In these accounts of the Black Sox affair, Comiskey is aided and abetted by Alfred S. Austrian, legal counsel for the White Sox corporation. Via the powers of artistic invention which pervade his 1963 book Eight Men Out,1 Asinof presents vivid scenes of Austrian’s scheming. But his portrayal of the attorney tends toward the schizophrenic. First, Asinof depicts Austrian as a Black Sox nemesis, wheedling confessions of fix complicity out of cowed, uncounseled ballplayers, and then immediately handing these unfortunates over to the government for criminal prosecution. Pages later, however, Austrian is operating behind the scenes to thwart the prosecution that he has just set in motion, teaming with Arnold Rothstein to orchestrate the disappearance of crucial documentary evidence, and secretly arranging for the accused players to be represented by the cream of the Chicago criminal defense bar.

Not to be outdone in the fantasy department, Sayles embellishes his 1988 film version of Eight Men Out with make-believe of its own.2 Here, the erudite and patrician Austrian is presented as a glib shyster, smooth-talking innocent Buck Weaver out of retaining his own lawyer, and devising the remain-silent strategy that the Black Sox will deploy at trial. While Carney knows better than to accept the fabricated events of the Asinof book and Sayles movie at face value, his 2006 examination of then-available scandal evidence also places Austrian in the dock.3 But the judgment Carney strikes on Austrian is speculative, largely premised on guesswork about Comiskey-Austrian interaction,4 and likely colored by the peculiar Carney notion that the fix cover-up was an offense graver than the corruption of the Series itself (which is sort of like thinking concealment of a murder victim’s body is a crime worse than the killing).

This profile will attempt to extricate Alfred Austrian from the nonsense concocted by Eliot Asinof and John Sayles, and the postulates of Gene Carney, and to present a portrait of Austrian grounded in the historical record. It underscores that Austrian was one of Chicago’s most distinguished attorneys, with a roster of high-profile clients that kept his name in newsprint for almost 40 years. His services to Comiskey, moreover, far exceeded his role in the Black Sox affair. Austrian’s tenure as corporate counsel for the White Sox lasted more than three decades, and included a lengthy stint as a club vice president as well. He also served as counsel to the Chicago Cubs, and personal attorney for Cubs boss William Wrigley. In addition, Austrian was likely the draftsman of the Lasker Plan, the controversial initiative to restructure the governance of major-league baseball introduced during the waning years of the National Commission. The eruption of the Black Sox scandal shelved the Lasker Plan, with club owners opting instead for the appointment of an all-powerful baseball commissioner. Still, Alfred Austrian played a significant, mostly behind-the-scenes part in the baseball affairs of his time — even though he was not a baseball fan and had little nonclient interest in the game.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Alfred Solomon Austrian was born in Chicago on June 15, 1870, the second of five children born to Solomon Austrian (1836-1889), a recent Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, and his Mississippi-born wife, the former Julia Rebecca Mann (1848-1933).5 Shortly after Alfred’s birth, the Austrian family relocated to Cleveland, where Rebecca’s kin operated a large wool mill and ran a thriving clothing wholesale business. In short order, Solomon rose to name partner in Mann, Austrian & Company (a firm that manufactured textiles and clothing), allowing him to raise his children in comfort. While in Cleveland, Alfred attended local schools; upon high-school graduation, he matriculated to Harvard University. While there, according to Black Sox author Charles Fountain, Austrian played third base for his class team.6 If this is so, Austrian soon lost interest in the game — for during the many years that he served as legal counsel for the White Sox and the Cubs, Austrian rarely, if ever, attended a ballgame.7 Aside from family, Austrian’s interests were scholarly: savoring classical literary verse and collecting original book manuscripts and rare first editions.8

Shortly before his death in late 1889, Solomon Austrian returned the family to Chicago. That is where Alfred began his working life upon receiving his A.B. degree from Harvard in June 1891. Although a lifelong scholar, Alfred Austrian did not attend law school. Rather, he prepared for entry into the legal profession by clerking and reading law at the offices of the eminent Chicago law firm Kraus, Mayer, and Stein. Austrian was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1893, and quickly became a courthouse luminary. His gifts included formidable presence (a shade under 6 feet tall, lean, and impeccably tailored), a first-class intellect, and a quick, often acerbic, tongue. In time, Austrian also became a master of legal precedent and statutory construction, and a skillful out-of-court negotiator. All the while, Austrian benefited from the guidance and friendship of senior firm partner Levy Mayer, a powerhouse attorney with prominent clients and a close connection to Chicago’s Democratic Party.

In May 1895 young attorney Austrian was in the news as counsel for a consortium of whiskey distilleries, exchanging public insults with the ousted president of the concern.9 Less than two months later, he was identified as one of three incorporators of a reconstituted “Whisky Trust,” a venture designed to corner the country’s manufacture and distribution of bourbon and rye.10 Other Austrian clients included Chicago saloonkeepers, jewelers, theater owners, and politicians. Nor did he neglect social life. He was active in various civic and fraternal organizations, and in October 1901, Austrian took a bride, marrying 22-year-old Mamie Rothschild in a society wedding at Chicago’s Hotel Metropole. The birth of daughter Margaret in 1904 would complete Austrian’s small, exceptionally tight-knit family.

While Alfred Austrian was making a name for himself in Chicago legal circles, Charles Comiskey was scouting out a new home for his Western League baseball club, the St. Paul Saints. In 1900 Comiskey’s relocation of the club to Chicago spearheaded the efforts of league President Ban Johnson to upgrade the WL from a regional circuit to a national one, with its major-league aspirations reflected in Johnson’s renaming of the circuit the American League for the 1900 season. The circumstances that brought club owner Comiskey and attorney Austrian together have not been discovered, but politics may have figured in. Comiskey, while not politically active himself, was the son of a local Democratic politician, one-time city alderman Honest John Comiskey. Austrian, meanwhile, regularly represented Chicago Democrats. Whatever its origins, the Comiskey-Austrian relationship dates from the 1900 incorporation of the American League Base Ball Club of Chicago, or shortly thereafter.11 Austrian was inarguably White Sox corporation counsel by July 1903, appearing in court to obtain a court order restraining star shortstop George Davis from jumping the club to play for the New York Giants.12 Once the Davis kerfuffle was resolved, however, Austrian’s name disappeared from the sports pages for almost 15 years.

But that is not to say that Alfred Austrian became invisible. To the contrary, his fortunes continued to rise with well-paying clients and newsworthy cases burnishing a growing reputation as one of Chicago’s ablest lawyers. In fact, only months after Austrian got George Davis safely back inside the White Sox fold, he took up perhaps the highest-profile assignment of his long career: that of co-defense counsel in the Iroquois Theatre fire case.

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, Chicago’s newly opened Iroquois Theatre was packed well beyond its 1,602 seating capacity for a matinee performance of the musical Mr. Bluebeard. During the second act, a spark from an arc light set a muslin curtain ablaze. Within minutes, the theatre became a raging inferno in which some 600 perished, many of them children.13 Public outrage led to charges of criminal neglect and involuntary manslaughter being leveled against theater manager Will Davis. Retained to defend Davis was Levy Mayer, assisted by firm associate Austrian. Whether a reflection of devotion to his mentor Mayer, professional ambition, or cold-bloodedness, Austrian was not deterred from defending Davis by the toll the tragedy had taken within his own clan. Among the fire’s victims was cousin Joseph Austrian, a 17-year-old Yale undergraduate home for the holidays. After legal maneuvers kept the proceedings at bay for three years, Mayer and Austrian persuaded the trial judge to dismiss the charges against Davis on highly technical grounds, an outcome deplored by the public but one that only increased Austrian’s professional stock.

While the proceedings in the Iroquois Theatre case plodded on, Austrian was elevated to full partnership in the firm, now called Mayer, Meyer, Austrian, and Platt. During the ensuing decade, the Austrian stable of prominent clients expanded to include the Chicago Tribune, chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley, the Chicago sanitary committee, a Kentucky racetrack, the Cook County Democratic Committee, and advertising pioneer Albert D. Lasker. And it was the connection to client Lasker that returned the Austrian name to newspaper sports pages.

In January 1917, cash-strapped Chicago Cubs owner Charles Weeghman offered the wealthy Lasker a significant stake in franchise stock. Among Lasker’s purchase conditions agreed to by Weeghman was the Cubs’ retaining of Lasker lawyer Alfred Austrian as franchise corporate counsel.14 Lasker also maneuvered William Wrigley onto the Cubs board of directors. The following year, the two bought Weeghman out and assumed joint stewardship of the club. Meanwhile, another Austrian client, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, had grown estranged from one-time friend Ban Johnson, and joined the new owners of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in public remonstrance against Johnson’s leadership of the American League.

Tensions came to a boil in mid-September 1919 when an insurrection-minded AL board of directors authorized a probe of Johnson’s expenditures. The inquiry was to be conducted by White Sox counsel Alfred Austrian.15

While the board awaited Austrian’s report, the infamous 1919 World Series — which Austrian did not attend — was played by Comiskey’s White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, and won in eight games by the National League champions. Report that members of his team had agreed to dump the Series in return for a gamblers’ payoff reached Comiskey by the end of Game One, if not before. Yet, he did nothing visible in the immediate aftermath of the White Sox defeat. Instead, Comiskey directed manager Kid Gleason and front-office functionary Norris O’Neill to make discreet inquiries into fix rumors emanating from St. Louis.16 Comiskey was disturbed by the scuttlebutt that Gleason and Norris brought back, but publicly dismissed insinuations about the integrity of White Sox play, offering a $10,000 reward for credible information about Series wrongdoing by his players.

Taking up the reward offer were East St. Louis theater owner-gambler Harry Redmon and St. Louis pool hall operator-bookmaker Joe Pesch, who journeyed together to Chicago in late December. During a face-to-face meeting with Comiskey conducted in the Austrian law office, the two men related what they knew about Series corruption, including a Sherman Hotel meeting in Chicago organized by St. Louis gamblers Carl Zork and Ben Franklin to revive the fix after the corrupted players went off-script and won Game Three. Word of the Austrian office parley promptly leaked to the press, but White Sox club secretary Harry Grabiner downplayed the encounter, declaring that Redmon and Pesch “could give no direct evidence or any new information concerning the alleged [Series] scandal.”17 Happily for White Sox brass, Grabiner’s statement was accepted at face value by the sports press and public, taking the pressure to act off — at least for the time being.

The extent to which Comiskey’s post-Series conduct was influenced by club counsel Austrian is unknowable, but Comiskey biographer Tim Hornbaker asserts that the Old Roman, ailing and distraught, left management of the simmering scandal mostly in the hands of Austrian and Grabiner.18 And increased Austrian involvement in club affairs is undeniable, embodied in his designation as a Chicago White Sox vice president (while retaining his position as corporation counsel) in club reports filed in early 1920. It was Austrian, for example, who quietly retained the J.R. Hunter Detective Agency to shadow suspected White Sox players and prowl around for evidence of fix payoff spoils. But the reports submitted to Austrian by detectives were pretty much a dud.19 Holding the view that unsubstantiated allegations of player corruption did not justify retributive action by the club — or so Comiskey testified during post-scandal civil litigation in 1924 — Austrian recommended the new contracts, with handsome salary increases, extended to suspected fix participants Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, and Swede Risberg during the offseason. However self-serving and duplicitous the Comiskey/Austrian maneuvers appear today, as a strategy they worked, at least temporarily. Series corruption rumors died out, and the throngs attending Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox battle the Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees for the 1920 AL pennant shattered club attendance records.

The scandal dam cracked in September when a Cook County (Chicago) grand jury was empaneled to investigate allegations that a recent game between the Cubs and Phillies had been fixed by gamblers. Itching for revenge against insurrectionist Charles Comiskey, AL President Johnson then prevailed upon his longtime acquaintance Judge Charles McDonald, the jurist presiding over the grand jury, to widen the panel’s probe to include inquiry into the integrity of the 1919 World Series. Unseemly revelations about baseball corruption presented to the grand jury quickly found their way into newsprint, but concrete evidence of 1919 World Series corruption was sparse. That abruptly changed, however, when fix insider Billy Maharg went public with claims that grand-jury targets like Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams had dumped Games One, Two, and Eight in return for a gamblers payoff.20

Austrian immediately realized that club boss Comiskey had to be placed on the right side of now-cascading allegations of Series corruption and acted with dispatch. Summoned to the Austrian office on the morning of September 28, a stressed-out and seemingly remorseful Cicotte quickly broke down under questioning by Austrian, admitting his complicity in the Series fix and naming seven teammates as co-conspirators. Austrian thereupon marched Cicotte over to the Cook County Courthouse and delivered him to lead grand-jury prosecutor Hartley Replogle. Decades later, Eight Men Out author Eliot Asinof would maintain that Austrian was the one who induced Cicotte to sign a pre-testimony waiver of immunity from prosecution, but this claim is belied by the record. The waiver was presented to Cicotte within the grand-jury room by Replogle and signed by Cicotte before the grand jurors.21 Not as easily refuted is Asinof’s charge that Austrian’s conduct toward the White Sox players was adversarial and betrayed a conflict of interest. Strictly speaking, the conflict charge is unfounded, as nothing in the canons of professional ethics conferred upon Austrian any duty to individual White Sox players. His professional obligation was to safeguard the best interests of his client: Charles Comiskey and his corporate alter ego, the White Sox corporation.22 That said, some modern Black Sox commentators (but not the writer) deem Austrian’s procurement of the player confessions to be morally indefensible, if not ethically so.

As scandal events rapidly unfolded in late September 1920, nothing suggests that Austrian devoted attention to parsing modern-day ethical questions about conflicts of interest. Rather, he continued to focus on protecting Comiskey and the ballclub. To that end, Joe Jackson (and thereafter Lefty Williams) was summoned to Austrian’s office, admitted Series fix complicity under questioning by Austrian,23 and then was delivered to prosecutors to repeat admissions of fix guilt to the grand jurors. On September 29 the eight White Sox players reportedly indicted by the grand jury were immediately placed on suspension by Comiskey pending the disposition of any charges officially preferred against them. A day later, Austrian rescued those charges from being undone by lame-duck Cook County State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, who publicly questioned the validity of grand-jury investigation of what he deemed to be non-indictable offenses.24 A widely published Austrian tutorial on the applicability of conspiracy law and other Illinois felony statutes embarrassed Hoyne,25 and he quickly backed off. There would be no further interference by Hoyne with the grand jury’s work.

In the short term, Austrian’s strategy of preemptive action served Comiskey well, with press commentary portraying the club boss as selflessly sacrificing his own interests in the effort to purge the game of corruption. And while his press notices were still good, Comiskey struck back at Ban Johnson. He threw his support behind Albert Lasker’s plan to reconstitute the National Commission, the three-member governing body of Organized Baseball largely perceived as under Johnson’s thumb, filling its posts with new members unconnected to the game’s establishment.26 Although he had no great personal interest in baseball, business formation and corporate restructuring were right in Alfred Austrian’s professional wheelhouse, and he was widely reputed to be the draftsman of the Lasker Plan. Comiskey and his allies then doubled down, threatening to transfer the White Sox, Yankees, and Red Sox to the National League if the Lasker Plan was not adopted, their secession warning buttressed by an Austrian legal opinion that player contracts were the exclusive property of the players’ respective clubs, not the American League. The teams, not the AL, controlled where the players played.27 For the time being, however, further hostilities were deferred pending the outcome of the criminal trial of the Black Sox.

Despite his pivotal role in procuring the confession evidence, Austrian was only a minor witness at the July 1921 Black Sox proceedings. He did not testify about the out-of-court admissions of fix complicity made in his office by Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams. Nor was he called as a witness during the midtrial hearing on the admissibility of the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony. Austrian only appeared in court briefly as a prosecution rebuttal witness, denying that he had ever called gambler-informant Harry Redmon a blackmailer or otherwise denigrated Redmon.28 But Austrian was hardly idle. At the time the Black Sox were being tried and ultimately acquitted, Austrian was in court battling attorneys for Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a photogenic gold-digger and actress wannabe whose serial acquisition and discard of millionaire husbands had made her a tabloid sensation. In the end, Austrian was able to procure the divorce decree sought by lumber baron W. Stanley Joyce, while Peggy obtained an alimony settlement sufficient to tide her over until another wealthy husband could be snared.29

In the aftermath of the Black Sox criminal trial, Austrian coordinated the White Sox defense against the civil suits instituted by Joe Jackson and several other banished White Sox players. Of critical importance in the Jackson case, the only one of these suits that ever went to trial, Austrian obtained the grand-jury transcript of Jackson’s testimony from disappointed Cook County prosecutors only too happy to oblige. Devastating use of that transcript on cross-examination of Jackson led to vacation of the monetary judgment awarded him by a Milwaukee jury, and a perjury citation being slapped on Jackson by the trial judge.30 Called as a defense witness late in the trial, Austrian recounted the events that attended the statements given in his office by Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams; outlined his dealing with Arnold Rothstein and Rothstein attorney Hyman Turchin prior to Rothstein’s grand-jury appearance; and explained the basis for the salary increases given players suspected of fix participation. According to Austrian, he and club owner Comiskey lacked the concrete proof of fix complicity that would only emerge later and declined to punish the players based solely on suspicion and then-unsubstantiated allegations.31

Although White Sox vice president Austrian and/or club secretary Harry Grabiner sometimes attended club owners’ meetings in place of an ailing Comiskey,32 the Black Sox-connected litigation concluded Austrian’s baseball-related court appearances. But he did institute a $50,000 libel suit on behalf of client William Wrigley after a weekly magazine called Tolerance accused the Cubs boss of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.33 Austrian also represented meat-packing giant Armour & Company in high-stakes proceedings conducted before the US Department of Agriculture. And there were the constant legal difficulties of Chicago politicians to keep Austrian busy. In his precious spare time, Austrian puttered around posh Lake Shore Country Club. In 1929, a nationally published AP wire story regaled readers with the improbable tale that Austrian, for years a high-handicap hacker who rarely broke 100, had whittled his score down into the 70s by taking a year’s worth of expensive lessons from the Lake Shore golf pro. The objective of the reported $10,000 that Austrian paid for his lessons was “to win a $5 bet” with cronies.34

Sadly, Austrian would have little time to enjoy his new-found golfing prowess. In September 1930 he underwent surgery of an undisclosed nature, and was thereafter prescribed extended rest as post-operative treatment.35 He never fully recovered and spent most of his final months confined to bed. Alfred Solomon Austrian died in his Chicago home from a gastrointestinal malady (probably stomach cancer) on January 26, 1932. He was 61. During funeral services at Rosehill Cemetery attended by Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak and a host of other dignitaries, Rabbi Solomon Freehof eulogized Austrian as “a joyous warrior, a leader in civic affairs, and an intellectual force in the community.”36

Postscript: Although hardly beyond criticism, Alfred Austrian led a life of distinction. But with those having living memory of Austrian’s accomplishments now long gone, what lingers in today’s consciousness are the unflattering decades-after-the-fact Austrian portrayals of Eight Men Out novelist Eliot Asinof and filmmaker John Sayles. To this, add The Fix, a recently debuted Black Sox-themed opera that casts Shoeless Joe Jackson as tragic hero and White Sox counsel Austrian (not club owner Comiskey) as the villainous heavy of the piece.37 Cruel, indeed, is the fate that supplants an estimable true life story with the caricatures of modern pop culture.

Acknowledgments

This biography is adapted from an article published in the June 2019 issue of the SABR Black Sox Scandal Research Committee newsletter. It was reviewed by Rory Costello and Len Levin and examined for accuracy by SABR’s fact-checking team.

Sources

The sources of information for this bio are set forth in the Notes.

Notes

1 The work’s full title is Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series. The book was published in New York by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, and originally released in hardcover in 1963.

2 The movie version Eight Men Out was released by Orion Pictures in 1988.

3 See Gene Carney, Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Coverup of the Fix of the 1919 World Series Almost Succeeded (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2006).

4 Much of the Comiskey-Austrian relationship was shrouded by the attorney-client privilege.

5 Alfred’s siblings were Bertha (born 1868), twins Delia and Celia (1874), and Harvey (1879).

6 According to Charles Fountain in The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 124.

7 According to author Harvey Frommer, “Alfred Austrian never read the sports pages, cared very little for baseball, and looked at the [White Sox and Cubs] teams he represented merely as corporate clients.” Frommer, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ragtime Baseball (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1992), 137. As of 1924, it was reported that Austrian had attended exactly one major-league baseball game in his entire life. See the Milwaukee Sentinel, February 8, 1924.

8 As noted in the Austrian obituaries published in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times, January 27, 1932. His library of several thousand volumes included first editions of Milton, Yeats, and Conrad. See “Library of Rare Volumes Left by A.S. Austrian,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1932.

9 See “Greenhut Squelched Again,” Chicago Inter-Ocean; “Some Hot Word,” Cleveland Plain Dealer; and “Filed a New Suit,” Omaha World Herald, all published May 9, 1895.

10 See “Whisky Trust Takes New Name,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, and “Rectified Budge: The Old Whisky Trust Is Re-Incorporated, “Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald, both published July 2, 1895.  

11 The club was incorporated under the laws of the State of Wisconsin on March 5, 1900, per Tim Hornbaker, Turning the Black Sox White: The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles A. Comiskey (New York: Sports Publishing, 2014), 132, n8.  

12 As reported in “Davis Is Enjoined; Is He in Hiding?” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1903.

13 To this day, the Iroquois Theatre tragedy remains the deadliest single fire in American history.

14 Per Jeffrey Cruickshank and Arthur W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), 159.

15 See “Directors to Probe Rule of Ban Johnson,” Bridgeport (Connecticut) Evening Farmer, and “Will Investigate Ban’s Activities,” Washington Times, both published September 17, 1919.

16 At his own expense, Chicago filmmaker and ardent White Sox fan Clyde Elliott accompanied Gleason and O’Neill on the St. Louis trip.

17 As per “Gamblers Unable to Prove Charges Made After Games for World Title,” Salt Lake City Telegram, December 30, 1919. See also, “Comiskey Calls Bribery Bluff,” Chattanooga News, and “$10,000 Bribe Offer of Comiskey Stands,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, also December 30, 1919.

18 Hornbaker, 288-289.

19 For more detail, see Gene Carney, “Comiskey’s Detectives,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Fall 2009.

20 The Maharg revelations were published in the Philadelphia North American on September 27, 1920, and republished in newspapers nationwide the following day.

21 The transcript of Eddie Cicotte’s grand-jury testimony has not survived intact, but parts of it were embedded in a deposition subsequently given by Cicotte in connection with a civil suit against the White Sox instituted by Joe Jackson. The record, furthermore, inarguably documents that Replogle (not Austrian) elicited the waivers of Jackson and Williams. See transcript of Jackson grand-jury testimony at JGJ1-5 to 22. For Williams, see WGJ23-10 to WGJ24-8.

22 By 1903 Comiskey had bought out the minority shareholders in the White Sox corporation. From then on, Comiskey would exercise complete and unilateral control of the franchise until his death in October 1931.

23 The extent to which Jackson revealed his fix complicity in Austrian’s office is unclear. The record establishes only that the telephone calls Jackson made to Judge McDonald to arrange his appearance before the grand jury were placed from the office. Once in chambers, Jackson admitted his involvement in the fix to Judge McDonald. He thereafter repeated those admissions under oath before the grand jury.

24 Hoyne had lost his bid for renomination to the State’s Attorney’s post in the October 1920 Democratic Party primary, and left the office in a huff to vacation out the remainder of his term in New York City.

25 See e.g., “Baseball Probe Goes to Grand Jury,” Kansas City Star, and “No Loophole for Indicted,” Seattle Star, September 30, 1920, and “Baseball Inquiry Will Go Through to End, Says Judge,” New York Tribune, October 1, 1920. Judge McDonald and grand-jury foreman Henry Brigham also publicly rebuffed Hoyne, and resolved to continue the proceedings.

26 As reported in “League Magnates Favor Lasker Tribunal Plan,” Omaha World Herald; “Baseball Magnates Talk Over Reorganization Plan,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 6, 1920, and elsewhere.

27 See “Owners Prepare for Bitter Legal Battle,” Evansville (Indiana) Courier, and “AL Hold on Men Denied,” The Oregonian (Portland), November 10, 1920.

28 See “Confessions of Ball Players Go to Jury,” The Sporting News, July 28, 1921.

29 See “Joyce Wins; To Pay Peggy,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1921.

30 For more detail on the Jackson perjury citation and the civil proceedings from which it emanated, see William F. Lamb, Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial, and Civil Litigation (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2013), 149-198. The scene in Eight Men Out where the Jackson grand-jury transcript mysteriously emerges from the briefcase of White Sox defense attorney George Hudnall is just one of the many Asinof fabrications that hamper enjoyment of his book.

31 See generally, Transcript of Jackson civil trial, 889-958; 1028-1035. See also, “Lawyer Says Jackson Admitted Part in Plot,” Milwaukee Journal, February 6, 1924.

32 See e.g., “American and National League Club Owners Assembled in New York,” The Sporting News, December 19, 1929. Published with the article is a photograph showing Austrian and Grabiner among AL magnates.

33 See “Chewing Gum Man Files Suit Against Anti-Klan Weekly,” Baton Rouge State-Times, February 3, 1923, and “Wrigley Sues Anti-Klan,” Rockford (Illinois) Republic, February 6, 1923. The accusation was untrue, and the institution of the Wrigley lawsuit led to the publication’s closing shortly thereafter.

34 See e.g., “It Costs $10,000 to Win $5 Bet,” Benton Harbor (Michigan) News-Palladium, June 22, 1929, and “Lawyer Pays $10,000 to Pro Who Helps Him Break 80,” Danville (West Virginia) Bee, July 21, 1929.

35 “A.S. Austrian in Hospital; Recovering after Surgery,” Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1930.

36 “Leaders of Bar and Business Honor Austrian,” Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1932.

37 A plot summary of the historically maladroit opera is provided in Dan Levitt’s review published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee newsletter, The Inside Game, Vol. XIX, No. 3, June 2019.

One of J.J. Benton’s six children, John Cleve Benton was born on June 27, 1890, in Clinton, North Carolina. A tall, lanky youth with natural athletic ability, John pitched in several independent leagues, including a 1909 stint with Lakeland in the then-semipro Florida State League. The following year he started the season 11-5 for Macon in the Sally League when the Cincinnati Reds purchased his contract for $3,500, an unusually high price for a Class D player. “Rube” (an inevitable nickname in those days for a country boy from the South, especially one who bore so many similarities to Rube Waddell) made his major-league debut on June 28, 1910, losing to Three-Finger Brown of the Cubs one day after his 20th birthday. He appeared in 11 more games, 10 of them in relief, finishing the season with only the one loss and a 4.74 ERA.

Optioned to Chattanooga in 1911, Benton went 18-13 in the minors and returned to Cincinnati late in the season. Though his record for the Reds was only 3-3, he showed promise by finishing five of his six starts and posting a 2.01 ERA. Benton’s breakout season came in 1912, when he won 18 games and led the National League with 50 appearances and 39 games started. He even pulled off a steal of home, inspiring W. A. Phelon to pen a poem in his honor. Rube got off to another strong start in 1913, having won 11 of 18 decisions when the motorcycle he was riding early one morning struck a trolley car at high speed. Unconscious when he was taken to the hospital, Benton suffered a broken jaw and numerous cuts and bruises. The Reds suspended him for the remainder of the season.

Already, Rube was exhibiting the type of erratic behavior that would plague him for the rest of his life. His contract for 1914 included a clause stipulating that he would receive a bonus if he abstained from alcohol and tobacco to an extent that would satisfy manager Buck Herzog. For that one brief season Benton managed to avoid controversy, winning 16 games (including four shutouts) for a last-place club that won a total of only 60.

In 1915 Rube returned to his drinking and carousing, and his record stood at 6-13 when Cincinnati placed him on waivers in early August. The New York Giants verbally claimed him for the $3,000 waiver price, but shortly thereafter the Pittsburgh Pirates offered $4,000. The Reds accepted the Pirates’ offer, prompting the Giants to file a grievance. Benton, meanwhile, reported to the Pirates and pitched on August 17 against the Chicago Cubs, who played the game under protest. He tossed a six-hitter and defeated the Cubs, 3-2. One week later, the NL’s Board of Directors awarded Benton to the Giants. It ruled, however, that the Pirates had acted in good faith; rather than forfeiting the August 17 game to the Cubs, the Board ordered that it be stricken from the record books and replayed in September. The day after the decision, Rube pitched his first game for the Giants—against the Pirates, of all teams!—and gave up 12 hits in four innings of a 9-7 loss. He finished the season 3-5 for the last-place Giants, giving him a combined record of 9-18 for 1915.

Despite his concern over his new pitcher’s “inability to take the game seriously” (a common euphemism for a player who was an alcoholic), John McGraw thought highly of Benton’s pitching ability. The 6’1″ left-hander rewarded his manager’s faith by winning 31 games and losing only 17 over the next two seasons. In the 1917 World Series Rube pitched Game Three, with the Giants already down two games to the Chicago White Sox, and revived his team with a brilliant 2-0 victory, becoming the first southpaw to hurl a shutout in a World Series. Benton’s next start was Game Six, when Heinie Zimmerman was unfairly labeled a goat for chasing Eddie Collins across the plate. Rube lasted only five innings and ended up the losing pitcher despite not giving up any earned runs.

Benton’s next season was cut short by the military draft. He reported to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, on May 26, 1918, and spent an uneventful year in the army, mostly playing baseball games against college and professional players. Returning to the majors in 1919, Rube won 17 games for the second-place Giants while his old team, the Cincinnati Reds, won the pennant and beat the Chicago team that became known as the Black Sox.

Once again Benton became the center of controversy, testifying on September 24, 1920, before a Chicago grand jury that was investigating baseball gambling. At the time he was suffering through a 9-16 season, the worst of his Giant career. Rube testified that the only game-fixing incident he knew of was an offer from Giant teammate Buck Herzog and Cincinnati’s Hal Chase to throw a game against the Cubs in September 1917, but he had refused their bribe and won the contest. Herzog, though, didn’t appreciate Benton’s bringing up his name before the grand jury. Claiming that Rube had carried a grudge against him since 1915, when he was managing the Reds, Herzog counter-charged that Rube won $3,800 betting on Cincinnati in the 1919 World Series. He produced affidavits signed by Tony Boeckel (who, like Benton, later died in a car accident) and Art Wilson of the Boston Braves in support of his claim.

The grand jury subpoenaed Benton a second time, and this time he admitted knowing that the 1919 World Series was fixed. Though he denied betting on the Series himself, Rube testified that Chase won $40,000 on the Reds, and he also named four of the Chicago players who were in on the fix. Benton’s testimony was a vital link in a chain of events that led several of the Black Sox to admit their guilt.

Rube pitched well at the beginning of the 1921 season, compiling a 5-2 record and 2.88 ERA, but the Giants suddenly released him in midseason. There was no official explanation for his release or the failure of any other big-league club to claim him, but Benton was now considered an undesirable character. The Giants assigned him to St. Paul of the American Association, and in 1922 he won a total of 24 games, including the only two games the Saints took from the International League-champion Baltimore Orioles in the Junior World Series. Both the St. Louis Browns and the Cincinnati Reds expressed interest in Benton for 1923.

American League president Ban Johnson declared Benton ineligible, however, and National League president John Heydler followed Johnson’s lead, though he decided to leave the final decision to Commissioner Landis. To everyone’s surprise, Landis ruled on March 8, 1923, that “Benton is eligible to play with the Cincinnati club and no one is going to keep him from doing so if that club wants him.” This seemed to be a direct contradiction to his decisions in the cases of Buck Weaver and Joe Gedeon, both of whom were banned for life for having “guilty knowledge” of the fix, but Benton spent three more seasons with the Reds, winning 30 games and losing 29. His 2.77 ERA in 1924 was fourth best in the league.

After the 1925 season Benton drew his release from the Reds and returned to the American Association, pitching the next eight years for the Minneapolis Millers, a team often referred to as “the Old Men’s Home of Baseball.” In 1931 Rube was returning from a hunting trip in Indiana when he swerved to avoid a hay wagon and crashed into a statue in front of a cemetery. He suffered a shattered cheekbone, an injury to his hands, and internal injuries as well. Newspaper coverage of the accident noted that his family investigated and reported that he hadn’t had a drink all day. It was feared that Benton’s pitching career was over, but he recovered in time to post an 18-7 record for the first-place Millers in 1932. He continued to pitch for Minneapolis through 1934, finally hanging up his spikes at age 44.

Benton came out of retirement to pitch in a semipro game for Erwin, North Carolina, on June 27, 1937, claiming it was his 50th birthday (though record books showed he was only 47). On December 12 of that year he was involved in a head-on collision in Dothan, Alabama, and died of a fractured skull and chest injuries. His wife and one daughter survived him.

An earlier version of this biography appeared in SABR’s “Deadball Stars of the National League” (Brassey’s Inc., 2004), edited by Tom Simon.

Sources

Boren, Steve. “The Bizarre Career of Rube Benton.” Baseball Research Journal. SABR, 1983

Cincinnati Enquirer. 9/4/1932.

Dothan (Alabama) Eagle. 12/12/1937 obituary.

Lane, Frank. “The Sensational Rube Benton Affair.” Baseball Magazine, May 1923.

National Baseball Hall of Fame. [Garry] Herrmann Letter File, and Rube Benton file.

National Baseball Hall of Fame. T.F. Sawyer letter to Frank Lane.

New York Times. 12/13/1937 obituary.

The Sporting News. 1/8/1914.

The Sporting News. 9/31/1920.

The World Telegraph. 9/4/1915.

A more detailed look at Brown’s life shows how unlikely it was for Arnold Rothstein to entrust Brown with anything. Rachie Brown comes across as a small-time (at most, midlevel) operator with a reputation as a “squealer,” a survivor, certainly, but not at the pay grade of somebody such as Nat Evans. Brown knew Rothstein, but (unlike Evans) was not a close associate of “AR.” As such, the common thesis that Evans posed as “Brown” during the Fix makes a lot of sense.

Like most of the gamblers involved in the Fix, Brown was Jewish-American. According to his 1919 passport application, he was born on July 4, 1870, in New York City, the son of Hyman Braunstein. The passport officer highly doubted that affidavit of birth. In fact Brown WAS born Abraham Joseph Brown or Braunstein, around 1871, but his census entries have him born in Wisconsin or Michigan. His widow stated that he was born on July 4, 1871, in Milwaukee.2 Around 1897 he married Rose Bell (last name unknown), who survived him. The couple was childless, but they adopted a daughter, Jessie, who died at the age of 14.

One newspaper story had Brown coming to New York City from St. Louis, “in the days of the Becker strong arm squad” [i.e., the early 1900s].3 He appears as a broker on the 1905 census of New York, living in Manhattan with his wife. The first public notice we have of him is 1907, during one of New York City’s frequent (and invariably unsuccessful) attempts to clean out the gambling houses in the city. An article in the New York Herald goes into great detail about the many gambling joints in and around Broadway, all doing business in full view of the public, “notorious resorts for thieves” all paying $200 to $500 a month in protection money to the police and the Tammany Hall politicians. Among the joints mentioned was “that unique institution, the Paris Optical School. Abe (Rachel) Brown complains that he is compelled to pay an average of $500 a month for the privilege of teaching a lot of criminals, whom the detective sergeants attached to Inspector McLaughlin’s Bureau can’t catch, that their optics are not perfect. Brown, who is affectionately referred to by his police pals as ‘Jew Rachel,’ had one roulette wheel and two crap tables running last night. His profits last month, according to his own story, were about $7,200.”4

Around this time he partnered with Louis William “Bridgie” Webber (1877-1936) in various gambling houses. The connection almost got Brown killed. In July 1912 a small-time bookmaker, the unlikable Herman Rosenthal, complained to the press about the police department shaking down his operations for protection money. Two days later, as Rosenthal walked out of the Hotel Metropole off Times Square, he was brutally murdered. The subsequent trial culminated with death sentences for five men, including corrupt NYPD Vice Squad Lieutenant Charles Becker. Bridgie Webber was seen running from the crime scene. While in a jail cell, Becker claimed that two months before Rosenthal’s murder, Rosenthal’s killers had targeted “‘Rachey’ (Rachel) Braunstein, Bridgie Webber’s gambling partner.” According to Becker, Rosenthal’s slayers had plotted to kill “Rachel Braunstein” and take over Brown/Braunstein’s half of the gambling partnership. Trial witness Jack Sullivan learned of the plot and told Brown, who promptly (wisely?) boarded a ship and fled to Spain.5

The plot thickens. At the time of Rosenthal’s murder, Brown “was a partner of Bridgie Webber in West Forty-Fifth Street and in the poker room at Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. … He, Webber, Rosenthal, and Sam Paul [1874-1927, also involved in the Rosenthal murder] were members of the old Hesper club on Second Avenue, and left the East Side to break into the gambling pastures for the Tenderloin and Harlem. Brown started a house on his own account in West Forty-Fifth Street, and it was promptly closed up by the police.” Another Brown venture, in the “Tenderloin,” was to have opened the night of April 7, 1911. On the morning prior to the opening, a bomb exploded in the house’s basement entrance, wrecking the place.6

Webber and Brown didn’t like, or trust, each other. They “were once partners in the Sixth Avenue poker room from which the gunmen departed to kill Rosenthal.” Brown suspected that Webber had hired the gunmen who killed Rosenthal. Webber accused Brown of tipping the police off to one of Webber’s establishments, and raiding it. Brown blamed Webber for the police tailing him day and night. Amidst mutual accusations of “squealing,” the newspapers suggested that Webber would only meet Brown with “a rapid fire gun battery.” Brown, on the other hand, “is one who has always settled his own quarrels personally … [and to] have a strong objection to the class of men favored by Webber [i.e., hired gunmen] in affairs of personal vengeance.”7

In May 1913 police found a dynamite bomb in the basement of Brown’s house, at 127 Manhattan Avenue. Brown seemed rather nonchalant about the whole thing. He told police that “he knew of no enemies who might want to do him harm.” Mrs. Brown calmly explained that her husband was a stockbroker, although she admitted that his business office had been “blown up two years ago by dynamite”!8

In March 1914 Brown appeared in magistrate’s court to answer a disorderly-conduct charge that stemmed from a fight. Indignant, Brown “asserted that since the Becker trial he had been hounded and threatened on many occasions.” In fact, New York District Attorney Charles S. Whitman, knowing Brown’s animosity toward Webber, was putting pressure on Brown to testify against Webber in the Becker-Rosenthal case.9

Arnold Rothstein knew Brown, but does not appear to have had a close relationship with “Rachie.” Rothstein knew all the principals in the Rosenthal murder. In fact, Rosenthal had tried to borrow $500 from Rothstein (whom he considered a friend) to pay off Charlie Becker. In 1917 Rothstein, Brown, and Curly Bennett were among the many gamblers at a crap game in the St. Francis Hotel who were robbed at gunpoint.10

In 1918 “Rachie Brown, the old partner of Bridgie Webber” was back in the news after being netted in a police raid of the newly opened Piccadilly Club in the Tenderloin. Police found 25 men playing poker, with signs that roulette wheels were soon to be installed. A man police suspected of running the place identified himself as fish dealer Aaron Braun but vice detectives immediately recognized him as “the genuine ‘Rachie Brown.’” The cops suggested that Brown “close up shop and beat it after you get through with this affair.”11

An interesting sidelight on Brown occurred in early 1919. In February of that year he applied for a passport in order to travel to Cuba for his health. The application was notarized by Julius Formel, a notorious gambler and business associate in the Saratoga casinos. Brown gives details on his life and explains that his father, Hyman, is in a sanitarium. But the passport officer, who appears to have known Brown, didn’t believe a word of it. “I shall be glad if this passport be refused. In the first place I do not consider he is the type of a man who should be allowed to leave our country. I doubt if he is in his right mind. I think he wants to go to Cuba to bet on the races [presumably at the Havana racetrack Nat Evans operated]. Secondly, I doubt if he was born in this country and question the reliability of his birth affidavit. He is the most insulting and arrogant man that has been in this Agency for a long time. The entire staff will sign this Certificate if necessary. His father is now in an insane asylum and I am afraid the son will soon kick into the same place if he does not change his method of conduct.”12

The summer of 1919, Brown was in jail again, arrested during a raid on a gambling resort in Saratoga. When brought before the local judge, Brown “boasted of having paid over $50,000 income tax last year. He was allowed to give a small bail to appear as a witness before the grand jury when wanted, no charges being lodged against him.” A short time later the Saratoga County grand jury returned gambling-related indictments against 48 targets, including Brown. Brown acted as a “steerer,” haunting the posh local hotel lobbies “looking for ‘suckers’ for a gambling den in Greenfield.”13

Initially, nothing on Brown’s life received mention when newspapers nationwide ran stories about the indictment of Joseph “Sport” Sullivan and “Brown,” “agents of Rothstein,” in connection with the Cook County probe of the 1919 World Series.14 The Grand Jury in Chicago indicted “Brown,” but Chicago officials seem to have been unsure whether the indicted man was indeed “Rachie” Brown or Nat Evans, posing as Brown.15 The consensus among modern historians is that Evans monitored the Fix on behalf of Arnold Rothstein, but while dealing with the players used the name “Brown” to confuse future investigators.

Reports soon surfaced that Brown had fled the country. An October 5 story out of New York claimed, “Rachel Brown, partner of ‘Bridgie’ Webber in the old days when the tenderloin was run wide open and more recently a partner and ‘steerer’ for Arnold Rothstein and indicted by the Cook County grand jury in Chicago for world series ‘fixing,’ has fled to Europe. Brown is widely known in sporting circles in Albany and Saratoga.”16

Reports of Brown fleeing the country, however, were soon contradicted by “several men of wide acquaintance in the gambling ring” who allegedly talked with Brown several days after the purported getaway ship had sailed. The author of this article has checked passenger lists and can find no trace of Brown sailing from New York at this time. He could not have left, because the following month, Brown and Saratoga codefendant Jules Formel (who’d notarized Brown’s passport application) were arrested in New York City and then transported upstate to answer the Saratoga charges. Granted immunity, Brown testified against his old friend, Formel. However, Brown managed not to implicate either himself or Formel directly. The evidence showed that Formel cut local public officials in on his gambling profits, and that Brown took 15 percent as his share. There appears to have been no effort made to extradite Brown to Chicago, even though he was under indictment.17

Brown then tried bootlegging. In April 1921 he was indicted for smuggling alcohol by car from Canada. The newspaper report identified him as the gambler who was indicted in the World Series Fix. Brown pleaded guilty, paid part of the fine, then was released on his promise (!) to pay the rest. He failed to do so, and in 1922 was rearrested in New York City.18

After this last brush with the law, Brown appears to have retired from the New York gambling scene. In the late 1920s he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, purchasing a house on South Catalina Avenue and running a small bookmaking operation. He died there, of a cerebral hemorrhage, on September 22, 1936. His remains were cremated.19

Sources

In preparing this biography, the author relied primarily on major online newspaper databases. Also helpful was David Pietrusza, Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003).

Notes

In 1919 Burns infamously returned to the major-league scene as one of the conspirators in the Black Sox Scandal. At the criminal trial in 1921, he turned State’s evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution. His account of events has been accepted as factual, but veracity was not his strong suit.

William Thomas Burns was born on January 27, 1880, in San Saba, Texas, and grew up on a farm there. He was part of a large Catholic family. His father, James Francis Burns, was an Irish immigrant, and his mother, Anna Cecilia (Peters) Burns, was a daughter of Irish immigrants. William was the sixth of 14 children born to James and Anna. In 1896 Anna stepped on a rusty nail and died from lockjaw. James remarried in 1901 and had four more children.

James was a “successful farmer and stock-man.”2 His San Saba farm was profiled in a 1911 report by the US Department of Agriculture. He grew cotton, wheat, oats, corn, and sorghum on 90 acres, and he kept 30 to 40 head of cattle, 10 to 15 hogs, and 100 to 200 chickens. He was not a rich man, but as noted in the report, “his cash income has been sufficient to meet all obligations incident to providing for and educating a family of 18 children.”3

San Saba was remote; before 1911 the nearest train station was 24 miles away.4 The community, with a population of 1,200, was visited in 1896 by Texas Rangers, who were sent to stop a violent vigilante gang known as the “San Saba mob.”5 It was the Wild West.

William worked on the family farm. He was a natural athlete who excelled at baseball, football, and rodeo competitions, including roping, branding, and bronco busting.6 His pitching for the “Big Orchard ranch nine” in Texas attracted the attention of the baseball coach at the New Mexico Military Institute, who offered him “an education in return for slabwork.”7 After two years there, Burns ventured westward, and in 1905 he reportedly won 36 of 37 games pitching for a semipro team in Richmond, California, near San Francisco.8 He was a big man, described as husky and burly: 6-feet-2 and 195 pounds. His hairline receded in his twenties and made him look older than he was.

In 1906, Burns joined the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League and compiled a 16-16 record. He bettered it with a 24-17 mark for the pennant-winning Angels the following year. Upon the recommendation of scout Denny Long, the Washington Senators drafted him.9 He made his major-league debut at age 28 on April 18, 1908, against the Highlanders in New York. The southpaw was “practically invincible” for the first eight innings, but the Senators lost, 6-5, in 11 innings.10 Five days later he earned his first major-league win, a 6-4 triumph over the Boston Red Sox in Washington. The losing pitcher later became one of the prime figures in the Black Sox Scandal: 23-year-old Eddie Cicotte, pitching in relief.11

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

In Washington on May 21, 1908, Burns hurled a two-hit shutout against the Detroit Tigers. Four days later in Washington, he twirled a three-hitter but lost to the Tigers, 1-0, his throwing error accounting for the lone run. He held 21-year-old Ty Cobb, the AL batting champion, hitless in those two games. The Washington Post called Burns “the greatest find of the season.”12

Burns had an excellent fastball, curveball, and changeup, and used the same casual windup in delivering each of them so that the batter had no idea which pitch was coming.13 He pitched with a crossfire motion, in which his left arm came across his right leg, à la the great southpaw Eddie Plank. Burns was ambidextrous; though he never pitched right-handed in a game, he did in batting practice “with considerable speed.”14

Burns’s pickoff move was exceptional. Umpire Billy Evans said that he had never seen a more deceptive one. Batters would sometimes start their swing as Burns threw to first base.15

Runs were scarce during the Deadball Era, and in especially short supply for the Senators. In Chicago on June 5 and June 8, Burns pitched well but lost both games by identical 2-1 margins.16 He impressed White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, who made an offer to trade for him that was rejected by the Senators.17

During one of these close contests in Chicago, Burns fell asleep on the bench in the eighth inning while his teammates were batting and had to be awakened when it was time for him to return to the mound.18 He had no trouble falling asleep whenever and wherever he wanted. This trait earned him the nickname “Sleepy Bill.” He could also be seen nonchalantly reading a magazine or newspaper while on the bench during a game.

In Washington on July 7, Burns lost another close one, 1-0, to the White Sox in the first game of a doubleheader, and at his request, he started the second game but lasted only four innings. His effort was applauded by Washington fans.19 Three days later, again facing the White Sox in Washington, he gamely pitched the first 13-1/3 innings of a 16-inning, 2-2 tie.20

Burns’s 6-11 record in 1908 does not tell the story of his fine performance. His 1.70 ERA was sixth best in the American League, and only one AL pitcher (Cleveland’s Addie Joss) walked fewer batters per nine innings. Burns’s control was “remarkable, especially for a southpaw.”21 He “has proved himself as good as any southpaw in the league,” wrote Paul W. Eaton in Sporting Life.22 But Burns’s success had given him a swelled head, said J. Ed Grillo of the Washington Post.23

Burns sustained a season-ending injury in late July of 1908, in an altercation with the Senators’ “hot-tempered” captain, Bob Ganley.24 Reportedly, Ganley struck Burns with a bat, fracturing two ribs. Burns recovered and in the winter pitched for the Reach All-Americans on a tour of Japan, China, and the Philippines. Hostility between Burns and Ganley continued in the spring of 1909. Senators manager Joe Cantillon rid himself of the problem by trading Burns to the White Sox and selling Ganley to the Philadelphia Athletics.

On May 28, 1909, Burns pitched all 14 innings for the White Sox but was edged, 2-1, in Detroit. The game was “a corker,” said the Chicago Inter Ocean, but “it went to waste in this minor league burg, where but a small handful of fans turned out to see the game.”25 While Chicago was snooty towards Detroit, Burns had become a prima donna on the White Sox. In June he chose to stay at a different Washington hotel from the rest of the team, and throughout the season he came and went as he pleased and shirked morning practice with the team.26

In Chicago on July 11, Burns delivered a three-hit shutout against the Red Sox.27 He took “keen delight in harpooning his late associates on the Washington team.”28 Three times he defeated Walter Johnson and the Senators, including two shutouts.29 But Comiskey, who had a surplus of left-handed pitchers, grew tired of Burns’s attitude and sold him to the Cincinnati Reds in June of 1910.

As a member of the Reds, Burns shut out the first-place Chicago Cubs twice in 1910, with a one-hitter on June 27 and a two-hitter on July 7, and he defeated the defending world champion Pittsburgh Pirates with a four-hitter on July 2.30 Sportswriter Ring Lardner asked, “Who is he?”31 The world wanted to know.

And through the press, Burns told them in a charming Texas drawl. According to Burns, he owned nearly $250,000 worth of Texas land and was so wealthy that he did not need to play baseball, but he played the game because he loved it and could not stay away from it. He flashed an expensive diamond ring as he spoke.32 Also, he was a legendary hunter in Texas known for capturing foxes with his bare hands.33 Sportswriters reported his claims as if they were facts, apparently unaware that Texans tell tall tales. “How did you lose your hair?” someone asked the balding Burns. “Full count on the batter with the bases full,” he replied with a grin.34

Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton ran a series of articles in which ballplayers told of the greatest plays they ever saw. Most described a remarkable play from a major-league game, but Burns told Fullerton of a game played in Texas in which the players wore chaps and spurs. It was a rather peaceful game, he said, with only two shootings and no one was hurt. A center fielder, who was so fast that he ran down jackrabbits to stay in shape, caught a popup in shallow center field and then rode his spurs like roller skates all the way to home plate, arriving just in time to tag the baserunner who had tagged up at third base.35

In the book Tall Tales from Texas, folklorist Mody C. Boatright examined the genre: “Sometimes the listener was informed by a sell at the end of the story that he had been taken in; more often he was made aware of the fact by the sheer heights of exaggeration to which the narrative ascended; occasionally he accepted the story in good faith and went away neither sadder nor wiser.”36 The tall tale was an art form in Texas, something to master and be proud of. Burns was indeed a master and could easily fool unsuspecting greenhorns.

When Burns was not spinning tales, he might be napping. Twice in May of 1911, Reds manager Clark Griffith wanted to put Burns into a game as a relief pitcher, only to find that Burns was not warming up as instructed but was asleep on the clubhouse bench.37 This was inexcusable; Griffith suspended him and then sold him to the Philadelphia Phillies.

Awake on the Phillies, Burns shut out the Cubs twice in Chicago in 1911; the first was a four-hitter to defeat Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown on June 15, and the second was a one-hitter on September 19. And Burns beat Christy Mathewson and the New York Giants twice in Philadelphia in a span of three days, with relief help from rookie Grover Cleveland Alexander on July 3, and by going the distance in the first game of a doubleheader on July 5.38 If these four victories are excluded, however, his won-lost record for the Phillies was 2-10, including losses to both Brown and Mathewson.

Joe Cantillon, now manager of the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, wanted Burns and worked a deal with the Phillies to acquire him in January of 1912.39 But Burns was unwilling to accept a demotion to a minor league and instead signed a contract with the Detroit Tigers. There were conflicting reports about how this was arranged; either Burns bought his own release from the Millers, which permitted him to sign with the Tigers as a free agent, or the Millers sold him to the Tigers because he refused to pitch for the Millers.

By a 12-4 margin on April 13, 1912, Burns and the Tigers trounced the Cleveland Naps in Cleveland, as Burns held slugger Shoeless Joe Jackson – the most famous of the Black Sox to be – to one single in five at-bats.40 But it was Burns’s last major-league victory. Eight days later he “blew up” in the 10th inning of a 4-0 loss to the Naps in Detroit, and in his final major-league appearance, on May 23, he was batted “freely” in a 5-2 loss at Washington.41 The Tigers then sold Burns back to the Millers.

Shortly before Burns’s departure, the Tigers’ Ty Cobb was suspended by AL president Ban Johnson. To protest Cobb’s suspension, the Tigers refused to take the field on May 18 against the Athletics in Philadelphia. Tigers manager Hughie Jennings quickly assembled a replacement team consisting of amateur and semipro players from Philadelphia, and the makeshift lineup got walloped, 24-2, by the Athletics. At the recommendation of Burns, Jennings picked a 31-year-old Philadelphian named Billy Maharg, a former lightweight boxer, to play third base on this replacement squad.42 Burns and Maharg probably became acquainted the year before, when Burns was a member of the Phillies. The pair would figure prominently in the Black Sox Scandal.

Burns pitched well for the Millers in 1912 and 1913, with a combined record of 18-11 in the two seasons, though he was sidelined for much of the 1912 season by illness and injury. In 1913 he delivered a one-hit shutout against the St. Paul Saints on May 29, and a four-hit shutout against the Toledo Mud Hens on July 13.43 In the latter contest, Toledo’s Jim Baskette threw a no-hitter but lost, 1-0.

A gun-toting Texan, Burns slept at night with a firearm under his pillow.44 According to a news story from December of 1913, he was walking down a street in San Saba when he was accosted by a man wielding a long knife. Burns pulled out a gun and “dropped the stranger with a shot through the leg.”45

Burns pitched for the Millers until August 1914, when he bought his release from the team and signed with the Louisville Colonels.46 In Indianapolis on September 11, 1914, he lost his temper and punched umpire Jim Johnstone, jarring loose several of the umpire’s teeth. Burns was arrested for assault and battery. Johnstone, infuriated that the American Association did not suspend Burns, quit the league in protest.47

The Colonels released Burns in March 1915, and he rejoined the Los Angeles Angels. On May 5, he hurled a one-hit shutout of the Venice (California) Tigers.48 But he was now 35 years old and out of shape. On May 28 the Salt Lake City Bees took advantage of his immobility by bunting on him, which was, said the Los Angeles Times, “a mighty mean” thing to do to the “fat man.”49 Two more future Black Sox took part in that game. One of the bunters was a 22-year-old pitcher, Claude “Lefty” Williams, who posted a 33-12 record for the Bees that season. The Angels second baseman that day was 23-year-old Fred McMullin.

The Angels released Burns in July 1915, and he signed with the Oakland Oaks. Against the Vernon (California) Tigers on August 5, he belted a ball that should have been a home run, but he collapsed from exhaustion when he reached third base and settled for a triple. “The game had to be interrupted for ten minutes to give Burns a chance to recuperate,” said the Oakland Tribune. “Even the umpires had to stand back and laugh at Burns.”50 When he returned to the mound the next inning still fatigued, the Tigers scored three runs off him, one scored by yet another future member of the Black Sox, 20-year-old Charles “Swede” Risberg.

On October 31, 1915, Burns and several of his Oakland teammates played against the Richmond Elks, the semipro champions of Northern California. Burns pitched and lost, 7-3, while his brother Charlie earned the victory for the Elks. Eight years younger than Bill, Charlie was a right-hander and said to be the star pitcher on the Richmond club.51

Bill Burns retired after the 1915 season, but the Oaks needed pitching help and persuaded him to return in June 1916.52 On October 19, 1916, he defeated the Vernon Tigers with an 11-inning shutout.53

On May 31, 1917, in Alameda, California, the 37-year-old Burns married 25-year-old Laura Patricia Carroll of Cincinnati, a daughter of Irish immigrants. Laura’s older sister, Margaret, was the wife of pitcher Bobby Keefe, who had been a teammate of Burns on the Reds in the spring of 1911.54

Burns left the Oaks in June 1917, and he and his wife moved to Santa Rita, in southwest New Mexico, where he worked at an open-pit copper mine for seven dollars per day. He earned additional money by pitching for and managing the Santa Rita team in the Arizona-New Mexico Copper League, and his team won the league pennant.55

On March 24, 1918, Burns’s Santa Rita squad played against a team of Army soldiers at Camp Cody near Deming, New Mexico; he and Keefe combined to pitch a six-inning shutout.56 And in early April, Burns’s team won one of two exhibition games against the Chicago Cubs at Camp Cody, with thousands of soldiers in attendance.57 It is unknown whether Burns remained at Santa Rita that summer. It is possible that he went home to San Saba, where his father died on May 9.58

Burns went to spring training in 1919 with the Beaumont Oilers of the Texas League, but left the team to try his hand at making money in the Texas oil industry.59 This was a period of rampant speculation, and “swindlers, fakers, and oil stock manipulators” sought to take advantage of the nationwide interest in Texas oil.60 On July 12, 1919, Burns ran this advertisement in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

“OIL LEASES – BILL BURNS, FORMER RED PITCHER, IS IN TOWN. He wants to interest Cincinnatians in the buying of oil leases and royalties located in the TEXAS OIL FIELDS. Wonderful opportunities for those who care to invest. The leases are located in the RANGER OIL FIELDS, in the central part of Texas. Burns can be seen at Room 609, HAVLIN HOTEL. He will be in Cincinnati two weeks.”

From there Burns went to Missouri and made a similar pitch to St. Louisans. He claimed that he had invested $500 in an oil lease and two weeks later sold it for $16,000, and with that money he purchased more oil leases for which he was offered $60,000.61

Burns also boasted that oil was discovered on his “farm down in Texas some time ago” and that he had enough money to “buy a major league ball club.”62 It is unknown whether he was referring to his father’s San Saba farm or some other farm in Texas, or whether it was fictitious.

Burns returned to Cincinnati in August, pitched batting practice to the first-place Reds,63 and no doubt pitched oil leases to them as well. In New York, he sold a San Saba oil lease for about $2,000 to a group of Chicago Cubs, including Bill Killefer, Speed Martin, Fred Merkle, Hippo Vaughn, and manager Fred Mitchell.64 In the November 1919 issue of Petroleum Age, Burns and his business partner, A.M. Baten, advertised that they “buy and sell San Saba County [oil] leases and royalties.” To the greenhorn, Burns appeared to be a successful oilman. But according to the Texas Almanac, oil was not discovered in San Saba County until 1982.65

During his travels in 1919, Burns discussed more than oil. He and his pal, Billy Maharg, conspired with eight Chicago White Sox players to “fix” the 1919 World Series. In addition to those previously mentioned (Cicotte, Jackson, Williams, McMullin, and Risberg), the group included Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, and Buck Weaver.

In September 1920, Maharg told the story of the fix to reporter James Isaminger of the Philadelphia North American. Burns, but not Maharg, was indicted by a grand jury in October 1920, and by a second grand jury in March 1921. Both Burns and Maharg testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial in July. As fix insiders, their testimony was crucial to the prosecution’s case, but the jury acquitted the eight White Sox players. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis then banned all eight from Organized Baseball.

The Black Sox Scandal has been thoroughly studied by historians. To re-examine it here in depth is beyond the scope of this biography. That includes the extent to which gambler Abe Attell was involved; Attell was clearly a prominent figure in the fix, though a credible case can be made that he may not have been the lead figure. The putative role of Burns as liaison between the Black Sox players and the group including Attell, and the duration of Burns’s involvement, are also murky issues that are explored in works devoted expressly to the scandal.

Confessions given by Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams in 1920 reveal that the 1919 World Series was indeed fixed, but the details of the fix remain sketchy and subject to debate. It is likely that not all of the participants in the fix have been identified – and to reiterate, for those who have been identified, the extent of their involvement is unclear.

It’s notable that AL president Ban Johnson wanted Burns to testify in view of being an insider; Johnson went to costly lengths to find Burns in Texas. Burns and Maharg did step forward to tell their stories. They appeared trustworthy and were applauded by the press for giving credible testimony at the criminal trial. However, newspaper coverage of Burns’s time on the witness stand (parts of three days) is also notable in showing that his customary charm was lacking – he spoke in a monotone and was barely audible. Only upon cross-examination did he perk up and show some wit.

Much has been written since that presumes that Burns and Maharg were telling the truth. Yet, as noted previously, Burns was known for spinning yarns – in modern parlance, he would be called a “BS artist.” With the passage of time, it has become difficult if not impossible to distinguish the shades of gray in the accounts given by Burns (and Maharg).

In 1925, Burns resided in Del Rio, Texas, near the Mexican border, and an Associated Press story said that Ban Johnson was coming to Del Rio as Burns’s guest and would go bear hunting with him.66 While Burns probably did hunt bears, it is unlikely that Johnson would socialize with any of the Black Sox conspirators. Burns said he had leased 100,000 acres in Mexico and was organizing a hunting club there, and he wanted Johnson to be president of the club.67

Burns and his wife separated in the 1920s, and in 1930 she was back home in Cincinnati and working as a clerk at an automotive company.68 In 1940 Burns worked in highway construction and resided in Calexico, California, near the Mexican border.69 He died of a heart attack in Ramona, California, on June 7, 1953, at the age of 73, and was buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego. His brother, Charlie, said he lost track of Bill over the last 20 years of Bill’s life.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks William F. Lamb for helpful discussions, as well as Jacob Pomrenke and Rory Costello for their input.

This biography was reviewed by Norman Macht and Rory Costello and fact-checked by Alan Cohen.

Sources

William F. Lamb, Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2013).

Jacob Pomrenke, ed. Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox (Phoenix, Arizona: SABR, 2015).

National Baseball Hall of Fame file.

Ancestry.com.

Findagrave.com.

Notes

At the end of 1959 Cannon was installed as legal advisor to the Major League Baseball Players Association. He was more of a conciliator and go-between than an attorney who fought strenuously on behalf of his client. The half-dozen years he worked for the association are noteworthy yet unremarkable. His term would probably gather little interest today if he had not been followed by one of the most influential figures in modern baseball history, Marvin Miller.

Imagine the players’ representative telling Congress, as Cannon did in 1964, “The thinking of the average major league ballplayer, ‘We have it so good we don’t know what to ask for next.’” Rather than pushing the owners and league officials on behalf of the players, he went to great lengths to please management. In his words Cannon would “make no demands, no public statements.” He thought the players were extremely fortunate to be in the position they were, working in perhaps the finest industry in the world. He believed the benevolent owners would in time give the players everything they required. He also believed the league administrators, though hired and paid by management, would be fair and impartial toward the players. Cannon’s viewpoint was colored by his envy of the players’ pension plan. He believed it was the finest in the land and evidence that the owners must be benevolent at heart. Thus, Cannon repeatedly advised the players to proceed gently and cautiously in their negotiations with management so they could reap greater rewards at some undefined time in the future. He didn’t want them to jeopardize what they already had, a growing pension fund. Perhaps defining Cannon’s term was his inability to negotiate a raise in the minimum salary, despite baseball’s apparent financial health, highlighted by expansion, relocations and richer media contracts.

Robert C. Cannon was born on June 10, 1917 in Milwaukee, the first child of Raymond J. Cannon and Alice Carey. The Cannons were married in 1915 and had three children, including daughters Mary and Jeanne. Raymond was a lawyer, politician, and sports fan who represented several prominent sports figures, including Jack Dempsey. Raymond was also a semipro pitcher who played off and on from 1908-1922. In the aftermath of the thrown 1919 World Series Raymond was hired by one of the banned Black Sox, Milwaukee native Happy Felsch, to regain back pay, unpaid World Series earnings, and damages for termination of his major league career from Charles Comiskey and the Chicago White Sox. Felsch’s teammates Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson, and Swede Risberg also became Cannon’s clients. Cannon dove into baseball politics in 1922. He detested the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave baseball an anti-trust exemption on the grounds that the sport was not involved in interstate commerce. Raymond Cannon formed the National Baseball Players Association, an early players’ union that did not survive for long.

The Cannon family moved to Washington, D.C., for part of each year while Raymond served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933-1939. Robert attended the local Catholic and Georgetown Universities. After graduation he entered his father’s alma mater, Marquette University, earning a law degree in 1941. He joined the bar in Wisconsin and landed a job as a special assistant to the U.S. district attorney. A year later, he joined the navy during World War II. In 1945 Robert Cannon was elected a judge in the Milwaukee civil court. The 27-year-old was the youngest elected judge in the United States. In 1953 he was elevated to the circuit court, where he served for the next 25 years. He married his high school girlfriend, Helen E. Gildea. They had six children.

Growing up with his father’s interests and associations, Robert Cannon naturally became an avid sports fan. In 1956 he started hosting the Associated Press’ award ceremonies each year. He was also a boxing fan and a frequent visitor at Milwaukee ballparks. No one was happier to have the Boston Braves relocate to Milwaukee in 1953. During the close pennant race in 1956 Cannon scheduled his judicial calendar around potential postseason games. The Braves fell short that year, but he attended the two World Series against the Yankees in 1957 and ’58.

In 1959 Cannon’s name surfaced on the list of 10 lawyers who were candidates to replace the Major League Baseball Players association’s legal counsel, J. Norman Lewis. Lewis, a New York City lawyer, had been hired in August 1953 to help player representatives Allie Reynolds and Ralph Kiner negotiate with the owners’ pension committee. The pension plan had been created in 1946 but the players had made little progress after the initial concessions. Lewis, Reynolds, and Kiner reached their first agreement with the owners in April 1954, tying funding for the pension to All-Star Game receipts (60% of the net gate) and radio and television money from the World Series (60%). During his tenure Lewis also attained an increase in the major league minimum salary to $7,000, from $6,000.

Lewis had a lucrative law practice and worked only part-time for the players. The owners constantly pushed for his removal, because they wanted to limit the players’ outside influences and keep them ignorant about employment law. In 1958 Robin Roberts, a leading association member since the mid-1950s, proposed hiring a full-time advisor with a staff and office. He believed the association needed a central office to “make it feasible for ballplayers to register their views and opinions on any matters pertaining to association policy or player welfare.” The part-time director of the Players Association was Frank Scott, a former New York Yankee traveling secretary turned promotional agent, but he basically oversaw financial matters involving product sponsorship and personal appearances. Scott maintained the association’s New York “headquarters” in a file cabinet in his office.

The players and Scott put together a list of 10 potential candidates to replace Lewis as legal advisor. It included such familiar names as former baseball commissioner Happy Chandler, Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, Richard Moss (later Marvin Miller’s right-hand man), and Cannon. Bob Friend, the National League player representative, pushed Cannon’s candidacy. Friend sent a letter to Scott stating, “Please give considerable attention to a recent applicant for player attorney Judge Robert Cannon from Milwaukee. Of all the applicants I would favor this one.” Cannon was hired on December 4, 1959. The players’ initial agenda called for Cannon to protect and grow the pension fund and to assist with player grievances. Cannon became the association’s de facto director and spokesman. He did so as a part-time unpaid advisor, though he had an expense account, and he kept his position as a Milwaukee judge. Cannon handled union business on the weekends and other off hours and during his vacation. He met the players face to face during spring training visits and at mid-summer meetings. In the winters he attended league meetings.

From the outset Cannon made his intentions perfectly clear. He told The Sporting News in March 1960 that he would “make no demands, no public statements.” He wasn’t an aggressive lawyer like his father, who attacked the owners on the players’ behalf in the courts and in Congress during the 1920s and ’30s. Rather than pushing the owners on behalf of the players during the Continental League negotiations, Robert Cannon stood back from the proceedings stating, “Whatever determination or decisions they (the owners) come to would be for the best interest of baseball and the ballplayers in general”–even if that meant an extended playing schedule, which increased the players’ workload and travel, and would bring many more men under the pension umbrella. With expansion increasing the workforce Cannon even allowed the owners to unload 100% of the new insurance requirements onto the players.

When Cannon started meeting the players as he toured spring training camps, his message was simple: work with the owners. He constantly reminded the men how good they had it. He wanted the players to make no waves. Above all, the players should foster a greater relationship with the benevolent owners. In essence Cannon was preaching to the players from the beginning, before he even met everyone and understood the demands and responsibilities entrusted to him. He never did grasp the industry from a player’s perspective. For example, after the National League expansion in 1962, the Pirates threatened to rebel in August because they were forced to play five games in three days, including a doubleheader after a night game. Cannon reacted to the owners’ concerns and threats and advised the Pirates to take the field, which they did. Though it’s a single example, it shows that Cannon responded not to the players’ concerns but to the owners’.

Cannon was introduced to the owners on May 17, 1960. If it wasn’t an amiable relationship at the time, it soon would be. Cannon was admittedly “starry eyed” at meeting some of the greats of the past like Joe Cronin, the American League president. As one pundit put it, Cannon “never met an owner he didn’t like.” One could add league officials to that list as well. For their part, the owners embraced Cannon, welcoming him into meetings and letting him speak for the players, something they never allowed J. Norman Lewis to do. In turn Cannon spouted management’s line like he was one of them. He spoke about the “best interests of baseball” and referred to the reserve clause as a “necessary evil.”

To Cannon the best interests of the game were his primary concern; the players, as only a piece of the game, took a back seat in his mind. He very much wanted to be the glue that bonded labor and management in the baseball industry. He even invited the general managers to the players’ annual meetings. Cannon didn’t push the owners to raise the minimum salary and he certainly never asked them to earmark a percentage of their revenue to payroll as Lewis did. As a result, the minimum salary never rose during Cannon’s tenure. Perhaps little more needs to be said about his priorities.

As early as July 1960 Cannon’s name was being tossed about as a possible successor to Ford Frick as commissioner. Cannon garnered more press coverage over this issue than all others during his time as legal counsel. One of his first acts in office was to advise the players not to hire a D.C. lobbyist to plead their case to Congress. He asked the players to “proceed cautiously and carefully” and not to “jeopardize the fine relationship existing between the players and the club owners.” Cannon was “satisfied that the commissioner and the presidents of the respective leagues sit as quasi judicial officers.” He “presumed that they will accord fair treatment to both the player and the club owner.” In fact, when a player dared to speak up after Eddie Mathews was fined by the National League president, Cannon chastised the player, declaring that the remark was in bad taste and telling the player to be thankful Judge Landis wasn’t in office to wield his wrath.

In August 1960 Billy Martin was brought before a National League disciplinary committee for punching rookie pitcher Jim Brewer. Cannon made it clear that he would not defend individual players, only the union as a whole. He sat in on Martin’s hearing but wouldn’t sit beside the ballplayer. In 1961 Cannon took up the cause of African-American players who were facing segregation in Florida during spring training. He also developed an informal employment agency to help players find work in the off-season, an effort that distracted from the true purpose of his office and consumed a great deal of his time, which may have been better spent on other issues.

In 1961 the owners unilaterally refunded to themselves $167,400 from pension monies to cover a tax liability—never mind that it was illegal for management to remove money from the pension fund. Although American League player representative Eddie Yost objected strenuously, Cannon gave his approval. Cannon often publicly praised the players’ pension plan as the finest in the world and told a congressional committee that the players had it so good they “don’t know what to ask for next.” He repeated these sentiments time and again to the players.

The majors had started playing two All-Star Games each year in 1959, before Cannon took office, to increase the revenue flow into the players’ pension fund. The owners soon wanted to do away with the second game, but negotiations maintained the two-game structure through 1962. In 1963 the owners ceded all revenue from the All-Star Game to the players (minus 5% for expenses) and only one game was played from then on. After the settlement Cannon uttered one of his famous lines: “I don’t think there ever has been a better feeling between the owners and the players. We are perfectly happy.” The pension fund grew significantly because of All-Star Game revenue. Cannon rode the goodwill and the players were satisfied to have him looking after their interests. The fact that he did it for free was a plus. He was reelected in 1962 by a vote of 580 to 15.

In 1963, in the wake of scandals in college basketball and pro football, Commissioner Frick cautioned players about associating with undesirable characters and listed specific establishments as hangouts for gamblers and therefore off-limits. Cannon toured the training camps giving speeches on the topic and telling the ballplayers to be respectful and professional with the media and public. Seemingly pushing Cannon’s buttons, Frick boasted, “He’s (Cannon) telling everyone that baseball is not a one-way street, and the players owe an obligation to the game.” Cannon, the players’ representative, was again acting as the mouthpiece of management rather than pushing the interests of his clients.

The Christian Science Monitor stated that Cannon “has a perfectly balanced sense of responsibility in his relations with ballplayer and owner,” as if that was his job. Not surprisingly, the owners loved him. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey smiled when thinking about Cannon, calling him “one of the major improvements in baseball in my time.” Sounding as if he was campaigning to succeed Commissioner Frick, Cannon made sweeping feel-good statements such as: “The relationship today between player and owner is on a very high level. As long as there is mutual understanding and respect, each trying to understand the other’s problems, we will always be able to sit down and talk things over, no matter what our problems might be.” At no time, even in retirement, did Cannon acknowledge the conflict arising from his close relationship with the owners and his near-reverence for their and the league administrators’ responsibilities.

In 1965 the players decided they needed a full-time, New York-based executive director, something Robin Roberts had been advocating since before Cannon was hired. The pension contract was set to expire on March 31, 1967, and the players wanted an experienced full-time representative on their side in the negotiations. As it stood, the pension plan was increasing by $2.5 million annually by 1966. The players were receiving 60% of broadcasting revenues from the All-Star Game and World Series and feared that the owners would try to reclaim it. The owners steadfastly refused to share regular-season broadcasting money. Since the players received none of the revenue from network television’s Game of the Week, Roberts and others foresaw that the owners would negotiate lopsided deals that pumped up the Game of the Week dollars while undervaluing the All-Star Game and World Series.

Cannon had just lost his bid to become commissioner to William Eckert, and wanted to continue as the association’s executive director. Most players favored his candidacy, especially his staunch ally Bob Friend. Friend often sought advice from Pittsburgh Pirates owner John Galbreath concerning pension issues. Galbreath pushed Friend towards Cannon and Friend in turn pushed the players to hire Cannon. Some of the men wanted to explore their options, so player representatives also interviewed former Vice President Richard Nixon and the United Steelworkers union’s leading economist, Marvin Miller, among others. The night before the election, Friend pushed Cannon’s candidacy hard, playing on the players’ fear that Miller was too much a “union type.” On January 27, 1966, the Players Association’s board named Cannon the new full-time executive director, with a five-year contract at $50,000 a year, double his salary on the bench. He accepted over the phone and Friend made the announcement. The owners were so tickled to have their man leading the union that they immediately committed $150,000 to pay his salary and office expenses.

Within a week Cannon began to have second thoughts. He didn’t want to leave his home in Milwaukee and he wanted to maintain his position on the bench. Cannon then asked about what he truly envied, wanting to know what kind of pension the players would provide for him. The players countered by offering to relocate the office to Chicago, nearer his home, with some financial concessions. Not satisfied, Cannon withdrew his name from consideration on February 4, as his nomination had not yet been ratified by a vote of all the players. He was still interested in the job, under his conditions, but his hesitation alienated members of the executive committee. Friend and others withdrew their support. In a subsequent interview Cannon claimed that the “radicals” Robin Roberts and Jim Bunning were the ones who decided to look elsewhere and blasted Roberts for his “anti-owner” stance. Cannon even declared that his old ally Bob Friend “became a little bit militant.”

The job was then offered to Brooklyn native Marvin Miller, who accepted on March 5. The owners immediately withdrew their commitment of $150,000 for staff and office expenses, citing a legal conflict they apparently hadn’t noticed a few weeks earlier. Cannon remained on the job, as Miller still had to stand for election by all the players. Miller later alleged that a few players, with Cannon’s backing, waged a smear campaign against him in the Los Angeles newspapers. Miller believed Cannon drew up a petition calling on the players to hire someone with a “legal background that the owners can respect.” Cannon actually wrote Miller’s initial employment contract, adding clauses which reneged on the players’ earlier agreements. First, the contract pushed back Miller’s start date until January 1, 1967, which would have been after the pension negotiations. Second, it called for a two-year deal instead of the agreed-upon five years. Third, Miller was granted only $20,000 in office expenses instead of the $100,000 that had been discussed earlier. A “moral turpitude” clause was added; Miller rejected it because it said he could be fired for mere accusations of improper conduct. In the end the employment contract was reworked with a less intrusive hand.

Miller and Cannon traded barbs throughout the years. Naturally, the whirlwind that Miller caused into the 1980s reflected poorly on Cannon, and he was stung by the criticism. He later claimed that he would have eventually pushed through the same advances Miller won because the owners “owed me something.” In Cannon’s words, “Why should I make a damned fool of myself by making demands? I knew how far to push because I knew how far they (the owners) could go.”

Cannon maintained his ties with the baseball industry. He was again mentioned as a candidate for commissioner in 1968, but Bowie Kuhn was elected instead. He was vice president of Milwaukee Brewers Inc., an organization established to return baseball to the city after the Braves left. His assistance was later helpful in the drive to secure an American League franchise for Milwaukee. Bud Selig, for one, was forever grateful for Cannon’s efforts. Cannon was named vice president of the Brewers after the club relocated from Seattle.

Soon after leaving the association, Cannon was back in the national headlines. In August 1966 civil rights demonstrators picketed his house in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin for eleven nights because he refused to quit the Fraternal Order of Eagles, an all-white organization. The activists wanted him to quit the Eagles or resign from the bench. He did neither, despite crowds nearly 1,000 strong parading through his neighborhood. He continued on the bench, moving to the Milwaukee Court of Appeals from 1979-1982 and remaining as a reserve judge until 1997. Robert Cannon died of congestive heart failure on October 22, 2008, at age 91 at St. John’s on the Lake, a retirement community in Milwaukee. He was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery.

Sources

Ancestry.com

Appleton Post-Crescent, Wisconsin

Baseball1.com/Carney

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

Burk, Robert F. Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin

Chicago Tribune

Christian Science Monitor

Daily Telegram, Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Hartford Courant

Helyar, John. Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball. New York: Villard Books, 1994.

Korr, Charles P. The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players Union, 1960-81. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Los Angeles Times

MacPhail, Lee. My Nine Innings: An Autobiography of 50 Years in Baseball. Meckler Books, 1989.

Manitowoc Herald Times, Wisconsin

Miller, Marvin. A Whole Different Ballgame: The Sport and Business of Baseball. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

New York Times

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, Wisconsin

Pasadena Star-News, California

Pittsburgh Courier

Sheboygan Journal, Wisconsin

Staudohar, Paul D. Diamond Mines: Baseball and Labor. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Stevens Point Daily Journal, Wisconsin

Washington Post

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Wauwatosanow.com

Yet there was something about “Prince Hal,” as he was perhaps inevitably nicknamed, some combination of athletic grace, back-slapping charm, and apparent sincerity, that convinced any number of hard-bitten baseball men — men who should have known better — to take a chance on him. Long after his alleged transgressions had come to light, moreover, he was recalled by many of his peers — including Babe Ruth, Pants Rowland, Ed Barrow, Cy Young, and Bill Dinneen, to name just a few — as the best first baseman they had ever seen. Yet when he died, a penniless derelict, in 1947, he left behind two shattered marriages, an estranged son, and one of the great unfulfilled careers in baseball history. Today he is remembered as the poster boy for an era when gambling and throwing games seem to have been much more common than anyone was willing to admit.

Harold Homer Chase always marched to the beat of a different drummer. He was born in Los Gatos, California, on February 13, 1883, the fourth son of James and Mary Chase, natives of Maine who had emigrated to California, where a number of relatives had already settled, in the late nineteenth century. The Chase family was involved in the lumber industry, but young Hal never evinced much interest in the family business. Instead, at an early age, he decided that his remarkable athletic skills would be his meal ticket. As a youth he played on various semipro teams in and around San Jose and eventually enrolled in nearby Santa Clara College, which at that time was a West Coast collegiate baseball power.

At Santa Clara, Chase supposedly studied engineering, though there is no evidence to suggest he ever set foot in a classroom. He was something of an oddity in that he frequently played second base and catcher even though he threw left-handed, but his athletic ability was obvious — so much so that in 1903 the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League signed Chase to his first professional contract.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Chase spent the 1904 season with the Angels, playing first base, batting a solid but unspectacular .279, and catching the eyes of scouts from the eastern major league clubs. When the Highlanders drafted him, the Angels threatened to rupture the newly signed peace agreement between the PCL and the rest of organized baseball rather than give up their promising young star-in-the-making, but eventually cooler heads prevailed. Chase reported to the Highlanders and was immediately installed as the starting first baseman.

The Highlanders were an appropriate team for Chase, if only because their owners personified the dubious morality of early twentieth century New York. Frank Farrell was the proprietor of the most famous illegal casino in the city; his partner Big Bill Devery was a notoriously corrupt police captain and Tammany Hall functionary. Their young star took to New York like the proverbial duck to water. He quickly became a fixture in Broadway’s sporting and theatrical demimonde, rubbing shoulders and raising glasses with the likes of George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, and Willie Hoppe.

It took eight and a half seasons for Chase to wear out his welcome in New York, but during that time he established himself as one of the biggest stars in baseball. Those seasons had highs, though they were mostly individual rather than collective: the Highlanders went through six managers, including Chase himself, and only twice posted winning records, but Prince Hal finished among the AL top ten four times in RBI, three times in batting average, and twice in stolen bases. In addition, he earned a reputation as perhaps the best batter in the league at executing the hit-and-run. For the most part, though, Chase was better known for his defense, and his relaxed ethical standards, than his offense.

Right from the start, his glovework was a revelation. Longtime baseball men were astonished at how far off the bag he played, his casual one-handed catches, and his catlike pounces on sacrifice bunt attempts. Soon, however, the whispers began that Chase, while undeniably talented, was a selfish prima donna who was a disruptive force on the ballclub. Once, when a reporter complimented him on a particularly outstanding play, he grinned and replied, referring to his less-talented teammates, “I could make plays like that every day, only I am afraid to turn the ball loose because I might hit one of those dopes in the head.”

More seriously, in 1907 he threatened to jump to the outlaw California State League until Farrell raised his salary. In September 1908 he left the Highlanders and returned to California, reportedly upset that shortstop Kid Elberfeld, rather than Chase, had been named to replace Clark Griffith as interim manager of the struggling Highlanders. Two years later he left the team during a Midwestern road trip and returned to New York to demand that Farrell fire manager George Stallings. The fiery Stallings responded by accusing Chase of “laying down” on the team. The owner sided with his star player, dismissing Stallings and appointing Prince Hal in his stead. His teammates were less than thrilled; recalling the episode years later, Jimmy Austin commented, “God, what a way to run a ballclub!”

Chase’s tenure as manager was not a success, and he was allowed to resign following the 1911 season. He managed to stay out of trouble until early in the 1913 campaign, when he ran afoul of the Yankees’ new manager, Frank Chance. “The Peerless Leader,” whom Farrell had hired with great fanfare, told two reporters that Chase was “throwing down me and the team.” Farrell finally agreed that Prince Hal had to go, and traded him to the White Sox for first baseman Babe Borton, who batted .130 in 33 games as Prince Hal’s replacement, and infielder Rollie Zeider, who was troubled by foot problems. Both were gone after the season; reporter Mark Roth wrote caustically that “The Yankees traded Chase to the White Sox for an onion and a bunion.”

Chase spent scarcely more than one full season in Chicago before jumping to Buffalo of the upstart Federal League. He turned the tables on the White Sox by invoking the standard baseball contract’s “ten-day clause,” by which clubs were required to give an unwanted player ten days’ notice before terminating his contract. Chase saw no reason why the ten-day clause shouldn’t work the other way. Organized baseball, needless to say, was outraged, but the ensuing legal wrangle ended with a judge declaring that the structure of organized baseball was “a species of quasi-peonage unlawfully controlling and interfering with the personal freedom of the men employed.”

Chase was one of the biggest stars in the Federal League, batting .347 over the remainder of the 1914 campaign and leading the league with 17 home runs in 1915, but when the Feds went belly-up following the 1915 season his reputation as a troublemaker ensured that no American League team would have him. He finally caught on with the National League Cincinnati Reds as the 1916 season began and went on to enjoy his finest season in the majors, leading the NL in batting (.339) and hits (184) and finishing second in RBI (82) and slugging percentage (.459) and third in total bases (249).

Two years later, however, he was in trouble again. Christy Mathewson had become manager of the Reds, and Matty suspended his old friend in August 1918 for offering bribes to teammates and opponents, including Giant pitcher Pol Perritt, to influence the outcome of games on which he had bet.

At a postseason hearing before NL president John Heydler, three Reds players — Jimmy Ring, Greasy Neale, and Mike Regan — testified against a defiant Chase. But neither Mathewson, serving with the military in France, nor Perritt was present, and John McGraw himself testified that he could not confirm the allegation that Chase had offered Perritt a bribe. A frustrated Heydler had no choice but to let Chase off the hook.

To the surprise of practically no one, the newly exonerated Prince Hal quickly signed on with McGraw’s Giants, who were in dire need of a first baseman. “I have found him a most agreeable chap, and I am sure we will get along without a hitch,” predicted the manager in the spring. (Adding to the intrigue, Mathewson returned from France and also joined the Giants as a coach.)

McGraw’s optimism was, to put it mildly, misplaced. By September 1919 Chase was on the sidelines, ostensibly because of an injured wrist but in reality because he had once again, along with Giant third baseman Heinie Zimmerman, been attempting to bribe teammates. Chase never played in the majors again.

In the spring of 1920 he was back in California playing semipro ball when his former Cincinnati teammate Lee Magee revealed that he and Prince Hal had conspired to throw games during the 1918 season. In August Chase was also accused of attempting to bribe Pacific Coast League players, for which he was banned from organized baseball in his native state. But even these bombshells were overshadowed when news of the Black Sox Scandal began to leak out in September. Chase was eventually indicted as an alleged middleman in the fix, though he avoided extradition to Chicago, and thus his role in the scheme was never definitively established. Rube Benton testified that Chase had won $40,000 betting on the 1919 World Series, though his testimony was later called into question. Curiously, however, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis never officially expelled Chase from organized baseball.

Prince Hal spent most of the 1920s playing semipro ball in Arizona, bouncing among teams representing Nogales, Williams, Jerome, and Douglas, to which he lured Black Sox pariahs Chick Gandil, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams. He was in the latter town in 1926 when the radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson turned up there, claiming to have been abducted by Mexican bandits. It was eventually revealed that she had run off with her radio engineer, and reporter S. L. A. Marshall later claimed that Chase had contemplated blackmailing Sister Aimee, threatening to reveal that she had disappeared to have an abortion, though no evidence exists to corroborate this story. Chase moved on to an El Paso, Texas, team in 1927, and spent the rest of the 1920s playing for various semipro clubs in California while also prospecting for gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Eventually, of course, the years of carousing began to take a toll, as did a 1926 car accident which severed an Achilles tendon. By December 1933, when he was rediscovered in Tucson by the New York writers accompanying the Columbia football team to the Rose Bowl, Chase seems to have been little more than a shambling derelict.

The last fifteen years of his life were miserable. Chase ended up living on the Williams, California, ranch of his sister Jessie and her husband, Frank Topham. Topham so loathed his brother-in-law that he refused to allow him in the house and built him his own cabin on the property. Chase granted interviews that were published in The Sporting News while he was hospitalized with various health problems in 1941 and again in 1947. He must have sensed that he was running out of time, for in these interviews he seemed desperate to clear his name. He again denied having had a role in arranging the Black Sox fix, though he admitted that he had known about it in advance and expressed regret at having kept silent about it: “I did not want to be what I then called a ‘welcher.’ I had been involved in all kinds of bets with players and gamblers in the past, and I felt this was no time to run out.” He added, “I’d give anything if I could start in all over again…. I was all wrong, at least in most things, and my best proof is that I am flat on my back, without a dime.” But, he still insisted, “I never bet against my own team.” He died on May 18, 1947, and was buried in Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose.

This biography originally appeared in SABR’s “Deadball Stars of the American League (Potomac Books, 2006), edited by David Jones.

Sources

Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella, The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game. Sport Classic Books, 2004.

Martin Donell Kohout. Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook. McFarland, 2001.

Lawrence S. Ritter. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. Collier, 1966.

Cicotte once estimated that 75 percent of the pitches he threw were knuckleballs. The rest of the time the right-hander relied on a fadeaway, slider, screwball, spitter, emery ball, shine ball, and a pitch he called the “sailor,” a rising fastball that “would sail much in the same manner of a flat stone thrown by a small boy.”2 Whether he was sailing or sinking the ball, shining it or darkening it, the 5-foot-9, 175-pound Cicotte had more pitches than a traveling salesman. “Perhaps no pitcher in the world has such a varied assortment of wares in his repertory as Cicotte,” The Sporting News observed in 1918. “He throws with effect practically every kind of ball known to pitching science.”3

But the most famous pitch Cicotte ever threw was the one that nailed Cincinnati Reds leadoff man Morrie Rath squarely in the back to lead off the 1919 World Series, a pitch that signaled to the gamblers that the fix was on. After confessing to his role in the scandal one year later, Cicotte was banned from the game for life, a punishment that perhaps denied the 209-game-winner a spot in the Hall of Fame.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Edgar Victor Cicotte (pronounced SEE-cot)4 was born on June 19, 1884, in Springwells, Michigan, a former township in the Detroit metropolitan area, into a family of French heritage. He was the son of Ambrose and Archangel (Drouillard) Cicotte. Eddie’s brother, Alva, was the grandfather of Al Cicotte, who pitched in the major leagues for five seasons from 1957 to 1962. By the time Eddie was 16 years old, his father had died, forcing his mother to support her large family as a dressmaker. Leaving school early, Eddie took up work as a boxmaker to help pay the family bills.

Cicotte began his baseball career, according to some sources, as early as 1903, playing semipro ball in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In 1904 he pitched for Calumet (Michigan) and Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario) in the Northern Copper League, posting a record of 38-4 with 11 shutouts.5 Based on that dominating performance, Cicotte earned a tryout with the Detroit Tigers in the spring of 1905. The Tigers determined that he wasn’t ready for the majors, and optioned him to Augusta (Georgia) of the South Atlantic League, where he compiled a record of 15 wins against 9 losses, and brawled with his young teammate Ty Cobb after a Cobb stunt cost Cicotte a shutout. As a joke Cobb had taken popcorn with him to his position in center field and as a result committed an error that led to a run.6 This incident notwithstanding, among his teammates Cicotte was known as an easygoing prankster who enjoyed a good laugh.

Near the end of the season Detroit brought Cicotte up and he made his major-league debut on September 3, 1905, allowing one run in relief and getting tagged with the loss in a 10-inning game. Two days later Cicotte earned his first major-league win, a complete-game victory over the Chicago White Sox. He finished the year 1-1 with a 3.50 ERA, but would not return to the major leagues for another three seasons.

Cicotte began 1906 with Indianapolis of the American Association, where he posted a 1-4 record in 72 innings before landing with Des Moines of the Western League. Cicotte blossomed with his new team, registering an 18-9 record. The following season he pitched for Lincoln, also of the Western League, going 21-14. Impressed by the young hurler’s arsenal of pitches, the Boston Red Sox purchased Cicotte’s contract for $2,500 at the end of the 1907 season.

During his five-year stint with the Red Sox, Cicotte lost nearly as many games as he won, and frequently found himself in trouble with Red Sox owner John I. Taylor, who accused the pitcher of underachieving. “He was suspended without pay so much of the time that it was like having no job,” the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Weller wrote of Cicotte’s Boston career.7 On a club that consistently failed to meet expectations, Cicotte often became the scapegoat, and in 1911 Taylor tried to secure waivers on his inconsistent pitcher, only to pull back when another team made a claim. “[Taylor] wouldn’t like the way I was working, or perhaps the opposition had made one or two hits,” Cicotte later charged. “Taylor never liked me; I never liked him, and it was seldom that I went through a game without having him comment upon it.”8

After Cicotte started the 1912 season with a 1-3 record and a 5.67 ERA in six starts, the Red Sox, though no longer owned by Taylor, had finally seen enough. On July 22 the team sold Cicotte’s contract to the Chicago White Sox, where the 28-year-old right-hander began to mature into one of the game’s best pitchers. With Boston, Cicotte had won 52 games and lost 46. Over the next 8½ seasons with the White Sox, he won 156 games against 101 losses.

The biggest reason for this improvement was Cicotte’s gradual mastery of his expansive pitching repertoire. As his command over his knuckleball improved, Cicotte’s walk rate dramatically decreased; from 1912 to 1920 he ranked among the league’s 10 best in fewest walks per nine innings seven times, leading the league in 1918 and 1919, when he walked 89 in 572⅔ innings.

Cicotte also fully exploited the era’s liberal regulations regarding the doctoring of the ball. In this area, his most infamous pitch was the shine ball, in which he rubbed one side of the ball against the pocket of his right trouser leg, which had been filled with talcum powder.

Flustered opponents protested to American League President Ban Johnson that the pitch should be outlawed, but Johnson ruled the pitch legal in 1917, and it would remain so until February 1920. Thanks to the knuckleball, the shine ball, the emery ball (ruled illegal by Johnson in early 1915), and other trick pitches, Cicotte struck out a fair number of batters, placing in the top 10 in strikeouts per nine innings three times, even though his fastball probably couldn’t break a plane of glass. Asked to explain his success, Cicotte chalked it up to “head work,” adding, “It involves an ability to adapt pitching to certain conditions when they arise and perhaps use altogether different methods in the very next inning.”9

In 1913 Cicotte enjoyed his first standout season in the major leagues, posting an 18-11 record to go along with a 1.58 ERA, second best in the American League. That offseason, Pittsburgh of the newly formed Federal League attempted to sign Cicotte, but White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was able to secure the pitcher’s loyalty through a three-year contract. In the first year of his contract, Eddie managed only an 11-16 record, although his 2.04 ERA was fifth best in the league. After a mediocre 13-12 campaign in 1915, Cicotte finally hit his stride in 1916, when he split time between the starting rotation and bullpen, posted a 1.78 ERA, won 15 out of 22 decisions, and had what today would be five saves. (The statistic hadn’t been invented yet.)

The following year, 1917, Cicotte moved back to the starting rotation and enjoyed the best season of his career, as the White Sox captured their first pennant in 11 seasons. Cicotte led the way, ranking first in the league in wins (28), ERA (1.53), and innings pitched (346⅔). Eddie also tossed seven shutouts, including a no-hitter against the St. Louis Browns on April 14, the first of six no-hitters pitched in the major leagues that season. In that year’s World Series, Cicotte contributed one win to Chicago’s six-game triumph over the New York Giants. He was, according to Grantland Rice, “the most feared pitcher of the series.”10

After Cicotte’s breakthrough season, Comiskey offered his star pitcher a $5,000 contract, with a $2,000 signing bonus, making him one of the highest compensated pitchers in baseball.11 But Cicotte failed to produce an encore suitable to his dominant 1917 campaign, as he wrenched his ankle in early May, and limped his way through the season to a mediocre 2.77 ERA and 19 losses, tied for the most in the league. It was not a performance to inspire Comiskey to hand out a raise, and when the 1919 season began, financial troubles were weighing heavily on Cicotte. According to the 1920 Census, Cicotte was the head of household for a family of 12, including his wife, Rose; their three children; his wife’s parents; Eddie’s brother and wife; and a brother-in-law and his wife and child. To make room for his large family, Cicotte took out a $4,000 mortgage on a Michigan farm.12

Cicotte regained his 1917 form, pitching the White Sox to their second pennant in three years. Once again, Eddie led the American League in victories (29) and innings pitched (306⅔, tied with Jim Shaw). His 29-7 record was good enough to lead the league in winning percentage (.806), and his 1.82 ERA ranked second. In early September, first baseman Chick Gandil and infielder Fred McMullin approached Cicotte about throwing the World Series. After thinking it over, Eddie agreed to the scheme, telling Gandil privately, “I would not do anything like that for less than $10,000.” Three days before the Series began, Cicotte demanded to have the money in hand before the team left for Cincinnati. That night, he found $10,000 under his pillow.13

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Cicotte’s abysmal performance in the 1919 World Series was not a complete surprise to informed observers. Throughout September, reports surfaced that the overworked Cicotte was suffering from a sore shoulder. Prior to the first game of the Series, Christy Mathewson noted, Cicotte “has had less than a week [actually two days] to rest up for his first start. … And that may not prove to be enough. If he blows up for a single inning it may cost the White Sox the championship, for I think the first battle is going to have a very strong bearing on the outcome, especially if the Reds win it.”14

With at least six of his other teammates in on the fix, Cicotte led the way in blowing the first game, surrendering seven hits and six runs in 3⅔ innings of work, and fueling Cincinnati’s winning rally by throwing slowly to second base on what should have been an inning-ending double-play ball. The performance was so bad that it generated renewed speculation that Cicotte was suffering from a “dead arm.”

For his second start, in Game Four, with the White Sox trailing two games to one, Eddie pitched more effectively, holding the Reds to just five hits and two unearned runs, both coming in the fifth inning on two Cicotte errors, including one inexplicable play in which he muffed an attempt to cut off a throw from the outfield, allowing the ball to go to the backstop and letting a Cincinnati runner – who had already stopped at third – score. The miscues were enough to ensure that the White Sox lost the game, 2-0. Afterward, Chicago manager Kid Gleason declared, “They shouldn’t have scored on Cicotte in 40 innings. … There wasn’t any occasion for Cicotte to intercept that throw. He did it to prevent [Larry] Kopf from going to second. But Kopf had no more intention of going to second than I have of jumping in the lake.”15

Though Eddie had received his $10,000 before the start of the Series, many of his fellow conspirators had not received the money promised them by the gamblers, so before Cicotte’s third start, in Game Seven of the best-of-nine Series, the players decided to play the game to win. Accordingly, Cicotte put forth his best effort of the Series, allowing just one run on seven hits in a 4-1 Chicago victory. Lefty Williams threw the following game, however, giving Cincinnati the world championship. In the wake of Chicago’s defeat, Mathewson publicly tossed aside rumors that the Series had been fixed, saying, “No pitcher could guarantee to toss a game. … Even if a pitcher should let the other side get two or three runs before he was yanked, he could not guarantee that the other side wouldn’t come up the next inning and make four or five. That wipes out any single pitcher and leaves the proposition of fixing on a club. This can’t be done.”16

Despite the persistent rumors that swirled around the club that offseason, Cicotte re-signed with Chicago for 1920, and put forth another excellent season, posting a 21-10 record with a 3.26 ERA. That summer Babe Ruth electrified the sport with his 54 home runs for the New York Yankees, but Cicotte grabbed a few headlines of his own after he stymied Ruth in several encounters. Asked to explain his success, the crafty Cicotte allowed that he mixed up his pitches and relied heavily on the spitball, because the pitch was “hard to hit for a long clout.”17

Before the season, the spitball and other doctored pitches, including Cicotte’s famous shine ball, had been banned from baseball. Although a number of established spitball pitchers were given a one-year exemption from the rule, Cicotte was not one of them.

On September 27, 1920, the Philadelphia North American ran a story in which Billy Maharg, one of the gamblers in on the Series fix the previous fall, testified to his role in the affair, and specifically named Cicotte as the man who initiated the plot. The next day, Eddie met with White Sox counsel Alfred Austrian and admitted to his role in the scandal. He also implicated seven of his teammates.18 Afterward, he went to the Cook County Courthouse and repeated his story for a grand jury charged with investigating corruption in baseball. The grand jury responded to Cicotte’s testimony by indicting all eight of the “Black Sox” players for throwing the 1919 World Series.

In front of the grand jury, Cicotte testified that he began to have second thoughts during the Series. After losing Game One, he was “sick all night” in the hotel and told roommate Happy Felsch, “Happy, it will never be done again.” He also said that he tried his best to win Game Four, claiming “I didn’t care whether I got shot out there the next minute. I was going to win the ball game and the series.” But he never offered to return the gamblers’ money. “I couldn’t very well do that,” he admitted.19

Though he and the other seven accused players were acquitted of conspiracy charges the following year, Eddie Cicotte’s major-league baseball career ended with his confession. For the next three years he played with several of his banned teammates for outlaw teams in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but by 1924 Cicotte had moved on with his life.20 He worked as a Michigan game warden and managed a service station before finding a job with the Ford Motor Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1944.

During the last 25 years of his life, Cicotte raised strawberries on a 5½-acre farm near Farmington, Michigan. In an interview with Detroit sportswriter Joe Falls in 1965 he said he lived his life quietly, answering letters from youngsters who sometimes asked about the scandal. He agreed that he had made mistakes, but insisted that he had tried to make up for it by living as clean a life as he could. “I admit I did wrong,” he said, “but I’ve paid for it the past 45 years.”21 Falls seemed to agree, noting that as he prepared to leave Cicotte’s home, he looked at Eddie’s socks. They were white.

Eddie Cicotte died on May 5, 1969, at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. His death certificate listed his occupation as baseball player, Chicago White Sox. He was buried in Park View Cemetery in Livonia, Michigan.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

Asinof, Eliot, Eight Men Out (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1987).

Falls, Joe, Interview with Eddie Cicotte. Detroit Free Press, December 4, 1965.

Lardner, Ring, Chicago Examiner. July 21, 1912.

MacFarlane, Paul, ed., Daguerreotypes. The Sporting News, 1981.

Stump, Al, Cobb (New York: Algonquin Books, 1996).

findagrave.com.

Obituary, The Sporting News. May 24, 1969.

Michigan Death Certificate.

Obituary, New York Times. May 9, 1969.

1880 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

1920 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

1930 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

ancestry.com.

The Sporting News, February 23, 1933, 8.

retrosheet.org.

Contract card, National Baseball Library, Hall of Fame.

Washington Post, August 24, 1906; August 24, 1907; March 8, 1908; April 15, 1917.

New York Times, April 15, 1917.

Sporting Life, February 21, 1914.

Kermisch, Al, “From a Researcher’s Notebook.” Baseball Research Journal #23 (Cleveland: SABR, 1994.)

Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1906.

baseball-reference.com.

Notes

An Ivy League graduate, Collins was one of the smartest players of his day, and he knew it. Saddled with the nickname “Cocky” from early in his career, Collins drew the resentment of teammates for his self-confidence and good breeding that at times seemed as though it belonged more in a ballroom than a baseball clubhouse. Perhaps for this reason, contradiction and complexity became a recurring theme throughout his 25-year major-league career. He made his major-league debut under an alias and later served as captain of the most infamous team in baseball history, the 1919 Chicago White Sox. He won an award recognizing him as the most valuable player in the league, only to be sold off to another club in the subsequent offseason. Despite his upper-class origins and education, Collins abided by a litany of superstitions, although he insisted he was “not superstitious, just thought it unlucky not to get base hits.”1

Edward Trowbridge Collins was born on May 2, 1887, in Millerton, New York, the son of railroad freight agent John Rossman Collins and Mary Meade (Trowbridge) Collins. When Eddie was 8 months old, the Collins family moved to Tarrytown, New York, in the Hudson Valley 30 miles north of New York City. Young Collins registered at the Irving School in Tarrytown for the fourth grade in 1895. By legend, he played ball there that afternoon, and continued smashing hits for Irving through the spring of 1903, when he graduated from the prep school. That fall he entered Columbia University. Though a slight 135 pounds, the precocious 16-year-old quarterbacked the freshman football team and later one season on the varsity before the school dropped football entirely – “At that time,” Collins recalled, “I liked football better than I liked baseball”2 – and was the starting shortstop for the college nine.

Shortly after beginning his amateur athletic career at Columbia, Collins began picking up paying gigs on the side. In 1904 he pitched for the Tarrytown Terrors for $1 per game. He also performed for a Red Hook (New York) squad, drawing closer to $5 a contest. In the summer of 1906, Eddie played for a succession of semipro clubs – in Plattsburgh, Rutland, and Rockville – before his professional career was discovered, thus invalidating his senior year of eligibility at Columbia. The summer was not to be a total loss, however. While honeymooning, Andy Coakley, a pitcher with the Philadelphia Athletics, happened to see Collins playing for Rutland. Coakley sent word of the youngster to Connie Mack, who dispatched backup catcher Jimmy Byrnes to develop an in-depth scouting report.3 When Byrnes confirmed the pitcher’s observations, Mack signed Collins to a 1907 contract, but not before Collins obtained a written promise that Mack would not send him to the minor leagues without his consent. John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, had been aware of the budding prospect but declined to offer him a trial.

At Connie Mack’s suggestion, Collins made his major-league debut under the alias of Eddie T. Sullivan on September 17, 1906, at Chicago’s South Side Park. “I put on a uniform that did not fit me too well,” he recalled later. “Gosh, I weighed about only 140 pounds. I was self-conscious among all those big fellows – men like [Rube] Waddell, whom I had read so much about.”4 He played that first game at shortstop behind the future Hall of Famer Waddell, who completely subdued Eddie in batting practice. Nonetheless, “Sullivan” managed to reach Chicago’s Big Ed Walsh for a bunt single in his first at-bat. Six fielding chances were executed flawlessly that day, though Eddie’s tenure at short was not to last.

Having played six games with the Athletics, Collins was back in class at Columbia shortly after the Mackmen completed their Western tour. On March 26, 1907, the day of Columbia’s opening game, Collins ran out to take the field at shortstop before being informed that the University Committee on Athletics at Columbia had ruled him ineligible for the 1907 season – not because of his time with the Athletics, which wasn’t revealed publicly until years later, but because he had been paid to play with semipro teams in Plattsburgh and Rockville. Still, Eddie’s game smarts earned him the unprecedented position of undergraduate assistant coach for the Lions’ 1907 squad. By this time, the baseball bug had a firm hold on Collins and the youngster postponed his plans for a legal career to rejoin the Athletics after graduation in 1907, appearing in 14 games for Philadelphia that summer.

Collins became a regular player in the majors in 1908. That first full season, he split time at five positions: shortstop, second base, and all three outfield spots, hitting .273 in 102 games. He converted to second base full-time in 1909, pushing Danny Murphy to right field, and from there his remarkable career took wing. It was no small coincidence that when Collins became the starting second baseman, the team also took off. Eddie played every game in 1909, hitting .347 as the club rose to second, chasing the pennant-winning Tigers to the wire. The young second sacker finished second in the circuit in hits, walks, steals, and batting average, and placed third in the league in runs, total bases, and slugging. He led all second basemen in putouts, assists, double plays, and fielding average.

In 1910 the club broke through, winning the first of four pennants in a five-year stretch by a convincing 14½ games. Eddie led the American League in steals, was third in hits and RBIs, and fourth in batting, while leading in most fielding categories. Philadelphia dusted the Cubs in five games to give Connie Mack his first World Series title. Collins was the star of the Series, batting .429 and hitting safely in each contest. His play in Game Two, when he had three hits, stole two bases, and made several outstanding defensive plays, confirmed his status as one of the American League’s top stars.5 A month after the championship was secured, Eddie married Mabel Doane, whose father was a close friend of Connie Mack’s; Mack himself had introduced them. Collins and Mack had a standing bet as to who would get married first, which Mack won by a week. The Collinses remained married for more than 30 years until Mabel’s death in 1943.

In 1911 the A’s, with the “$100,000 Infield” of Home Run Baker, Jack Barry, Collins, and Stuffy McInnis now intact, repeated as world champs, besting Detroit by 13½ games, and downing John McGraw’s Giants in six. After finishing fourth in hitting (.365) during the year and leading the league’s second basemen in putouts, Collins had a modest Series, batting .286 with three errors. Still, the A’s had successfully defended their championship and, Collins, just 24, had experienced little but success in his few years of prep, collegiate, and professional play.

Collins’s plainly evident self-confidence could rub people the wrong way. As educated and ostensibly sophisticated as he was, cockiness could lead to actions that in hindsight at least were not entirely smart. During the Athletics’ championship run, some of his teammates groused about Collins’s loyalties and priorities. Collins, like other baseball stars such as Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson, was often commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write articles on the inner workings of the game. Some A’s players argued that other teams were able to correct the weaknesses Collins had pointed out in his articles, thereby hurting Philadelphia’s chances at winning the pennant. In 1912 Collins led the league in runs and posted a .348 average with 63 stolen bases, but the dissension in the clubhouse was at least in part attributable to the gifted second baseman, and the A’s finished out of first place. The anti-Collins faction in the A’s clubhouse was led by backup catcher Ira Thomas, whom Mack named his field captain in 1914 spring training.

The bright, confident, and successful Collins was given to a litany of less than “rational” practices and observances. At the plate he kept his gum on his hat button until two strikes, then would remove it and commence chewing. He loathed black cats, and would walk or drive out of his way to avoid crossing paths with one. If he saw a load of barrels, he believed he’d make one or two hits that day. Finding a hairpin meant a single, two hairpins a double. Scraps of paper littering the dugout steps drove him crazy. He would refrain from changing game socks during a winning streak, and as player-manager for the White Sox is said to have fired a clubhouse man for acting in violation of this practice. He believed it lucky to have someone spit on his hat before a game. Each winter Collins soaked his bats in oil, dried them out, and rubbed them down with a bone. This practice became the stuff of lore, as it has even been said that he buried his bats in cow dung piles to “keep ’em alive.” On the more practical side, he would wear heavier shoes as spring approached so that his feet would feel lighter when the season opened.

Known as a gentleman off the field, the brainy star gave grudging quarter at best between the foul lines. Hard-nosed play around the bag invited like responses and incurred the enmity of some. One such encounter in 1912 would have long-term consequences. An unflinching tag by Eddie broke the nose of Washington first baseman Chick Gandil. Chick’s teammate Clyde Milan witnessed the play and noted that “for the rest of his playing career, Gandil was out to get even. He went into the bag against Collins 200 times I guess, and always got the worst of it.”6

In 1913 the A’s returned to form, winning their third World Series, in five games over the Giants, as Collins hit .421, with five runs, three RBIs, and three steals. His standout autumn followed a regular campaign that featured 55 steals, 73 RBIs, and a robust .345 average. In 1914 the A’s repeated as American League champs, and Collins was honored as the Chalmers Award winner, given to the league’s most valuable player. Unfortunately, the bat that drove in 85 runs and registered a .344 clip was utterly absent in the Series. Philadelphia was stunned in four straight by the “Miracle Braves,” with Collins batting .214.

In the aftermath of the upset, his team’s harmony fractured by overtures from the Federal League, Connie Mack began to clean house in Philadelphia. On December 8, 1914, Collins was sold to the Chicago White Sox for a reported $50,000. As part of the deal, the White Sox agreed to pay Collins a salary of $15,000 per year, plus a signing bonus of $10,000.7 By 1919 his salary was still more than double that of any of his Chicago teammates.8

The White Sox had spent the first half of the 1910s languishing between fourth place and sixth place. Collins’s tenure in Chicago lasted 12 years. For all 12 seasons, he was a genuine star. For the last two-plus years, he was player-manager. During Collins’s first year in Chicago, the great Cleveland outfielder Joe Jackson joined the club via trade with 45 games remaining in the campaign. Though by skill they were peers, there was little evidence of friendship or social interaction between the two stars. The educated and savvy Collins may have intimidated his illiterate teammate.

A sub-.500 team in 1914, the White Sox steadily rose in the standings. The 1915 club finished third, besting the .600 mark with 93 wins. Collins was second in the league in batting, led in walks, was third in steals, and was fifth in total bases while leading second basemen in both assists and fielding average. In 1916 the White Sox chased the Red Sox all summer, finishing a mere two games back. Collins led the league’s second basemen in double plays and fielding average, while on the offensive side of the ledger he was second in triples, third in walks, and fourth in steals. In 1917 the White Sox won the pennant by a convincing nine games, with 100 wins for a .649 percentage. Though Collins’s average dipped to .289, he led second basemen in putouts, and was second in the circuit in steals and walks.

In that year’s fall classic, Collins enjoyed his third great World Series, with a .409 average, and scored the first run in the sixth and final game by outthinking the Giants defense. Though immortalized as the “Heinie Zimmerman boner,” it was actually catcher Bill Rariden, first baseman Walter Holke, and pitcher Rube Benton who were the real goats. In a rundown between third base and home plate, Rariden allowed Collins to slip past him, and Holke and Benton neglected to cover home. With a foot pursuit his only option, the lumbering Zimmerman failed to catch Collins as he slid across the plate with what proved to be the Series-winning run. “In a World’s Series game, when you see a base uncovered you run for it,” Collins later recalled. “Believe me, I didn’t waste any time on that play. … At least two, possibly three other men could have covered the plate on that play. Why they didn’t I’ll never know.”9

Like many other players, Collins’s 1918 campaign was cut short by US involvement in the Great War. On August 19, 1918, Collins joined the Marine Corps, missing the final 16 games of the season. His decision to enlist in the military was greeted with patriotic fanfare – unlike his teammates Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, and Byrd Lynn, who were harshly criticized for taking war-essential jobs in the shipyards. Collins’s actual service wasn’t much different from theirs, consisting mainly of drills and guard duty at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, but he received a Good Conduct Medal and was honorably discharged on February 6, 1919, in time for spring training.

As the great White Sox team coalesced, it became ever more socially segmented. When Chick Gandil had arrived before the 1917 season, the calcification of some of these divisions was pretty much assured. There was resentment, right or wrong, of owner Comiskey’s penny-pinching ways, and Gandil’s pre-existing bitterness towards Collins helped to focus some of the discontent on the captain. Collins came to represent management, and his status as one of Commy’s favorites further poisoned the atmosphere. Of all the performers in this ill-fated cast, Collins was sharp enough to have sensed the malignant potential. Perhaps his privileged status, his seemingly unbroken record of personal success, and the team’s burgeoning success combined to help dull such sensitivity.

One might expect that if Collins were so aware and adept at the multidimensions of leadership, he might have sensed and tried to mitigate intrasquad tensions. The superficial machismo of clubhouse camaraderie should not have been too significant a hurdle for a well-bred, broadly experienced, established star. The distinct cliques among the 1919 White Sox might have been immutable, but few were better equipped than Collins to initiate the select one-to-one rapprochements that might have modulated such tensions.

The 1919 White Sox finished with a record of 88-52 for a .629 percentage, besting Cleveland by 3½ games. Collins hit .319 and drove in 80 runs while leading second basemen in putouts and finishing second in double plays. The 1919 White Sox were the greatest he ever saw because, in part, they won despite widening dissension: “(The club) was torn by discord and hatred during much of the ’19 season,” Collins later said. “From the moment I arrived at training camp from service, I could see that something was amiss. We may have had our troubles in other years, but in 1919 we were a club that pulled apart rather than together. There were frequent arguments and open hostility. All the things you think – and are taught to believe – are vital to the success of any athletic organization were missing from it, and yet it was the greatest collection of players ever assembled, I would say.”10

Over the years Collins was inconsistent when discussing what he knew about his teammates’ plot to throw World Series games, as well as when he knew it. After the scandal was first exposed in the fall of 1920, Collins was quoted in Collyer’s Eye, a small gamblers’ newspaper, as saying, “there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind” as early as the first inning of Game One that the games were being thrown. Collins added, “If the gamblers didn’t have (Buck) Weaver and (Eddie) Cicotte in their pocket then I don’t know a thing about baseball” – and that he told “all this” to owner Charles Comiskey (which Comiskey always denied).11 Years later, Collins changed his story considerably. “I was to be a witness to the greatest tragedy in baseball’s history – and I didn’t know it at the time,” he told Jim Leonard of The Sporting News in 1950.12

After the scandal gutted the club, Collins still starred. He was one of the few bright lights for the decimated White Sox in the early 1920s. He filled in as player-manager for 27 games during the 1924 season and assumed the role full-time for the 1925 and 1926 campaigns. The club finished fifth in each of his full years at the helm. Injuries cut into his playing time in both of these seasons. Deposed as White Sox manager on November 11, 1926, Collins was released as a player two days later. He signed with Philadelphia six weeks later, and emerged as a solid pinch-hitter in 1927. From 1928 through 1930 he mostly coached, finally playing his last game at age 43 on August 5, 1930.

Collins concluded his career with a .333 batting average, 1,821 runs scored, 3,315 hits, and 741 steals, figures that assured his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1939, as one of the original 13 players honored by the baseball writers upon the museum’s opening. Also in 1939, Eddie Collins Jr. made his debut with the Athletics, where he would spend three seasons as a light-hitting outfielder. Collins’s other son, the Rev. Paul Collins, officiated his father’s marriage to his second wife, Emily Jane Hall, in 1945.

Collins coached full-time for Philadelphia in 1931 and 1932 before joining the Boston Red Sox as vice president and general manager when fellow Irving schooler Tom Yawkey purchased the team in early 1933. Collins remained with the Red Sox for the rest of his life, and in one notable scouting trip to California signed two future Hall of Famers, Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams. But his most notable act as general manager may have been his failure to pursue and sign Jackie Robinson after Robinson and two other Negro League players tried out for the Red Sox. Facing pressure from local press and politicians, Collins and Yawkey had offered the sham tryout only reluctantly, and their failure to take Robinson and the other black prospects seriously resulted in the Red Sox becoming the last team to integrate instead of the first.

Due to deteriorating health, Collins turned over the general manager’s reins to Joe Cronin after the 1947 season but remained as vice president. A cerebral hemorrhage in August 1950 left Eddie partially paralyzed and visually impaired. Devoutly religious throughout his life, he succumbed to complications from cardiovascular disease on Easter Sunday evening, March 25, 1951, at age 63. He was buried in Linwood Cemetery in Weston, Massachusetts, and was survived by his wife and two sons.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

Asinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

The Baseball Encyclopedia, Eighth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1990).

Bryant, Howard. Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Eddie Collins player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Huhn, Rick. Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2008).

Ritter, Lawrence. The Glory of Their Times (New York: Collier Books, 1971).

Verral, Charles S. The Mighty Men of Baseball (New York: Aladdin Books, 1955).

Notes

During his long association with the game, Comiskey was at various points regarded as a labor radical, a visionary executive, and a domineering patriarch who lavished money on his ballpark and the press while at the same time being accused of underpaying his best players. Baseball, Comiskey once wrote, “is the only game that is complicated enough to be always interesting and yet simple enough to be always understood.”1 Ultimately, the same can be said of the Old Roman himself.

Charles Albert Comiskey was born in Chicago on August 15, 1859, at the corner of Union and Maxwell Streets, one of seven children of John Comiskey, an Irish immigrant, and his wife, Mary, a native New Yorker. John served at various times as county board clerk, assistant county treasurer, and representative on the Chicago City Council (including as its first president),2 a résumé that may have given young Charlie valuable experience in the ways of backdoor local politics, which he would later put to use in the halls of the American League’s offices.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

It wasn’t long before Charlie discovered baseball, spending as much time as he could on the old Garden City grounds on the west side of Chicago, enjoying the fledgling game with his neighborhood friends. James T. Hart recalled just before the 1917 World Series how his boyhood pal was already the unspoken leader during their sandlot days in Chicago. He “… seldom went to school more than two months a year,” Hart recalled. “He was the captain of our team. He played all positions, and when any of us were sick, or our parents kept us at home to do the chores, Charlie was ready at a moment’s notice to serve as utility man.”3

Hart also remembered how difficult it was for the team to obtain bats and balls, often using the broken castoffs of older players. “When our team played we would compete on the proposition that the losing team would forfeit a bat. … (W)hen we … were threatened with a loss, Comiskey would start a row with the umpire or the opposing players and break up the game before we lost our bats. He was the foxiest kid in Chicago.”

From Father O’Neill’s Holy Family parochial school, through religious colleges in Chicago and Kansas, Comiskey never let his studies interfere with his principal outdoor recreation. He developed into a fairly skilled hurler, but the elder Comiskey objected to his son’s obsession with baseball, and quickly signed him up as an apprentice to a local plumber. Arguments ensued and in 1876, at the age of 17, Comiskey left home to play third base for an independent team in Milwaukee at $50 per month. His manager, Ted Sullivan, became a scout for Comiskey in later years.4

The following season, Comiskey moved on to pitch for Elgin, Illinois. A right-handed thrower and hitter who stood approximately 6 feet tall, Comiskey included in his repertoire a solid fastball and an assortment of curves. Elgin didn’t lose one of his starts all season, despite facing fairly tough competition from around the Chicago area.5 From there, Comiskey shifted to the Dubuque (Iowa) Red Stockings, where he was reunited with Sullivan. Once again a utilityman, he played first base, second base, and the outfield, and pitched. Possibly more importantly, Sullivan also employed Comiskey as a representative of his successful news agency, where Charlie’s 20 percent commission dwarfed his baseball salary. Comiskey stayed with Sullivan’s Dubuque club for four seasons,6 helping the team win the Northwest League pennant in 1879.

With future Hall of Famer Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn and Laurie Reis on the same pitching staff, Comiskey turned full-time to first base, where, as legend has it, he revolutionized the position. According to most accounts, Comiskey did not “hug the bag,” as was the habit of contemporary first basemen; instead, Charlie positioned himself closer to second, enabling him to cut off grounders hit toward right field.7 He practiced with his pitchers in the morning, making sure they became adept at covering first base whenever he snagged a groundball. Some recent historians have claimed that this approach was already in practice well before Comiskey employed it with Dubuque.8 Even if he was not the first, the story is an early indication of Comiskey’s keen baseball instincts and his penchant for leadership.

The big leagues finally beckoned after an exhibition game in St. Louis in 1882, when Chris von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns of the new American Association, offered Comiskey a contract. Though Von der Ahe originally suggested that Comiskey not ask for too much money as part of his terms, Charlie found that by his second paycheck his salary was a lot higher than what he had signed for. Comiskey never forgot the gesture, and was said to be one of the old man’s benefactors when Von der Ahe lost his fortune later in life.9

When Von der Ahe and his manager, Comiskey’s old friend Ted Sullivan, had a dispute late in the 1883 season, the Browns owner chose Commy as his new skipper. Charlie responded by piloting his team to four straight American Association pennants, and won the world’s championship in 1886, beating Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings of the National League in six games. Although he carried a reputation as an excellent team leader and solid defensive player, Comiskey was not a great hitter. For his career he batted .264 with 28 home runs and 416 stolen bases. Perhaps his best season came in 1887, when he batted .335, scored 139 runs, drove in 103, and stole 117 bases. Far more typical, however, was his showing the previous year, when he batted .254 with 95 runs scored, 76 RBIs, and 41 stolen bases.

In 1890, in a bold move, Comiskey jumped to the Chicago club of the maverick Players League, only to return to the Browns at the end of the season when the PL disbanded and peace was declared. The first baseman’s desertion caused friction between him and Von der Ahe, however, and in 1892 Comiskey signed with the Cincinnati Reds of the National League, where he spent the next three seasons as the club’s manager. Though his annual salary was $7,500, his promised share of the club’s profits never materialized, as there were none to be had.10

Prior to the 1894 season, his last as an active major-league player, the 34-year-old Comiskey was advised by his doctors that he was “threatened with tuberculosis.”11 To aid his health, Comiskey headed for the warmer climes of the South, scouting for new players along the way. Reportedly it was on this trip that Commy hit upon the idea of a new league featuring clubs from the Western states. Upon his return Comiskey contacted Ban Johnson, the sports editor of the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, asking if he would be interested in helping to lead this new venture.

Johnson was already embroiled in a feud with Comiskey’s boss, John T. Brush, but Charlie’s well-honed powers of persuasion helped convince Brush to campaign for Johnson to become the first president of the new Western League. The plan worked, and Johnson took control, quickly transforming it into one of the best circuits in the country.

Comiskey, meanwhile, spent the 1894 season with Cincinnati, fulfilling his obligations to Brush. After the season, Comiskey purchased the new league’s Sioux City Cornhuskers and moved the team to St. Paul. There he built his first ballpark, at a cost of $12,000.12 After five seasons in Minnesota as both owner and manager, Comiskey was granted permission by the National League to relocate his franchise to Chicago, on the condition that he could not use the name “Chicago” for his relocated ballclub. Therefore, recalling perhaps his finest moments as a player, Comiskey decided on “White Sox,” honoring the team his Browns had beaten for the 1886 championship.13

Meanwhile, Johnson and Comiskey positioned the Western League to challenge the monopoly of the established NL. In October 1899 it changed its name to the American League. Before the 1901 season, with franchises now placed in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the circuit declared major-league status. Quickly gaining credibility with the public, the AL was heralded by The Sporting News as being devoid of the “… cowardly truckling, alien ownership, syndicalism … jealousies, arrogance … mercenary spirit, and disregard of public demands” that the National League had become infamous for.14 Comiskey and Johnson were making a favorable impression with baseball fans, and the NL knew it. The ugly war between the leagues, rife with player-jumping, franchise-shifting, and acrimony on both sides, finally concluded with the establishment of the National Agreement in 1903.

During the first years of the new century, Comiskey built his club into one of the best in the country. The White Sox captured the 1901 American League pennant behind the strong pitching of manager Clark Griffith and an offense powered by outfielders Fielder Jones and Dummy Hoy. After falling to seventh place in 1903, Comiskey’s White Sox gravitated toward the top of the standings again, with strong finishes in 1904 and 1905 and a second pennant in 1906. Led by pitchers Ed Walsh, Nick Altrock, Doc White, and Frank Owen, and the potent (despite its name) Hitless Wonders offense featuring Frank Isbell, George Davis, and Jones, now the club’s player-manager, the White Sox upset the crosstown Chicago Cubs, winners of a record 116 games, in the 1906 World Series.

Though the team did not win another pennant and World Series title for 11 years, Comiskey built his franchise into one of the most financially successful in the country. At the end of the century’s first decade, the White Sox showed a 10-year profit of $700,000, highest among recorded earnings during that time.15 He turned some of those profits into the World Tour, taken with the New York Giants after the 1913 season.

From the beginning of his tenure, Comiskey established a reputation as an owner passionately involved in the day-to-day affairs of his club. Comiskey was never afraid to express his opinions about the game from his private box. Reporters shared numerous stories of Comiskey railing at his team over bonehead plays or games tossed away. “Sitting next to him at a game, one is likely to be nudged in the ribs, or have his toes stepped on as Comiskey ‘pulls’ on a close play,” stated Baseball Magazine.16

Nor was Comiskey afraid to spend money on his team or his ballpark. By the time of its opening on July 1, 1910, the cost of Comiskey Park and its grounds totaled $750,000, a remarkable amount for the time. Additional seating in subsequent seasons raised the cost to over a million dollars. Commy was also the only owner at this time to own his entire club, the grounds, and all the equipment.17

And though he did everything he could to hold down his players’ salaries, Comiskey spent large sums of money putting together his second great team of the Deadball Era. In December 1914 he purchased second baseman Eddie Collins from the Philadelphia Athletics for a reported $50,000. Less than a year later, he acquired Cleveland Indians slugger Joe Jackson for three players and $31,500.

Throughout his reign, Comiskey polished his reputation as a benevolent monarch. Beginning in 1900, he handed out free grandstand tickets to 75,000 schoolboys each season. He constantly professed love for the fans and when it rained at his ballpark, the occupants of the bleachers were permitted to enter the higher-priced sheltered sections without extra charge. “Those bleacherites made this big new plant possible,” announced Comiskey. “The fellow who can pay only twenty-five cents to see a ball game always will be just as welcome at Comiskey Park as the box seat holder.”18

He later claimed to have given away a quarter of a million tickets to servicemen, and followed that by donating a reported 10 percent of his 1917 home gate receipts to the Red Cross, an amount totaling about $17,000.19 Comiskey regularly allowed the city of Chicago to use his park for special events, often free of charge. The owner’s benevolence also extended to the press, whom he regularly feted with roasts and free drinks.

Comiskey had no qualms when it came to spending money on his ballpark, his city, and his fans. But with his players, those stories are few and far between. Like almost every owner of the time, he held a hard line on player salaries, although recent research has revealed that the White Sox had one of the highest team payrolls in the majors. As historian Bob Hoie has written, the “depiction of Chicago players as woefully underpaid by a tightwad boss” does not stand up to scrutiny.20 Likewise the legend often repeated about Comiskey’s team being known as the “Black Sox” long before the scandal due to their dirty uniforms, a result of their owner’s efforts to cut down on laundry bills; though an amusing anecdote, no evidence has yet been found to confirm that this story is true. Another apocryphal tale has Comiskey benching his star pitcher Eddie Cicotte to keep him from winning his 30th game and collecting on a promised $10,000 bonus. In reality, Cicotte did have a chance to win No. 30 – and clinch the American League pennant – in late September 1919, but he didn’t pitch well and was pulled before the White Sox rallied to win the game.21

During the course of the Deadball Era, Comiskey’s amicable relationship with Ban Johnson disintegrated into open warfare. According to legend, the discord erupted in 1905, when Johnson sent Comiskey a load of fresh fish on the same day that he suspended outfielder Ducky Holmes for an altercation with an umpire the day before. Comiskey, who had already given his extra outfielder, Jimmy Callahan, the day off, was irate. “What does he want me to do?” he bellowed. “Put one of these bass out in the left field?”22 (Versions of this story abound: Some sources say the incident occurred in 1907, and involved Fielder Jones, not Holmes.) A further series of disagreements set the stage for 1919, when two scandals rocked the league and irrevocably split Comiskey and Johnson.

In July 1919 Boston pitcher Carl Mays abandoned the Red Sox and demanded a trade. Johnson ruled that the temperamental pitcher could not be traded until disciplinary action was taken, but Boston owner Harry Frazee ignored the edict and dealt Mays to the Yankees, only to see Johnson suspend Mays. The Yankee owners responded by securing an injunction allowing Mays to play.

League owners immediately took sides: Frazee, Yankee owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston, and Comiskey were labeled “The Insurrectionists,” while most of the remaining AL moguls sided with Johnson. Comiskey even pursued a proposal to have his club join the National League; that plan never got off the ground after an uneasy truce between the parties was brokered the following winter.23 

By then the Black Sox Scandal hung like a dark cloud over the sport. There is some evidence that Comiskey was aware of the plot to throw the World Series as early as Game One and did nothing to stop it.24 Johnson helped fuel these accusations, while Comiskey threw the burden of the scandal back on Johnson. “I blame Ban Johnson for allowing the Series to continue,” he announced. “If ever a league president blundered in a crisis, Ban did.”25

But Comiskey certainly knew of the fix after the Series ended. One of his players, Joe Jackson, reportedly tried to return his share of the payoff only to be turned away by team executive Harry Grabiner.26 As rumors of the fix spread throughout the sport, Comiskey responded by publicly offering $20,000 to anyone with knowledge of the fix. The announcement was no doubt a public-relations move, intended to make Comiskey appear nobly dedicated to uncovering the truth, no matter the cost. When St. Louis Browns infielder Joe Gedeon did come forward with information, Comiskey rebuffed him and never paid the reward.27

By the end of the 1920 season, details of the plot began to emerge, as several conspirators confessed to their involvement. Even though the eight accused Black Sox were ultimately acquitted of the conspiracy charges filed against them, the scandal devastated Comiskey’s franchise. The eight accused players were banned from the game for life, and after 1920 the White Sox never again finished in the first division during Comiskey’s lifetime.

Charles Comiskey died of heart complications at his lakeside estate in Eagle River, Wisconsin, on October 26, 1931, at the age of 72, and was buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Evanston, Illinois. He was survived by a son. His wife, Nan Kelly, whom he had married in 1882, preceded him in death in 1922. The Comiskey family continued to control the White Sox until 1959, when they were bought out by a consortium led by Bill Veeck Jr.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

For this biography, the author used a number of contemporary sources, especially those found in the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Notes

Douglas’s professional career was mostly successful—from 1912 to 1922, he won slightly more often than he lost, compiling a 94-93 record, but with a very good 2.80 earned-run average, and a career 2.77 mark in the National League from 1914 through 1922 that ranks 10th among National League hurlers over those nine seasons. But alcoholism and a tendency to disappear from his teams for days at a time resulted in multiple fines and an eager willingness by his employers to ship him off to whomever was willing to put up with his behavior. Because of that, Douglas played for five teams in nine years before he was banned for life in 1922.   

Phillip Brooks Douglas was born on June 17, 1890, in Cedartown, Georgia, to John A. and Lucy Jane (Hawkins) Douglas. Phil was one of three children born to John and Lucy; he had an older sister named Eunice, who was seven years his senior, and a brother named Charley, who was deceased as of the 1900 census. Phil also had three half-brothers, including one known as Pig Iron Bill, and two half-sisters from his father’s previous marriage to a woman who died sometime in the 1880s. John was working in an iron foundry in the Cumberland Mountains town of Cowan, Tennessee, when he met and married Lucy. They moved to Georgia, where Phil was born, but went back to Cowan, where Phil grew up.

Douglas’s first season in organized ball came with Rome (Georgia) of the Southeastern League, but the league folded in July, so he had to wait until 1911 to enjoy his first full season of professional ball. He was a great success that year, leading the Class C South Atlantic League Macon Peaches with a 28-11 record, which so impressed the Chicago White Sox that they purchased his contract. In mid-August it was reported that Douglas would join the White Sox on September 1, but his major-league debut didn’t come until a year later. He began the 1912 season with Des Moines of the Class A Western League and went 15-16 before joining the White Sox and making his first major-league start on August 30. He went seven innings against Cleveland and allowed seven runs on nine hits, five walks, and an error in the 7-2 loss.   The game also marked the debut of ill-fated Indians shortstop Ray Chapman.

Douglas appeared in two more games that season and finished his first major-league stint with a record of 0-1 and an ERA of 7.30 in 12 1/3 innings. He went to spring training with the White Sox in 1913, and by one account did “exceptionally well,” but was shipped to the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League on April 2. The Chicago Tribune was pleased with Douglas’s progress, however, insisting that all he needed to do to make it back to the big leagues and become a “first class twirler” was learn how to hold runners on base. “He has everything else,” the paper averred.

Douglas went 6-8 with San Francisco, then 10-10 with Spokane of the Class B Northwestern League, a team that featured future Hall of Fame hurler Stan Coveleski and Black Sox co-conspirator Swede Risberg. Douglas was acquired by the Cincinnati Reds in the 1913 draft and earned a spot in the Reds’ rotation in 1914.

Cincinnati finished in last place that year, 34½ games behind the eventual champion Miracle Braves of Boston, but Douglas enjoyed a very good season despite a record of only 11-18. He led the team in ERA at 2.56, ERA+ at 114 (100 is the league average), hits per nine innings, and strikeouts per nine innings, and finished among the top ten in the National League in the latter three. He also incurred his first fine when Reds manager Buck Herzog docked him $100 for violating training rules. Douglas had come from a hard-drinking Southern family and developed his own taste for alcohol in his late teens. He was also used to a more relaxed lifestyle than the one he found in Organized Baseball. “The sacrifice of his fishing and drinking days between starts was a big one for Phil Douglas,” wrote Tom Clark, author of One Last Round for the Shuffler, “and one which, for all his love of baseball, he was not always willing to make.”

In December, it was reported that the Chicago Cubs’ new manager, Roger Bresnahan, coveted four Reds pitchers, including Douglas, and that a trade was in the making. But Reds president Garry Herrmann was less than impressed with Bresnahan’s list of available Cubs and held on to his hurlers. In hindsight, Herrmann probably wished he had dealt Douglas when he had the chance.

The spitballer was awful for Cincinnati in 1915, going 1-5 with a 5.40 ERA in eight games. He was also suspended briefly in early May for “tanking up,” and was taken to task by a Cincinnati sportswriter for failing to learn a lesson from the “Baseball Booze Hoisters of the past.”  Tired of Douglas’s act, the Reds sold him to the Brooklyn Robins on June 14 for $10,000.

Brooklyn was taking a huge risk; despite his slow start, there was no questioning Douglas’s abilities, but his commitment to the game was secondary to his craving for hard liquor, which made it impossible for him to remain subordinate to his employers. The suspension in May was one of three times he “broke training” with the Reds before he was sold to Brooklyn. Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson thought that if he could keep Douglas sober, he’d have the best pitcher in the National League. But that was easier said than done. “Shufflin’ Phil was really an anachronism and belonged back in the days of Rube Waddell and Bugs Raymond, when the festive baseball athlete passed the leisure hours irrigating his system with rum,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Harry A. Williams. “Drinking was not a habit with Douglas—it was a disease.”

Opposing managers were so apprehensive about Douglas that when Reds skipper Buck Herzog tried shopping the troubled hurler to both leagues, no one was willing to trade for him. Only the Robins expressed interest and only for cash.

Douglas regained his form with Brooklyn, going 5-5 with a solid 2.62 ERA in 20 games, but he was with the team only a month before being suspended by manager Robinson for suffering from “dizzy spells.”  The Los Angeles Times reported that Douglas was “off the reservation again and suspended for breaking loose.”  The suspension didn’t last long; Douglas was on the hill to face the Pittsburgh Pirates only two days later, losing 6-2. But he continued to violate the team’s training rules and was waived by Brooklyn in early September. The Cubs and Braves both placed a claim on Douglas before National League president John Tener awarded him to Chicago.

He started four games for the Cubs and was fantastic, going 1-1 with a stellar 2.16 ERA and fanning 6.5 batters per nine innings. Still, the Cubs adopted the same attitude toward Douglas as the Reds and Robins had and began shopping him during the offseason, offering him and an unnamed infield prospect to the St. Louis Cardinals for southpaw hurler Slim Sallee, who had gone 13-17 with a 2.84 ERA in 1915, his worst record since 1910. No deal was made, however, and Douglas stayed with the Cubs.

He brought more trouble on himself in 1916, but didn’t bother to wait until the season actually started before getting in hot water with his skipper, Joe Tinker, who declared Douglas suspended indefinitely on March 7 when he smelled alcohol on his enigmatic hurler at the team’s hotel in Tampa, Florida. Douglas asserted that the odor emanating from his body was actually garlic from a Spanish restaurant he’d recently frequented. “Honest, Joe, I haven’t had a drop for three months,” Douglas lied. “That garlic that you get in these Spanish dumps certainly sticks to a fellow.”  Tinker kicked him out of the hotel and insisted that he would never pitch for the Cubs again. “He’s through. I won’t have him on my ball club and I won’t have him where my ball club is,” The manager said.

Douglas disappeared and was reportedly heading for Cowan, Tennessee, when Tinker received a telegram from Mike Kelley of the St. Paul Saints of the American Association in which he offered to assume Douglas’s contract. The Cubs sold Douglas to St. Paul and he won 12 games for them, finishing at 12-11 and leading the team with 1.137 walks and hits per inning. It was Douglas’s last minor-league stint.

After leading the Cubs to a 67-86 record and a fifth-place finish in 1916, Tinker was replaced by Braves coach Fred Mitchell before the 1917 campaign. Douglas was given a fresh start and he made the most of it, tossing a four-hit shutout in a 2-0 victory over Pittsburgh in his first start, then scattering nine hits in a 9-2 complete-game victory over the Cardinals on April 18. Sporting Life predicted that Douglas would be Mitchell’s “principal winner,” but only if he saw the “error of his ways” and “concentrated on baseball.”

“Douglass [sic] would rank among the first five pitchers every year were he to take care of himself,” wrote Sporting Life. “His ability is unquestioned.”  Douglas wasn’t Mitchell’s principal winner that year—Hippo Vaughn won 23 games to Douglas’s 14—but he was second on the staff in victories, posted a very good 2.55 ERA, and finished among the top ten NL pitchers in eight categories. He paced the league in games with 51 (37 starts), finished second with a 3.02 strikeout-to-walk ratio, was third with 151 strikeouts, and ranked among the top five in strikeouts per nine innings and shutouts. Despite all that, he lost 20 games and finished with the 10th worst winning percentage (.412) among starters.

For the most part, Douglas stayed out of trouble that year. He suffered an injury to his pitching hand in July when it got caught in an electric fan while he was stretching in a subway car—years later it was posited that he jammed his hand into the fan on purpose because he was a “very inquisitive fella”—but he was back on the mound less than a week later. J.C. Kofoed of Baseball Magazine applauded Phil for “turning his back upon old John Barleycorn, and settling down to hard consistent work.”  Kofoed even went so far as to suggest, “If the big southerner had taken care of himself a few years back he might have rated with [Grover Cleveland] Alexander today.”  It was an ironic comparison, considering Alexander would become one of the more celebrated alcoholics the game has ever known.

Under Mitchell, the Cubs finished fifth again in 1917, but improved slightly, winning seven more games than they had in 1916 under Tinker. Before the 1918 season, though, J.V. Fitz Gerald of the Washington Post gave Cubs fans a reason to be optimistic when he called the Cubs’ rotation the best in the National League and possibly the equal of the Red Sox’ staff, which boasted Babe Ruth, Ernie Shore, Carl Mays, “Bullet Joe” Bush, and Dutch Leonard. Chicago had added Alexander in a trade with the Phillies, who were fearful that Pete would be drafted into the service—they were right; Alexander spent most of the season in France serving as a sergeant in the artillery—and they had Vaughn, Lefty Tyler, Claude Hendrix, and Douglas to round out the rotation.

Even without Alexander for most of the year and only a half-season’s worth of Douglas, who suffered an attack of appendicitis in February and wasn’t able to make his first start of the season until June 6, the Cubs finished the 1918 season with the best record in baseball at 84-45 and a World Series berth against the Red Sox. They also made Fitz Gerald look downright prescient by posting a 2.18 ERA, best in the National League and 13 points better than the Red Sox’ 2.31.

Douglas finished fourth on the staff with 10 wins and posted a then-career-best 2.13 ERA, but the only action he saw in the fall classic came in Game Four, when he relieved Tyler in the eighth inning and took the loss after allowing an unearned run on a single, a passed ball, and his own throwing error to first base on a grounder by Harry Hooper. The Red Sox defeated the Cubs in six games for their fifth championship in 18 years.

The Cubs were expected to repeat as NL champions in 1919 and Douglas did his part, going 10-6 with a 2.00 ERA in 25 appearances. But through 80 games, Chicago was languishing in third place, nine games behind the first-place New York Giants. The Giants were looking to add pitching depth and wanted to unload outfielder Dave Robertson, who had refused to play for manager John McGraw, so on July 25 the Giants sent Robertson to Chicago for Douglas. When asked why he was so willing to part with Douglas, Mitchell told writers, “He didn’t fight with the boys or bust down houses. It was just that I never knew where the hell he was, or whether he was fit to work.”

The New York papers focused on Douglas’s talent more than his transgressions, however; according to the Times, the Giants secured the NL title with the trade:  “With Shuffling Phil Douglas to strengthen the pitching staff, the Giants have little to do now but tack the pennant on the flagpole.”  It was a bold claim considering the Giants were only a game and a half up on the Reds with more than 60 games to go. McGraw wasn’t particularly worried about Douglas’s history either. “I know I am getting myself in for something when I take on Douglas,” he told the writers, “but I am sure I can handle him.”

On the field, Douglas did, in fact, prove to be a valuable addition. He lost four of six decisions, but posted a 2.10 ERA, sported the best strikeouts-per-nine-innings mark among the starters, and had the best strikeouts-to-walks ratio, by far. But Douglas’s demons began to get the best of him again and his behavior became erratic as the pennant race heated up. He won his first two games with the Giants, but the Reds caught New York on July 30 and passed them a day later when they swept the Braves in a doubleheader while Douglas was beating the Pirates, 5-2. He lost his next start in St. Louis, on August 5, and the Giants fell 2½ games off the pace; he lost to the Cubs on August 9 and the Giants fell 4½ games back; he lost the second game of a doubleheader to the Reds on August 13 and the Giants fell 6½ games behind Cincinnati; then he lost to the Cubs again on August 19 and that sent him over the edge.

Douglas went AWOL and disappeared for a few days, prompting McGraw to suspend him indefinitely for leaving the team without permission. The Times called his disappearance “mysterious,” and claimed the Giants had no idea what prompted Douglas to abruptly leave the team. Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton reported three days later that Douglas insisted that a member of the Reds had drugged his lemonade and put him out of commission. It was a farcical claim, but Fullerton regaled his readers with a plethora of tales about past druggings, poisonings, and nefarious plots that allegedly impacted previous pennant races.

The truth was that Douglas couldn’t stand McGraw and didn’t like New York, so he went back to Chicago and signed to pitch for the Logan Squares, a semipro team whose ranks included at one time or another George Halas, Babe Didrickson, Hippo Vaughn, and Ray Schalk. Douglas then appeared to have a change of heart and newspapers reported that he hoped that after he explained his disappearance to McGraw, the Giants skipper would lift the suspension. According to reports, McGraw sent word that the incident was closed and that Douglas could return to the team, and the manager reportedly refunded the fines he’d imposed on the pitcher. But Douglas opted to remain with the Squares instead.

As one would expect, Douglas dominated the lesser semipro batters and allowed only two runs in 49 innings, the second tally coming on a fourth-inning balk in his last game of the season. Before that, he had allowed only one run in 43 innings. But Douglas apparently tired of facing inferior competition and applied for reinstatement in January 1920. The National Commission approved his application but warned him that future transgressions would result in a heavy fine. Washington Post sportswriter Fitz Gerald called the warning nothing more than a “verbal spanking,” and asserted that Douglas’s disappearance was an “out and out case of desertion.”  But he also blamed the owners for “encouraging disobedience and contract breaking” and speculated that McGraw was willing to take Douglas back merely to use him as trade bait during the offseason.

But McGraw had other plans and kept Douglas on the team in 1920. He hired detectives to follow Phil and keep an eye on his every move. The pitcher resented the intrusion into his personal life, but he pitched well, tying his season-best in wins with 14, posting a solid 2.71 ERA, and leading the team in games finished, saves, and strikeouts per nine innings. Despite being bird-dogged everywhere he went, Douglas occasionally managed to elude the detectives long enough to get himself into trouble. On July 9, McGraw suspended Douglas again for “failure to keep in condition.”  The Giants were in Chicago for a four-game series with the Cubs and Douglas fell off the wagon on the first day. He last pitched on July 2, beating the Boston Braves, 13-4, in a complete-game victory, and didn’t appear again until a two-inning relief stint against Pittsburgh on July 17.

Harry A. Williams of the Los Angeles Times reported that opposing teams would tempt Douglas with liquor prior to games he was scheduled to pitch. “When right, Douglas is the best right-hander in the National League today, and when wrong he is all wrong,” wrote Williams. “However that may be, when Shuffling Phillip skids it’s a long skid with a loud crash at the other end.”

McGraw became so fed up with his recalcitrant hurler and his ineffective detectives that he hired a man named Shorty O’Brien to keep tabs on Douglas. The pair drew stares everywhere they went—O’Brien was bald and stood only 5-feet-1; Douglas was 6-feet-3 and close to 210 pounds. McGraw allegedly offered Douglas a bonus of  between $3,000 and 3,500 if he stayed sober during the season, and O’Brien was brought in to help him do it. Instead of balking at the idea of having a “keeper” whose sole purpose was to keep him out of trouble, Douglas hit it off with O’Brien and they became friends.

It was a tactic that McGraw had employed before. A decade before, he had a similar relationship with Arthur “Bugs” Raymond, an even bigger alcoholic than Douglas. Raymond would trade warm-up balls for alcohol during games and it wasn’t rare for him to pitch while inebriated. McGraw had Raymond’s roommates keep an eye on him, hired members of Raymond’s family to travel with him on the road, and once locked him in the clubhouse with guards at the door, only to find that he was able to smuggle booze to himself by lowering a bucket out the window to his fans down below. McGraw even resorted to sending Raymond’s paychecks to his wife, to which Raymond responded, “If my wife gets the money, let her pitch.”

McGraw eventually suspended Raymond indefinitely midway through the 1911 season, claiming that Bugs had shortened the manager’s life by five years. He never pitched in the majors again. Only a year later, Raymond got into a fight with some local hoodlums at a semipro game in Chicago, was repeatedly kicked in the head, and suffered a fractured skull. He died two days later of a brain hemorrhage.

Douglas made it through the rest of the 1920 season with no more infractions, but McGraw had had enough and placed him on the trading block in November. “Douglas’s eccentricities have tired McGraw and he has decided the Giants can get along without the star,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution. But again Douglas remained with the team, and again McGraw would be forced to deal with one of Douglas’s “vacations” during the 1921 season.

Douglas had gotten off to a good start, winning five of his first six decisions and posting a 3.29 ERA in his first 13 appearances. On June 18, he tossed 7 1/3 shutout innings at the Cubs to improve to 5-1 and reduced his ERA by almost half a run. On June 22, he suffered his second loss of the season when he allowed six earned runs in five innings to the Braves. But it was his poor performance and McGraw’s decision to leave him in for the full nine innings against the Phillies on June 27 that prompted Douglas to abandon the Giants again. Philadelphia tagged him for 12 runs on 19 hits, five of which were home runs, in a 12-8 victory that dropped Douglas’s record to 5-3 and increased his ERA more than a full run, from 3.84 to 4.86.

Upset that he had been left in the game to take such a beating, Douglas took another vacation. Despite yet another defection, McGraw reinstated the troubled hurler only four days later. He responded with a complete-game victory over the Dodgers on July 4 to improve to 6-3. Douglas went only 9-7 the rest of the way and posted his worst ERA of his career at 4.22, but he kept his nose clean over the second half of the season, won a career-best 15 games, and led the league in shutouts (3).

More importantly, “The Shuffler” was fantastic in the World Series against the Yankees, going 2-1 with a 2.08 ERA and fanning 17 batters in 26 innings to help lead the Giants to their first World Series title since 1905. McGraw called Douglas’s performance “among the best pitching that has ever been displayed in a World Series.”  And Babe Ruth is said to have told Douglas that he was “as tough a man as I’ve seen in [the American League].”

But that wasn’t enough to keep Phil off the trading block for yet another offseason. In late February 1922, the New York Times reported that Douglas and fellow hurler Jesse Barnes were on the market. Douglas and Barnes had won 30 games between them and accounted for four of the Giants’ five World Series victories, but neither had signed his contract for 1922 and though McGraw refused to call them holdouts, it was speculated that he was trying to trade them for that very reason.

About Douglas, McGraw was more pointed, though. “If he won’t behave I don’t want him around,” he told reporters. “I won’t put up with behavior like last year’s.”  He also wasn’t very impressed with Douglas’s 15 victories in 1921:  “I can take any one of the young pitchers on the staff last year and make them win that many. That ought to show where Douglas stands on this club.”  Rumors had Phillies pitcher Lee Meadows or Pirates southpaw Wilbur Cooper coming to the Giants for Douglas. Others thought that McGraw was just trying to scare Douglas into behaving by threatening to trade him.

Either way, the market for Douglas had dwindled over the years. Neither the Dodgers, Cubs, nor Reds would touch him with a ten-foot pole, as they’d already experienced life with Douglas and weren’t about to go down that road again. Dodgers president Charles Ebbets scoffed at the notion of acquiring the alcoholic slabman again. “I wouldn’t give the waiver price for Douglas,” Ebbets insisted. Pirates treasurer Samuel Dreyfuss quickly dismissed the Cooper rumor, and the Braves and Phillies gave no indication they were interested either. Only Branch Rickey of the Cardinals was reported to be interested enough in Douglas to keep in touch with the Giants, which was odd, considering that Rickey regularly lectured about the evils of alcohol and had a brother who worked as a federal marshal in the prohibition enforcement wing of the US Treasury Department.

Douglas failed to report for 1922 spring training and was said to be unhappy with the terms of his contract. McGraw reported that he had doubled Douglas’s salary, but that the terms were contingent on the pitcher’s behavior and the number of games he won. Douglas didn’t like those conditions and his teammates figured they’d seen the last of “Shufflin’ Phil.”  But he reported to camp on March 23, “looking fitter than ever and in a mood highly repentant,” and was reported to be “in as good condition as any other Giant.”

He signed his contract the next day, then threw four innings against the San Antonio Bears in a 4-3 win. “He used a mild form of spitball which the Bears raised in pop flies,” wrote the New York Times, “and except for bad fielding behind him he would have blanked the Texas Leaguers.”

Douglas got off to another fast start in 1922, beating the Dodgers twice in the season’s first week, throwing seven shutout innings against the Braves, then beating the Phillies on May 5 with a brilliant 14-inning performance in which he allowed only two runs on a homer by Cy Williams in the sixth inning of New York’s 3-2 win. Douglas was equally impressive on May 24, when he held the Reds to one unearned run on five hits in 10 innings in a 2-1 win that improved his record to 6-1 and lowered his ERA to a nifty 1.57.

His ERA climbed to 2.23 on June 19, but he continued to impress into the summer, making a start on July 3 in which he held the Dodgers to two earned runs in nine innings to improve to 10-3, then following that with consecutive relief appearances on July 7 and 15 in which he tossed another six scoreless innings to reduce his ERA to 2.00.

Then things began to fall apart. Douglas suffered through his worst outing of the year on July 18, lasting only 1 2/3 innings against the Cardinals in a 9-8 loss that pulled St. Louis to within a half-game of the first-place Giants. To make matters worse, McGraw criticized him throughout, causing an argument that lasted until McGraw shouted his pitcher down in the clubhouse after the game.

Douglas allowed only two runs in seven innings in his next outing, a no-decision against the Reds, then recorded his 11th and final win of the year on July 26 with a less-than-stellar performance in which he allowed five runs to the Cards in seven innings in a 10-5 Giants victory.

At that point he was 11-3 with a very good 2.45 ERA and was by far the Giants’ best pitcher. But it was just a matter of time before Douglas finally imploded and that moment occurred on July 30. Douglas took the hill at the Polo Grounds against the sixth-place Pirates looking for his 12th win and trying to help the Giants keep the second-place Cardinals, who were only 2½ games out of first, at bay. But Douglas was pounded by the Pirates to the tune of five runs on 11 hits, including a double, a triple, and two homers, in seven innings in a 7-0 whitewash. Combined with St. Louis’s 3-2 win over Brooklyn, the Giants’ lead was down to a game and a half. Douglas fell to 11-4 and saw his ERA climb to a still very good 2.63.

McGraw accosted Douglas after the game. “Where’s your bottle hid?” he demanded. Douglas was taken aback; his poor performance had nothing to do with alcohol. “I want to be traded to St. Louis,” he replied. St. Louis was the southernmost major-league city at the time and was less than 500 miles from Birmingham, Alabama, where Douglas made his offseason home. But Douglas was less concerned with being close to home than he was with being as far away from John McGraw as possible. McGraw flatly refused. “You’ll play for me or you’ll play for nobody,” he raged.

The spitballer was despondent and badly in need of a drink, so he headed to a friend’s apartment, got drunk, and passed out. Shorty O’Brien was no longer around—McGraw had fired him because not only did O’Brien play cards and go to the movies with Douglas, but he drank with him too, and allowed Douglas to “slip the leash” on occasion. Instead McGraw charged Giants coach Jesse “The Crab” Burkett with keeping tabs on Douglas during the season. Burkett did such a good job that Douglas grew to detest him. But Douglas was able to elude Burkett after getting pasted by the Pirates and he ended up on the Upper West Side getting soused.

While Douglas was sleeping it off, two detectives posing as representatives of Western Union gained entry to the apartment and found the drunk pitcher in bed. They accused him of stealing a watch from a fan at the Polo Grounds, a charge Douglas denied, and told him they were taking him into custody. When they attempted to remove Douglas from the apartment, he resisted, which prompted the detectives to threaten to “bring their blackjacks into play” if he continued. The detectives took Douglas to the 135th Street police station, where he was met by Burkett, who then transported the pitcher to the West End Sanitarium, where he was held against his will for five days.

Douglas underwent a grueling detox process that included hot baths, stomach pumping and multiple injections of a sedative. Later on, the pitcher insisted he was kidnapped, that as many as five detectives were involved, that his clothes were taken from him, and that they refused to allow him to call his wife to tell her where he was. Burkett called her to let her know that her husband was all right and McGraw eventually called her to let her know where Douglas was located so she could see him, which she did on Friday, August 4. “I was in bad shape then, and they promised to let me out of the sanitarium on that day,” Douglas later recounted. “Instead of letting me go they gave me some knockout drops again and I didn’t come to until the following day.”

He was eventually released on Saturday, August 5. Ironically, Douglas’s disappearance was reported in that morning’s newspapers with an interesting claim that “no one could account for his absence.”  The following Monday he appeared at the Polo Grounds for the first time in a week. Not only was he still under the influence of the depressants he’d been given, but he had spent the previous two days drinking heavily and was barely coherent. When he picked up his mail he found a bill for the taxi ride to the sanitarium and the five-day stay, which amounted to $224.30. When he tried to protest to McGraw, the manager lit into him and fined him $100 plus five days’ pay (about $188).

According to witnesses, it was the “most vicious tongue-lashing” McGraw had ever given a player. “He called me the most vile names. … I’ll never forget the way he talked to me on that day in the clubhouse,” Douglas later recalled.

That set into motion a series of convoluted events that would end Douglas’s major-league career. According to Douglas, when he learned of the fine, the loss of wages, and the bill from the sanitarium, he also believed he’d been dismissed from the Giants. Already broke, fearing that he wouldn’t be able to make a living, and upset with McGraw for giving him a “rotten deal,” Douglas sat down in the Polo Grounds clubhouse and penned a letter to Cardinals outfielder Les Mann, a former teammate with the Cubs.

Dear Leslie,

I want to leave here but I want some inducement. I don’t want this guy to win the pennant, and I feel if I stay here I will win it for him. You know how I can pitch and win. So you see the fellows, and if you want to, send a man over here with the goods and I will leave for home on next train. Send him to my house so nobody will know and send him at night. I am living at 145 Wadsworth Avenue, Apartment 1R. Nobody will ever know. I will go down to fishing camp and stay there. I am asking you this way so there cannot be any trouble to anyone. Call me up if you are sending a man. Wadsworth 3210, and if I am not there, just tell Mrs. Douglas. Do this right away. Let me know. Regards to all.

Phil Douglas

Sending a letter like that was a terrible mistake, especially with Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis looking to crack down on crooked players in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. But sending it to Mann proved to be Douglas’s ultimate undoing. According to author David Pietrusza, “Mann enjoyed a reputation as one of the game’s more upstanding individuals.”  Douglas realized his mistake almost immediately, phoned Mann in Boston where the Cardinals were playing and asked him to destroy the letter. Living up to his standup reputation, Mann instead showed the letter to Branch Rickey, who recommended that he forward the letter to Landis.

From there, things spiraled out of control for Douglas. He accosted sportswriter Fred Lieb in the press box at the Polo Grounds after the Giants’ 7-3 loss to the Reds on August 8 and told him never to write anything about him ever again, “good or bad.”  After he calmed down, he admitted that he’d been fined for breaking training and that he was in Burkett’s custody. He was also under team physician William Bender’s care. Bender went to Douglas’s house on Saturday, August 12, and injected him with a depressant. He repeated the injections on Sunday and Monday. Douglas and Burkett left for Pittsburgh on Monday night, where the Giants were to begin a three-game series with the Pirates on Tuesday, August 15.

Landis was also on his way to Pittsburgh. On the morning of August 16, McGraw and Landis met in Landis’s suite at the Hotel Schenley and summoned Douglas for questioning. Landis asked him about the letter, Douglas confessed, and he was immediately placed on the Giants’ list of permanent ineligible players and stricken from the hotel register as a member of the team.

When reporters showed up for the impromptu press conference, Landis was “grief-stricken … and looked weary and depressed,” and called the incident “tragic and deplorable.”  National League president John Heydler called Douglas a “victim of his own folly.”  When it was McGraw’s turn to speak he held nothing back. “[Douglas] admits the charge, and now he is a disgraced ballplayer, just as crooked as the players who ‘threw’ the 1919 World’s Series. He will never play another game in organized baseball, and not a league will knowingly admit him to its parks.”

“Personally I am heartily glad to be rid of him,” McGraw continued. “Without exception he is the dirtiest ball player I have ever seen and his value to the club has been little or nothing.”

It was a ridiculous statement on almost every level. Douglas had much value to the Giants—he paced the National League in ERA, ERA+, WHIP, and hits per nine innings, and it could be argued that he was the most valuable pitcher in all of baseball that year. And calling him the “dirtiest ballplayer I have ever seen” is preposterous considering that McGraw managed notorious game-fixers Hal Chase and Heinie Zimmerman, and men like Bennie Kauff, Buck Herzog, Rube Benton, Jean Dubuc, Fred Merkle, and Gene Paulette, all of whom were linked at one time or another to game-fixing, gamblers, or the Black Sox scandal, and some to all three.

The New York Times weighed baseball’s newest scandal against the White Sox’ throwing of the 1919 World Series, calculated the difference between the winners’ and losers’ share, considered that the Giants could possibly lose out on World Series money if they failed to win the pennant, and decided that in terms of total dollars, Douglas’s proposed abandonment of the Giants in the middle of a pennant race made it “the biggest scandal in the history of baseball.”

Douglas went home to New York and spilled his guts to the press. Soon more details began to come to light, although some were slow in coming. Les Mann denied any involvement in the scandal, which led reporters to speculate that the Pirates, Cubs, Cardinals, or Reds were involved. Dreyfuss denied Pittsburgh’s involvement, and National League president Heydler dismissed the notion that the Cubs were involved either. The Reds were also ruled out when Douglas repeatedly fingered Mann as the letter’s recipient.

Douglas insisted that he was innocent, then muddied the waters even further by claiming he was approached first by gamblers who wanted to fix the NL pennant race, and he had a letter to prove it. Apparently he figured if he wasn’t the instigator, he’d receive leniency. McGraw made things even murkier when he reported that Douglas had been negotiating his “fishing trip” with an unnamed player since January and that the Giants had evidence of such in the form of letters and phone records. McGraw even claimed at one point that he had overheard phone conversations between the conspirators, and that he had had his eye on Douglas since Opening Day. “Douglas has not only not been on the level,” McGraw spat, “but he is an ingrate.”

“I may never get back into Organized Baseball,” Douglas responded, “but before long I’ll force them to admit that I was not guilty of any crookedness. I never threw a game in my life and my record during my years in baseball speaks for itself. McGraw gave me a dirty deal and the public will soon find out that I am innocent. … I haven’t always kept in the best of condition, but I’ve always done my best. The letter put me in an awful fix and makes everything look bad for me, but I’m not concealing anything…I want the public to know that I am not guilty of any crooked baseball.”

Douglas’s wife insisted that Phil was the victim of a “frame-up” and that family and friends were conducting their own investigation. Theories held that Douglas was double-crossed by gamblers who convinced him to write the letter to Mann, then exposed him to authorities knowing that he’d be blacklisted, which would weaken the Giants and affect the pennant race.

Meanwhile, Heydler was on his way to Cincinnati to investigate rumors that the National League pennant race had been fixed “for Pittsburgh to win and New York to lose.”  If the rumors were true, the conspirators did a lousy job; when Heydler launched his investigation, the Giants were in first place with a 3½-game lead over the Cubs and Cardinals, while Pittsburgh floundered in fourth, seven games out of first.

Landis wasn’t buying any of it and was convinced that Douglas made the overture to abandon the Giants out of revenge for being “abused and mistreated” by McGraw. “If you see the same things in [the letter] that I see, you will be convinced that it was written by a man who was making, not answering, an offer to desert his team for money. … The tone of the letter indicates that Douglas was taking the initiative.”  Landis called the letter “damaging evidence,” but was more than willing to review any evidence Douglas could produce that might exonerate him. He also took one last parting shot at the pitcher. “As for Douglas he is more ignorant than anything else—a foolish, simple fellow who is unmoral rather than immoral. He is amazingly credulous and is inexperienced in many sides of human nature—an easy dupe for others.”

Others, like Mike Thomas of the Atlanta Constitution, questioned whether Douglas and his “childish mind” had the “intelligence to figure out a ‘scheme’ of this nature.”  Tom Rice of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was of the same opinion, calling Douglas “an overgrown man with the mind of a wayward child.”  Heywood Broun wrote, “[Douglas] didn’t begin to have sufficient strength of character to be a thoroughgoing villain.”  And Harry Williams wrote, “It is hardly the act of a sane and sober man to put a thing that like in writing. … Was Douglas, drunk, the mere dupe of smarter men?”  Rice thought not. “He has not the intellectual capacity for conceiving and carrying through the intricate plans of such men,” he insisted.

Les Mann again refused to admit that he was the recipient of the letter, but flatly denied that a telephone conversation had ever taken place between the two and insisted that he had “never in (my) life” spoken on the phone with Douglas. The rest of baseball also began to respond to the incident; Yankees business manager Ed Barrow reported that Douglas had been banned from the Polo Grounds and would not be admitted “even if he bought a ticket.”

Douglas hired Edward Lauterbach, one of the most popular attorneys in New York, who wasted little time and requested a hearing with Landis so that he would be “fully informed of all the details leading to the unfortunate incident.”  Lauterbach denied the rumor that Douglas had been a pawn in a larger conspiracy hatched by gamblers, insisting that the pitcher acted alone but was not in his right mind when he penned the letter, and that he was in a “dopey and sluggish mental condition” brought on by as many as 20 injections of depressants administered to him.

The Washington Post called the whole fiasco a “dime novel tragedy, involving all allegations of a drunken orgy, a raid, a taxicab kidnapping by detectives, a race to a police station, imprisonment in a sanitarium, a threat to use blackjacks, the use of hypodermic needles, and finally the expulsion of the former Giant pitcher from baseball.”

On August 22, the New York Times reported that Lauterbach was prepared to file a civil suit against the Giants for $100,000 if Landis refused a hearing. The Post put the figure closer to $300,000 and quoted Lauterbach as saying, “We may also prosecute on a charge of kidnapping and false arrest” if Douglas was denied his right to a hearing. A day later, Lauterbach announced that he had obtained “important” affidavits from people who witnessed Douglas’s kidnapping by detectives, and from sources who could prove that Douglas indeed made a phone call to Boston and asked that the letter be destroyed, which contradicted Mann’s earlier denials. “I am confident that when I have completed my collection of the necessary affidavits I will have plenty of evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Douglas committed no crime and that he had no criminal intent in writing the letter,” Lauterbach said.

While Lauterbach awaited Landis’s reply to his request for a hearing, the plot thickened. Apparently Douglas told his attorney that he’d been offered $15,000 to throw the games he was scheduled to pitch against the Yankees in the 1921 World Series, but he had destroyed the letter and had no way to prove it. Interestingly, Yankees hurler Carl Mays was under suspicion for throwing games during the same Series, made all the more intriguing by the fact that all three games he pitched were against none other than “Shufflin’ Phil” Douglas, two of which he lost, Games Four and Seven, in the late innings under suspicious circumstances. Had gamblers employed a backup plan in the event that Douglas refused their offer?

Landis acknowledged receipt of Lauterbach’s request for a hearing, but claimed the attorney failed to produce evidence sufficient enough to reopen the case. “Douglas has the right to appeal his case to the Commissioner,” Landis stated, “but he must present evidence not already heard in the case which shows him guilty of the charges of the New York club.”

The commissioner’s response, combined with the weight of the case, proved to be too much for Douglas, who suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be confined to his home. Meanwhile Lauterbach continued gathering evidence but in early September he started to backpedal a bit, speaking not of civil action and lawsuits, but of clearing Douglas’s name of “any connection with crime or criminal intent” so that he’d be able to play semipro ball if Landis refused to restore Douglas to “good standing” in the major leagues.   In fact, it was reported that Douglas was scheduled to pitch for a semipro team in Canton, Georgia, only three days later. Yearning to return to the South, Douglas gave up his fight, dismissed his lawyer, and, with his wife and two daughters in tow, returned to Birmingham.

All the talk about affidavits and hearings soon dissipated as newspapers shifted their focus away from Douglas and back to the pennant races. A day after Lauterbach made what appeared to be his last statement about the Douglas case, the Giants beat the Phillies 3-2 to hold back the surging Pirates, who swept a doubleheader from the Cubs and pulled to within four games of first place. It was the closest any NL rival had been to the first-place Giants since the Cards had a 3½-game deficit on August 23. Meanwhile, the Yankees and Browns were pitched in a heated battle for the American League crown, New York holding a half-game lead over St. Louis.

Neither second-place team was able to overtake the front-runners, however, and the Giants and Yankees headed back to the World Series for a second straight showdown. Pundits previewing the Series opined that the loss of Douglas severely weakened the Giants, leaving McGraw with only one reliable starting pitcher in left-hander Art Nehf. At least one writer called the Giants’ staff the weakest of any that McGraw had ever taken into the postseason.

The Yankees were favored to win their first World Series title, but the Giants overcame their supposedly weak pitching and swept the Bronx Bombers in five games (Game Two ended in a tie). Nehf, Jesse Barnes, Jack Scott, Hugh McQuillan, and Rosy Ryan posted a composite 1.76 ERA in 46 innings and held Babe Ruth to two hits in 17 at-bats (.118). The Giants clinched their second straight title on October 8 with a 5-3 win behind Nehf.

The winner’s share that year came to $4,545.71; Douglas reportedly made $6,500 for the 1922 season. If not for his ill-advised letter to Mann, Douglas would have boosted his salary 70 percent in less than a week. Perhaps that was weighing on his mind when he beat his wife, Louise, three days after the Series ended. Douglas and his family had recently arrived in Birmingham after having been in Lakeland, Florida, where he pitched semipro ball. According to Louise, the domestic disturbance was “the climax of a series of outbreaks,” and occurred right in front of their two children. When police arrived, they found her with two black eyes. Not surprisingly, Phil was drunk. He pleaded guilty to drunkenness and disorderly conduct and paid a $10 fine.

Things looked as though they might turn around for Douglas in 1923, when it was reported that he was being courted by an outlaw team from Hornell, New York, that paid as much as $4,000 for top talent. Former Philadelphia Athletics hurler Scott Perry, who had once been the subject of a legal battle between the A’s and the Boston Braves, was a 27-game winner for Hornell in 1922, and Fred “Bugs” Hersche, formerly of the International League, won 20. Former Pirates second baseman Jake Pitler was the team’s player-manager. The Hornell team was said to be the strongest outlaw team in the country. But players and teams who competed against Hornell were blacklisted.

That proved to be a problem almost everywhere Douglas landed. When he signed a deal in early August to play for the Forest City club of the Blue Ridge league in North Carolina, league officials were concerned that other players’ eligibility would be endangered. Regardless, Forest City signed Douglas to a contract that was to pay him $75 a week. His stint with the team lasted all of three innings.

Douglas’s first and only start came against Caroleen, Forest City’s chief rival. The team’s management did a fantastic job spreading the news that a former major-league pitcher would be suiting up for the club and scores of people from neighboring towns descended on the ballpark   “The roads leading into Forest city were jammed with automobiles, wagons, buggies and pedestrians,” reported the Atlanta Constitution. “Hundreds of expectant fans crowded into the Forest City ball park to see the widely heralded game.”

Douglas allowed seven runs in three innings—”Phil had found that his curves no longer possess their one-time uncanny ability to puzzle the enemy”—and the same fans who came to cheer him on, turned on him and accused him of “laying down.”  Douglas was replaced by a high schooler, who earned the win when Forest City came back to defeat Caroleen. That was to be Douglas’s only appearance. “Shorn of the glamour which had surrounded him on his arrival, Douglas held no more terrors for opposing hitters. The local management decided to rely solely on local pitching talent, and Douglas was handed his release.”

Douglas hung around town for a day or two before climbing aboard a train and heading for destinations unknown, claiming that he was through as a pitcher and would need to seek another line of work. “Not one hero worshiping urchin was at the station to bid farewell to the fallen idol,” the Constitution reported. Few realized just how far Douglas had fallen. Making little money to begin with and saving none of it, Douglas lost his Birmingham house when it was repossessed that autumn.

Six months later, in March 1924, Douglas visited the sports department at the Chicago Tribune and announced that Landis had reinstated him and that he would be leaving for Winter Haven, Florida, to begin training with the Chicago White Sox. Before he left, he asked a scribe if he could borrow $5 so he could get to Belvidere, Illinois. The writer handed Douglas the money and he left. Landis denied the report. “I haven’t seen Phil Douglas in a year and haven’t had any plea for reinstatement from him,” said the commissioner. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey also denied having spoken to Douglas.

Though it appears things didn’t turn out well for him in Forest City, Douglas’s semipro pitching performances were more often than not dominant. His next reported stop was Pikeville, Tennessee, where he pitched in 1925, and reportedly captured some of his old glory. “He pitched for us one time and fanned nineteen in terrific heat, even though he had been drinking the night before,” recalled Pikeville resident John Haswell. “We thought he was the greatest pitcher—we felt sure he was the greatest ever to come out of the Pikeville area.”  He also reportedly pitched a handful of no-hitters and one-hitters in places like Tracy City, Tennessee; Lynch, Kentucky; and Bluefield, West Virginia.

Douglas’s name appeared again in the papers in December 1925, when the New York Times reported that the pitcher was suing a Pittsburgh sportswriter, Joe Ward for libel for an article he wrote for Baseball Magazine the previous January. Douglas was seeking $100,000, but it’s not immediately clear why he filed suit. Ward, a writer for the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegram, met Douglas in an all-night restaurant in a seedy part of the Steel City.

When Ward arrived for the interview, the former pitcher was drunk. He described Douglas as “30 years old, looking fifty, his head bowed in grief. … He mumbled something we could not understand, but we held our tongue.”

Out of pity, Ward bought Douglas a drink and the hurler recounted the events of 1922; how he didn’t realize what he was doing, how he tried to have the letter intercepted before it reached Mann. He expressed through tears how badly he wanted to get back into baseball and out of the slums, and how booze was slowly killing him.

“He was a mere shadow of his former self,” Ward concluded. “All he had left were the broad shoulders, long and angular now, the strong muscles worn away by the drink. His old familiar shuffle is still there, but it is more like that of an aged man than of the one-time star pitcher. His hair has turned gray and his cheek bones stick out beneath a pair of blazing eyes, the face of a starving man.”     

After that, Douglas shuffled back to obscurity, although he would earn a mention every now and then. In 1927, his wife, Louise, died of cancer. Her death drove Phil deeper into the bottle—he’d sometimes drink for a week at a time—but even at 38, he continued to dominate semipro competition. Pitching for the Cowan, Tennessee, town team he regularly beat top squads from Tennessee and Alabama.

He remarried in 1928 and his drinking subsided. He and his family moved from Tennessee town to Tennessee town, from Tullahoma to Nashville to Whitwell, where he settled down and pitched for the local team while working in the coal and iron mines until 1931, when he moved to Bon Air. He pitched for and managed the local Bon Air team for a year before moving back to Whitwell. And so it went.

Like most residents of Sequatchie Valley during the Depression Era, Douglas was poor. In 1936, the Washington Post reported that Douglas was living in “abject poverty in a shack in Alabama.”  The Post was partially correct; Douglas lived in abject poverty in the neighboring state of Tennessee. The writer may have been confused because Douglas enlisted the help of Birmingham News sports editor Zipp Newman in an effort to apply to Landis for reinstatement that same year. Landis denied his application.

In 1938, in an article about the Hall of Fame, John Lardner wrote that he thought that among the “outlaws,” Douglas was a Hall of Fame caliber player. “(W)hich of them were players of the class of Ruth, Speaker, Matthewson [sic], Johnson, Young, Lajoie, Wagner, Alexander, Keeler, Sisler, and Collins?  I’d say that three of them were, and maybe four or five. [Joe] Jackson, [Buck] Weaver, and [Hal] Chase belong near the top. So, for this department’s money, do [Eddie] Cicotte and Douglas.”

“Shufflin’ Phil Douglas was an authentic iron man, when he wanted to be. Phil was strong as a horse, with great speed, and an excellent spitter. Only his happy-go-lucky disposition kept Philip from ranking with Young and Ed Walsh. But his disposition was peculiar, as you will gather from the fact that he once thrust his hand into an electric fan on a bet.”

That Cicotte was of Hall of Fame caliber is inarguable; that Douglas was is preposterous. Douglas finished with a career record of 94-93 and though his ERA of 2.80 is very good, none of his other numbers really stand out. Even had he the benefit of a full career, how many more wins would he have been expected to earn?  He was 32 years old when he was banned, had averaged just over 10 wins a year in his career, and never won more than 15 in a season. When Douglas was at his best, he was fantastic, but there was nothing to indicate that he would have been at his best long enough after 1922 to merit induction into the Hall of Fame.

Douglas eventually landed on his feet working as a foreman for a state highway crew in Jasper, Tennessee, just a few miles from his home. He worked for the Tennessee State Highway Department for eight years until 1949, when a lawnmower blade cut his foot. The cut itself wasn’t debilitating, but a blood clot formed soon after, and he suffered a stroke. Unable to work, he lost his job and settled back into poverty, living with his wife in an old log cabin in Sequatchie, paid for by his meager state pension.

Douglas suffered a second stroke in 1951, then a third in July 1952. Down to the last day of his life, he insisted he’d been framed and that his actions of 1922 were not intentional. He died on August 1, 1952, at the age of 62.

In 1990, friends and relatives petitioned Commissioner Fay Vincent to overturn Landis’s decision and lift the ban on Douglas on the basis that Landis wasn’t fully aware of the reasons Douglas wrote the letter, most notably that he was under the influence of drugs forced on him in during a “brutal” alcoholic rehabilitation program, and that he had an overwhelming hatred of John McGraw.

Unable to re-create the events of 70 years prior and unwilling to second-guess Landis’s decision, Vincent rejected the appeal.

Sources

Clark, Tom. One Last Round for the Shuffler. Pomerica Press, 1979.

Heritage Quest, 1900 Census/Tennessee/Franklin County/Tenth District. Supervisor District No. 3; Enumeration District No. 28.

Atlanta Constitution, 1919-1925

Boston Globe, 1915-1922

Chicago Tribune, 1912-1924, 1945, 1952, 1959

Christian Science Monitor, 1911

Hartford Courant, 1919, 1928, 1938-1940

Kofoed, J.C.. “The Youngsters of 1917.” Baseball Magazine, August 1917.

Los Angeles Times, 1913-1925

New York Times, 1913-1925, 1947, 1990

Sporting Life, 1917

Washington Post, 1914-1926, 1936

“Who’s Who on the Diamond.” Baseball Magazine, October, 1918.

www.baseball-reference.com

www.retrosheet.org

Notes

The origins of Douglas’s nickname are somewhat of a mystery, although it’s been credited to Hall of Fame sportswriter Charles Dryden, who dubbed Frank Chance the Peerless Leader, Charles Comiskey the Old Roman, and the 1906 White Sox the Hitless Wonders. In his book One Last Round for the Shuffler, Tom Clark also credits Dryden, and places the date of its origin at 1919, but the nickname appeared in print as early as 1913. Newspapers had erroneously been listing Douglas as William and Bill late in 1912 and sometimes as Douglass, until March 1913, when he appeared as Shuffling Phil Douglas in the Chicago Tribune. According to Clark, Douglas earned the nickname because of the slow pace with which he “shuffled” from the bullpen to the mound.

Harry A. Williams listed Shorty O’Brien’s real first name as Billy, while Tom Clark wrote that it was James.