it was clear this was no ordinary trial.At the defense table were some of the biggest names in professional sports, while both sides boasted some of the finest criminal attorneys of their time.
The judge overseeing the case was young, but also that combination of firm and fair you want to see in a jurist.He would go on to have a respected career.
All of this was good, folks would later note, because it meant that neither party could say they were outlawed or that the judge was crap.
The jury, however, was a different matter, just a random collection of men asked to weigh in on a matter of dire importance. To Chicagoans, at least.Well, really, to anyone who loved baseball in the Jazz Age.
And ultimately, though they probably didn't realize it'd have this effect, to the long-term viability of all professional sport in this country.Those on trial were accused of throwing the World Series.
explained Society of American Baseball research historian Jacob Pomerenke.
That strikes at the heart of sports in general.You know, if you're not trying your best to win, why are we even here?
It's supposedly true that those 12 Chicago jurors were standing in judgment of men they admired, even envied. It was equally true that some of the defendants had already confessed when first accused, but there was a catch.
What the eight men had confessed to was, in the most technical of terms, not illegal. There was no law in the books that said baseball players could not determine the outcome of a game before it was played.
Make no mistake, these guys had agreed to throw an entire World Series, ensuring that the Chicago White Sox would lose and the Cincinnati Reds would become world champions.But in the parlance, fixing or throwing a game was not explicitly illegal.
Chicago prosecutors found a way through that technicality, initially charging each of the eight with five counts of conspiracy to obtain money by false pretenses and or via a confidence game.
And this is what the eight professional ballplayers employed by the Chicago White Sox organization had done.
They had taken money to lose the 1919 World Series, specifically games one, two, and eight, handing the Cincinnati Reds five victories over eight games, ensuring that each move in those games would be dissected and debated for more than a hundred years.
In doing so, they had also guaranteed a bunch of New York and Midwest gamblers would haul in a wad of cash for betting on the Reds to win it all.
Not one to prolong the suspense on this most famous case, and I know a lot of you already know what happened next, I will simply cut to the chase.
All eight men, most with colorful names, George Buck Weaver, Arnold Chick Gandel, Charles Swede Risberg, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Knuckles Seacott, Claude Lefty Williams, Oscar Happy Felsch, and Fred McMullen, were found not guilty.
Even though they were, you know, guilty, at least in part.Because Seacott, Williams, and Jackson had already admitted they did it. They had, perhaps shamefully, agreed to purposefully play bad enough to lose.
The evidence on each of the players varied, but there were three, the instigator among the players, for whom the prosecutors made a solid case. Even they escaped without so much as a, don't do it again.
Does that mean the jury just couldn't see it for the danger it was?Or was the verdict a result of something called jury nullification?
That is, did the jury just decide to ignore the law and decide for themselves what they thought was legal or, you know, okay by them?Kind of a, no big deal, you're free to go.And that's what the jury said.In reality, they weren't.
Less than a month after the verdict, Judge Kennessy Mountain Landis, the freshly minted first commissioner of baseball, issued an edict that changed everything.
It read, quote, regardless of the verdict of juries, no matter who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, 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, end quote.
To this day, a rule saying as much hangs in the clubhouse of every major league baseball team.
They White Sox players, who would be called the Black Sox for their tawdry behavior, thus would be permanently banned from participation in organized professional baseball forever.
Landis' thinking was that if the people who pay to watch the game can't trust that they're watching real competition, then the game will die a rapid death.
Per Landis, whose words seemed to supersede those of the legal establishment, if you cheated to determine the outcome of a game, you would be out.Times be damned, motive be damned, nobody cares about your batting average, you're done.
This was important because, in truth, at least one of the eight had been so good that he would likely have ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame.Two others had an outside chance of doing the same.
According to Pomrenke, editor of Scandal of the South Side, the 1919 Chicago White Sox, a compilation of essays by members of the Society for American Baseball Research, shoeless Joe Jackson with a lifetime batting average of .356 was a shoe-in.
The case for Seacott was strong, but he would have had to have had three or more years at a very high level to cinch that.
Happy Felsch was an outside possibility too, but at just 28 years old, Pomeranke says, quote, he was still young when he was banned, but was a powerful slugger who would have benefited greatly from the live ball home run style of play in the 1920s, end quote.
Do not look for any of the three in Cooperstown.They never played another professional game.But make no mistake, they changed America by outing ongoing corruption in the nation's favorite pastime. Crimes of the Centuries is sponsored by our place.
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It sounds awfully quaint nowadays, what with all the doping and betting scandals we've been exposed to over the past several decades.But once upon a time, most Americans believed baseball was a pure sport.It never had been, said Pomeranke.
There's evidence that betting by players goes back to the mid-1800s.But there was a line.
players were betting on their own games, and that was something that was fairly common.Now, fixing games was always seen as something that was verboten.
Gamblers regularly courted players, hanging out in the visitors' hotels, organizing parties for them, making sure they wined and dined well.
Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton was told sometime before the series scandal that gamblers had a man in every clubhouse.Fans were fools to think otherwise. That's why it was the nation finding out the truth that almost mortally wounded the game.
Overstatement?I don't think so.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece on jazz age morality amid all that decadence, how narrator Nick Carraway met one of Gatsby's friends, a fictional mob guy gambler Fitzgerald named Meyer Wolfsheim.
Gatsby tells Carraway, after pointing him out at lunch in Manhattan one day, that Wolfsheim fixed the 1919 World Series. Carraway replies, quote, and quote. The reference was plain to those who lived in that era.
Wolfsheim was the fictional stand-in for Jewish mob kingpin Arnold Rothstein.Why isn't he in jail, Carraway asks in the novel.They can't get him, old sport, replies Gatsby.He's a smart man. Fitzgerald is restating what everyone knew.
Rothstein was too smart to get caught.In fact, when one co-conspirator threatened to tell all, he didn't because, you know, Rothstein let it be known that was a very bad idea. Still, Rothstein was not so smart that he didn't make mistakes.
He was shot to death in 1928 after refusing to pay a debt that arose from the result of a fixed poker game.So, historically at least, the eight stood alone to bear the nation's disappointment.
A few players would later say they regretted their decision, a few would say they were stupid to do it, and a few would refuse to ever speak of it again, even on their deathbeds.
They were not the only baseball players who had taken money to throw games, but they are the ones who brought the charade to a public end.
They're the ones, maybe even if you include those hitters who were found to have used steroids from the late 1980s and through the 2000s, who will be remembered as the biggest cheaters in American sports history.So how exactly did the crime play out?
That is not exactly clear, even now. I should say straight out that while I respect baseball and love a good ballpark, Frank, I don't know a ton about baseball history.
But my dad was a long-suffering Cubs fan, and I've worked in Detroit and Cincinnati, so I couldn't have escaped it if I tried.
Plus, my partner Scott is a lifelong baseball fan, and more specifically, a Cincinnati Reds aficionado, which matters here because that's the team the White Sox were playing against.
Regardless, this story won't require a lot of baseball knowledge because, to me, it's not just a baseball story, it's a crime story.It'll be about the who, the what, the why, and, as much as I or anyone can determine, the how.
Let me start by saying a lot of people who know this stuff say that the Chicago White Sox roster in 1919 was one of the finest ever assembled, comparable to the Yankees in the 1960s and the Big Red Machine of the 1970s.
These Chicago White Sox had just won the World Series in 1917.Still, 1919 might not have been an anomaly as far as shenanigans go.
Dan Holmes of the website Vintage Detroit wrote that gamblers were said to have been involved in the World Series of 1905, 1912, 1914, and 1918.It's also important to know that betting was just not that big of a deal back then.
It was part of the culture of the game.Fenway Park in Boston, among others, even had a gambler's section in the right field in full view of everyone, including cops. As a team, the players on the 1919 White Sox roster were not a happy bunch.
Here's a montage of baseball smarty-pants people talking over very dramatic music in a documentary called MLB Triumph and Tragedy 1919 White Sox.
It was a team divided by personalities. There were cliques on the team.Southerners like Williams and Jackson tended to stay together.Eddie Collins, the second baseman, and Ray Shaw, the catcher, were buddies.
But the rest of the infield, Chick Gandel, Swede Risberg, and Buck Weaver, wouldn't have anything to do with them.And you can actually see this in the warm-ups.The other three infielders would not throw the ball to Collins.
Split into these cliques, they squabbled like children, divided between the better-paid college-educated athletes and those who were country farm boys or blue-collar rooted city boys from the streets who were plenty good at what they were being paid to do, but paid less than their shinier teammates.
In fact, much of the lore about the scandal centers on how badly the players thought they were paid.
It was a main tenant of Eight Men Out, the book by Eliot Asimov, published first in 1963, a book that was penned with the cooperation of some of those involved.What's reported in that book has, for a long time, been accepted as fact.
New documents showed up in 2002, courtesy of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame library, which ultimately corrected a lot of those assumptions.
In socks expert Bob Hoy's eye-opening article, 1919 Baseball Salaries and the Mythically Underpaid Chicago White Socks, he reports that the 1919 White Socks had one of the highest payrolls in the major leagues.
Only the Boston Red Socks and the New York Yankees paid better.Socks owner Charles Comiskey likewise gave generously to the city and built the park that still bears his name.
Author Stephen Rice did the math in his book, Touching Base, Professional Baseball in American Culture in the Progressive Era.The eight tainted players made an average of $4,300 a year.
but the Columbia University-educated Eddie Collins made $15,000 a year.The less-than-fancy players, I should tell you now that Joe Jackson could neither read nor write, earned as little as $1,000 to $2,400 a year. Let me do that in today's dollars.
The eight men averaged about $82,000 a year, which is not chump change then or now.Collins made a whopping $285,000.The blue collared made between $19,000 and $46,000.And that does sound grossly unfair to me. Any way you look at it, though.
I think the Black Sox players saw a high reward for what they were doing.They could make as much as their yearly salary in one week for fixing the World Series.And I think they saw very little risk of getting caught or getting punished.
That was Pomeranke again, though talking to PBS that time. Now I'm compelled to do this for all of us hard-working schlubs.The average Major League Baseball player today makes $4.5 million a year.
The highest-paid player, Los Angeles Dodger Shohei Otani, makes $70 million a year for a guaranteed 10 years. back to 1919, which was an odd year for baseball.
World War I had just ended, and the baseball owners figured that attendance was going to suffer, so they shortened the season to just 140 games, 14 fewer than normal.
Rosters and salaries were likewise cut to make up for what everyone thought would be reduced revenue.But they guessed wrong.
Attendance shot through the roof, tripling for the White Sox and more than doubling for the whole of the American League of which they were a part.
To compensate, I guess, the World Series was expanded from its usual best-of-seven games format to best-of-nine.It would mean an infusion of extra cash for the owners and a tidy payout for the players.
That's because each player on the winning team in the series got a $5,027 bonus.The losers got the odd amount of $3,254.36.Today, that'd be around $96,000 for the winners and $62,000 for the losers.
The fix was in, but not because the players had been screwed. They did not want for money, but the theory holds that for some of the players involved, the money was owed them from the boss they saw as a skin flint.
And this was their so-called revenge against Comiskey, who wanted all the profit to himself and screwed a good portion of the team by not paying an equitable wage.
The inequity was there for sure, but the claim that Comiskey was the worst owner in baseball is not. The motive was greed.From everything we know, it's supposed that those who helped throw the games were to be paid $10,000 apiece.
That's a little shy of $120,000 in today's dollars.Note I said, were to be paid. I use that wording because it's not known how much was actually paid to the players.
Educated guesses say that first baseman Chick Gandall got away with something like $35,000, which maybe makes sense when you learn that he was the man who started the ball rolling. Crimes of the Centuries is sponsored by Laundry Sauce.
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That's better h-e-l-p dot com slash c-o-t-c. In early September of 1919, Chick Gandall and infielder Fred McMullen approached ace pitcher Knuckles Seacott about throwing the series.
Seacott is reported to have told Gandall that he would do it for no less than $10,000 and he wanted it before he threw a single pitch.
Side note from the revelations about comparative salaries in 1919, Seacott was the second highest paid pitcher in the league at the time.Only the famed Walter Johnson was paid more.Still, Seacott must have felt he needed the money.
According to baseball writer and researcher Jim Sandoval, Seacott was the head of a family of 12.His wife and three kids, and his wife's parents, his brother and his wife, a brother-in-law and his wife, and their kiddo.He was also very good.
As a pitcher, he was the winningest in the major leagues that year.Gandal must have felt like he had who he needed on board. He approached Boston bookmaker Joseph Sport Sullivan on September 18, 1919.
The two men had known each other since 1912, and Gandel had been more than happy to give Sullivan inside information about injuries and starting pitchers, that kind of thing.
I think we can put it in the bag, Gandel is reported to have said to the gambler.Going on to explain, he figured it would take $80,000 to get it done.He assured Sullivan that he'd be the go-between for the gamblers and the players in on the fix.
Tiny aside, the spot where this little conversation took place is room 615 of the now five-star Hotel Buckminster in Boston.A plaque in the hotel lobby lets baseball enthusiasts in on that history.
Sullivan loved the idea, but he knew he needed help to pull off this caper.He needed Arnold Rothstein's money.
So he tried to waylay Gandal, who for his part, did not waste any time talking the idea around to others, including to Bill Burns, a former colleague who said he knew how to get an audience with Rothstein as well.
Rothstein told Burns he wasn't interested on September 23rd.On the 24th, he changed his mind.Then Sullivan made an approach with basically the same scheme.
Bruce Allardyce, a history professor in suburban Chicago and a specialist on the lives of 19th century ballplayers, told WBUR in Boston in 2019.
Roste knew that if Sullivan comes to you with a deal, he knows what he's talking about and he's capable of pulling it off.
However it happened, Sullivan came back to Beantown with either 80 or 100 grand, sources differ, to pay the players and some extra cash with which to place private bets.Allerdice again.
He went to the Chamber of Commerce and got a list of who in the Chamber of Commerce was likely to bet on baseball games and made private bets with them rather than going publicly to a hotel and everything like that.
By now, Gandal, Risberg, McMullen, and Seacott hold talks with Williams, Felsch, Weaver, and Jackson.And by all accounts, Shoeless Joe was a straight shooter.He didn't hang around with gamblers or ne'er-do-wells, but he agreed to help.
He would later say that he had turned down the first offer of $10,000 and that when it doubled, he signed on.In the end, he'd only receive $5,000. His biographer, David Flights, wrote that Jackson paid his sister's hospital bills without money.
How the others were roped into the con is unclear.But having pitchers Seacott and Lefty Williams and power slugger Jackson on board surely was making the deal sound, as Gandal promised, in the bag. There was, however, one skeptic in the bunch.
Buck Weaver said it would never work.And while he attended two meetings where the scheme was discussed, he hadn't told anybody in authority that the talks were happening.
His work in the series was exemplary and sports writers never quite believed that he'd been in on the fix.It's unknown if he ever took any money from anyone to aid in the con.
Later, sure that he had done nothing to warrant the charges against him, he asked for a separate trial from the other seven.For the record, these men were buying into a scheme hatched by someone they did not like.
Pomrenke goes so far to say as the man did not have one single redeeming quality.
He was the one that wanted it the most and made sure that, you know, his teammates were in on it and that they followed through.
You know, when the fix was threatening to fall apart because they weren't getting their money from the gamblers, you know, Gandalf was the one that was trying to reassure everybody that, you know, no, no, we're going to get paid.
It seems apparent that Gandall handled the money transfer to the players, though little is known when the exchange took place, or if it was a payment that was stretched throughout the series, or if Gandall actually distributed the money as he had promised, or rather simply kept it for himself.
We do know that three days before the Chicago team got on the train for the first game against Cincinnati, $10,000 showed up under Seacott's hotel room pillow,
The first day of the series was played Wednesday, October 1st, 1919 at Redland Field in Cincinnati.Gandal was the starting pitcher for the Sox from a Smithsonian program.
Gambling is illegal, but bookies have the Sox as seven to five favorites.Just hours before the first pitch, money pours in picking the Reds to win.
Gandal's first pitch hit the batter in the back.It was supposed to be the sign that the fix was on.And that is when a teammate not in on the fix named Eddie Collins said he knew something was seriously amiss.
As he reportedly told a small gambling newspaper the next year, he was certain from that very first inning that things were hinky.Quote, there wasn't a single doubt in my mind, end quote.
It should be noted that 30 years later, Collins would claim he did not suspect such a thing.Funny how memory works, or maybe how age makes you more unwilling to shame your friends.
In any case, Seacott gave up seven hits and six runs in the first four innings and appeared to respond inordinately slowly when he needed to throw someone out at second.Final score, game one, Reds nine, White Sox one.
Seacott later told the grand jury that after the first game, he'd been up all night sick about what he had done.For the second game, on Thursday, October 2nd, the White Sox sent out pitching ace Lefty Williams to settle the score.
Except, you know, Lefty was in on the fix and the guy known for controlling his pitches better than almost anybody walked six batters that day.Final score game two, Reds four, White Sox two.
The headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer the following day read, White Sox Sluggers Helpless with Men on Bases.Helpless.Imagine what those clean Sox players must have been thinking.What the hell was happening?Maybe they did know.
Word about the fix had already reached some reporters, maybe even the Sox front office.But at this point, it was still just a rumor. Still, journalist Hugh Fullerton, who had been tipped off by gamblers, made note of anything suspicious.
During the first game, he marked his scorecard after the badly handled double play.Along with a former pitcher friend, the pair made a game of counting the plays they considered iffy. On Friday, the 3rd, the action moved to Chicago.
This time, the White Sox had rookie pitcher Dickie Kerr, who knew nothing of the scheme and pitched the game of a lifetime.Final score Game 3, White Sox 3, Reds 0. back to Seacott on the mound.
He was a little more convincing this time, explaining later that he genuinely had tried to win that one.Final score, game four, Reds two, White Sox zero.
In a rain-delayed game played on a sloppy field, everybody could be excused if it all looked, well, sloppy.Final score, game five, Reds five, White Sox zero.
More than 32,000 people watched as the game was tied through the 9th with the Reds, who had a four-run lead by the 4th inning, losing the game in the 10th inning.Had the embarrassed White Sox decided to unfix the whole thing?
Final score, game six, White Sox five, Reds four.The money from the gamblers had not materialized as expected, as in the gangsters hadn't paid up as promised, and the White Sox knew exactly what to do.They would show who was in charge.
They decided to play to win.Seacott pitched a good game.Final score, game seven, White Sox four, Reds one.
Lefty Williams started as a pitcher, but the story goes that he was threatened by a gangster who put a gun in Lefty's face and told him he would lose this game and he'd do it in the first inning or his wife would go missing.
He gave up four runs in just one third of an inning. The Sox pulled him and ran through four more pitchers on that Thursday in Chicago.Joe Jackson homered in the third inning.
The Reds came through with enough firepower to convince most that the right team had triumphed.Final score Game 8, Reds 10, White Sox 5.The Reds were world champs.
When most people think of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, they think of Richard Jewell, a security guard who was first painted as a hero by the media, but later became a suspect in the FBI's investigation.
But in the summer of 1996, it was Eric Rudolph, a terrorist and dedicated soldier in the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement, who executed the bombing and escaped into the night. And that's all most people know about him.
What most people don't know about him is that before withdrawing from civilization, he also bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub.
What even fewer people know about him is that he eluded the authorities for five years in the mountains of North Carolina until his eventual capture in 2003. And what I didn't know about him was how our two lives were connected.
From iHeart and Tenderfoot TV, I'm Cole Lacascio, and this is Flashpoint.All eight episodes are available to binge now.Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The day after the 1919 World Series ended, Shoeless Joe went to the White Sox front office exec Harry Grabner and told him everything.
Grabner told owner Comiskey, who hired his own people to investigate, offering $20,000 to anyone who could provide proof of it. Publicly, Comiskey defended his team.
Privately, he opted to withhold the loser portion of the series bonus from the eight players, pending further investigation.
When it all came apart later, it was found that Comiskey had successfully guessed which ones had agreed to the fix, though it's worth noting that debate remains as to whether Shoeless Joe actually threw a thing.
After all, he had a .375 batting average in the series with 12 hits, which was a World Series record for almost 50 years.A lot of people to this day think he might've agreed to take the money, but never had any intention of actually playing poorly.
Maybe that's why Grabner still offered Jackson a new three-year extension of his contract, even after Jackson stepped forward about the rigged series.
Meanwhile, sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, writing in the Evening World newspaper in New York, had been busy doing what journalists do.
On December 15, 1919, Fullerton exposed the culture that existed in the game and revealed the less-than-secret news that the World Series was being investigated for its connection to gambling.
Headlined, is big league baseball being run for gamblers with players in the deal?Fullerton wrote, quote, never before had players been so freely charged with cheating, end quote.
He went on to report that he'd heard rumors for years about how baseball and gambling had been intertwined, but, quote, steadfastly refused to believe.
Yet the World Series story is told with so much circumstantial evidence and with so many names, places and dates that one is bewildered, end quote.What kind of evidence was out there?
Well, a lot of gamblers were known to have told their friends who bet on baseball to take the Reds.Some even added that it was a done deal.Gamblers had also taken great pains to hustle everyone else with money to take the Sox.
Though Shoeless Joe played amazingly for someone who had supposedly been bribed to throw the series, other players seemed inexplicably off their game.
There were the two pitching wonderboys of the Sox, Seacott and Williams, who lost games they maybe shouldn't have.And the 0-80 batting average of 25-year-old Swede Risberg.
Risberg didn't execute an easy double play in the fourth inning of game one, and five Reds went on to score.He alone accounted for four errors in the eight games.He threw wide when trying to get someone out.He muffed a ground ball.
He made sure the Reds could make two double plays against the Sox when he drove two line drives into traffic when his teammates were on base.He later claimed to have a cold. After Fullerton's story in The Evening World, nothing happened.
The 1920s season began as usual.On its face, the scheme had worked.But how exactly?Daniel Ginsberg, author of 1995's The Fix Is In, wrote in Scandal, quote, no one knows the full story of the Black Sox scandal.
Few of the participants were willing to talk and the whole plot was confused and poorly managed, end quote. Pomeranke followed that with a little bit of what we do know.
There were multiple plots to fix the World Series, multiple sets of gamblers involved.You know, some of them were from New York, some of them were from Boston, and most of them were from the Midwest, Iowa, St.Louis, Chicago.
But the New York and Boston guys had money.And in fact, during the middle of the World Series, when Some of the gamblers were skipping the players.Another group of gamblers from Iowa and St.Louis tried to raise more money and pay off the players.
And they might have.We don't actually know if they did or not.But they were certainly trying to raise more money to pay off the players themselves, independent of Arnold Rothstein and some of the East Coast contingent of gamblers.
Pomeranke and his research consortium have discovered that while Rothstein and Sullivan and a former world featherweight champion named Abe Attell have either claimed or been given credit by history to being the biggest movers in the scandal, that's likely not true.
One of the reasons they do is because Ava Tell outlived everybody.He was the one that got to tell his story to the magazine writers and to Elliot Asinop.So he was able to kind of hold himself up as, I'm the one that picks the World Series.
The 1920 World Series ended with the Cleveland Indians beating the Brooklyn Robins five games to two.And after that, the scandal erupted.From a SportsCenter flashback special.
The investigation got underway for totally extraneous reasons.A late season game between the Phillies and the Cubs. The then president of the Cubs, William Beck Sr., Bill Beck's father, got a telegram saying, watch out, today's game is fixed.
A pitcher named Claude Hendricks was removed from his start because it was not only suspected, it was almost certain that he had been gotten at to throw a game.
A grand jury was called to investigate this game. and immediately started investigating the 1919 World Series.That game was completely forgotten.It just got lost in the shuffle.
The grand jury proceeded for a while, and during the course of it, testimony came out about, well, there's other things that have occurred.Lo and behold, they started opening this can of worms of what had transpired in the fall of 1919.
Mattel offered to tell all, name names and spill his guts to the Cook County Grand Jury.To the best of his knowledge, he told reporter Fullerton, he knew personally of 10 gamblers who made $250,000 each off the deal.
The Baseball Research Group found that other gamblers left tidbits of info behind that in interviews and lesser publications, now so much more easily findable because of the digitizing of newspapers, point to them as more significant in making the thing happen.
The confusion about who was in charge of the betting may have led to the uneven payouts, It also may have led some players to tell the truth about it all when confronted by their owners and then by law enforcement.
The owners were already worried that the game was being compromised.So when judge Charles McDonald, chief judge of the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois, got word of the owner's concerns, he took some action.
On September 7, 1920, a grand jury was asked to see if an August game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies had been crooked.But that little investigation soon enough morphed into a World Series probe.
It should be noted that both Judge McDonald and the grand jury foreman were ardent fans of the game.
On September 27, 1920, in the pages of the Philadelphia North American Newspaper, Bill Burns' associate Billy Mayharg admitted his role in the fix of the previous year's World Series.He fingered Seacott as being the lead man in the scam.
This made Seacott immediately tell the White Sox's attorney that, yeah, he'd helped throw the whole shebang, but he added he had help.
Then he named the other seven who had been at the table when the talking had grown serious and the money was discussed.
On September 28th, 1920, on advice of counsel, Seacott, Williams, Felsch, and Shoeless Joe went before the grand jury and explained what they had done.
Felsch, in talking with the Chicago Evening American, insisted he hadn't done anything to contribute to the losses, but he knew about the scheme and, well, yeah, he'd gotten five grand.
When Jackson and Seacott testified, neither admitted to any specific piece of wrongdoing.According to Seacott, the first two losses were paid for by Burns and Attell.Game 8's tank job was paid for by St.
Louis gamblers Carl Zorc and Benjamin Franklin.No, not that one.They mostly did this, if you recall, by scaring the living daylights out of Lefty Williams.
The grand jury did its duty and indicted all eight players involved, as well as the five gamblers who'd been named.Prosecutors had counted on Jackson, Seacott, and Williams to tell all, given that they would be given immunity for their stories.
Jackson and Williams recanted. Their lawyers, meanwhile, were doing everything in their power to have their grand jury testimony suppressed.The confessions, meanwhile, went missing.
At the last minute, Billy Mayharg, the man who had told all to the Philadelphia newspaper, was found trying to abscond to Mexico.He was at the border already and brought back to Chicago to testify.
Lucky for him, the state gave him immunity in exchange for the details, and they had a solid case.
As far as the people involved, the players, the gamblers, the baseball officials, there's nobody really that comes out looking good.Everybody kind of looks different degrees of bad.
That's Pumrenke again.You know the rest, except this. Joe Jackson went on to become an American folk hero, immortalized by W.P.Kinsella in his novel Shoeless Joe, and then in the 1989 film Field of Dreams, which was based on Kinsella's story.
He's one of the players who marveled that he was out there playing the game he loved for fans for eternity.In 1999, in a list of top 100 players in the 20th century, Shoeless Joe was ranked number 35.
In 2001, his bat, which he named Black Betsy, broke the record for the greatest sale price ever for a bat.It sold for $577,610. He didn't seem to lose out on any fame after being tossed out of the game.Ironic?Maybe.
Sheilas Joe is much more famous outside of the Hall of Fame than he ever would be if he had been inducted in 1951.Nobody would know his name if he had just played out his career and been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
But now we've got this kind of legend, this kind of iconic fairy tale character of Sheilas Joe, the ghost.
Is there more to unearth about the scandal?Of course.Recent finds have convinced the interested to keep looking.In 2007, the Chicago History Museum acquired the previously missing trial transcripts and grand jury testimony relating to the scandal.
In 2014, in Ottawa, Canada, a filmmaker from Chicago found a long lost newsreel that ran about five minutes long. It contains footage from Game 1, first and fourth innings, and Game 3 of the 1919 World Series.
Filmed by British-Canadian Pathé News, the newsreels were apparently placed inside a swimming pool in Dawson City, a berg in the Yukon.The pool became a hockey rink and the film was, pardon the pun, frozen in time.
On April 25, 2014, the new film was posted online by the Library Archive Canada YouTube page.
Homerenke wrote, quote, a quick three second clip beginning at the 306 mark of the video online appears to be one of the most disputed plays of the World Series.
One of the plays famously circled by sports writer Hugh Fullerton on his scorecard in the press box.The botched double play ball hit by the Reds' Larry Kopf and fielded by pitcher Eddie Seacott in the fourth inning, end quote.
So there's all that, but there's also possibly an elusive diary still out there somewhere.Pomeranke again.
The biggest holy grail out there for us right now, from a research perspective, is the diary of the White Sox general manager.He kept a personal diary throughout the 1919 season, throughout the 1920 and 21 seasons for sure.
He kept notes on payroll negotiations.He kept notes on you know, things that were happening within the team.
And we know the diary exists because it was discovered in the 1960s by the nephew of Bill Beck, who was the White Sox owner at the time, and it was discovered in an unused storage room in Old Comiskey Park.
It'd be a first-hand account from someone actively involved, a goldmine.It's said that Fred McMullin wrote a multi-paged account that his wife burned when he died, but still they look.
Today, in every pro baseball locker room, the gambling policy laid down by Landis is clearly posted.It's also read to players and teams and team employees before every season.So, you know, the eight men out were not prohibited from playing baseball.
They were just prohibited from playing for the professional league that was the pinnacle of the game. So a few made a living in the lesser semi-pro leagues.
Buck Weaver tried over and over to be reinstated, but Judge Landis had purposefully included that part in his banishment about having to report the conspiracy immediately if you knew about it.So no.
There is still a clearbuck.com campaign, albeit not very active. In 1991, the Hall of Fame passed a rule saying that any player ruled ineligible by Major League Baseball could not appear on the Hall of Fame ballot.In 2020, MLB changed its mind.
The league decided it had no hold on banned players after they die because the only point of the ban was to make sure they never held a job with a major league club.That means Jackson still has a chance.
And with all the questions out there still lingering, as a woman who lives in Cincinnati, I'd feel remiss if I didn't ask, could the Reds have beaten the Sox without their actively trying to lose?
We asked C. Trent Rosecrans, the current Reds writer for the New York Times and the Athletic, and the current president of the Baseball Writers Association Hall of Fame, and a friend of mine, what he thought.
He said straight out, the Reds were not good before or after the 1919 season, but they had a very deep bench of pitchers in that one year who could hold their own against anybody.In other words, they had a shot.
To research this case, journalist Amy Wilson read Scandal on the South Side, edited by Jacob Homrenke, written by members of the Society for American Baseball Research, as well as a sheaf of stories on the Sabre website.
She read Eight Men Out and watched the film of the same name.She also read some of the reporting done in the Chicago, Cincinnati and New York papers during the time of the scandal.
She found a few radio programs, specifically the WBUR Radio 2019 broadcast Joseph Sport Sullivan's little-known role in the Black Sox scandal.
And she made her daughter text her that passage from The Great Gatsby because she doesn't own a copy of her own.Extra thanks to Scott Wortman for his editing help and Cincinnati Red's expertise.
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Unless noted in the citations, this case was researched and written by me, Amber Hunt, and produced by Amanda Rassman and Henry Lavoie.Original music is by Bruce Hunt, Andrew Higley, and occasionally by my son, Hunt van Ben Scoten.
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