Dawson City also happened to be the end of the line for hundreds of silent films that were shown to residents in the town’s recreation hall during the 1910s and ’20s. These films were sometimes full-length features, but many were newsreels of current events, comedy shorts, or human-interest stories shown before the main event. The nitrate film reels were too expensive — and too dangerous, since they were highly explosive — to ship back south when folks in Dawson City were finished watching them, so it was easier to dispose of them. Instead of dumping the tin canisters in the Yukon River, the most common disposal method at the time, town leaders decided to bury them under an abandoned swimming pool that was used as an ice-hockey rink.

The films remained there, preserved pristinely in the permafrost, for a half-century until 1978, when construction workers razed the ice rink and discovered the buried treasure underneath. The find made international headlines. It took many years before the highly flammable reels could be safely moved across the country, transferred to modern formats, and made available to researchers. Some of them still have never been seen.

In January 2014 a Chicago filmmaker, Bill Morrison, visiting the Library and Archives Canada found one of these old Dawson City film reels with the curious label “1919 World Series.” What he discovered was remarkable: never-before-seen newsreel footage featuring nearly five minutes of game action from that notorious World Series in which Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte, and other members of the Chicago White Sox were banned for intentionally throwing games to the Cincinnati Reds — an event that has gone down in history as the Black Sox Scandal.

This rare newsreel, which was originally filmed by the British Canadian Pathé News service, is not the first footage ever seen from the 1919 World Series. But it’s by far the most extensive and highest quality of film available from that fateful fall classic. The film shows some of the most disputed and discussed plays from Games One and Three, along with aerial views of Redland (later Crosley) Field in Cincinnati, and candid shots of players from both teams.

And now we can watch it on YouTube, over and over again.

The Dawson City film is one of many exciting discoveries related to the 1919 World Series and the Black Sox Scandal that have come to light in recent years. As Gene Carney — the late founding chairman of SABR’s Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, whose members produced the book you’re about to read — liked to say, “The Black Sox Scandal is a cold case, not a closed case.” Thanks to these amazing finds, we’re learning more and more about the 1919 World Series all the time.

In his classic history of the 1919 World Series, Eight Men Out, Eliot Asinof told a dramatic story of undereducated and underpaid ballplayers, disgruntled by their low pay and poor treatment by White Sox management, who fell prey to the wiles of double-crossing big-city gamblers offering them bribes to lose the World Series. Asinof’s story does contain elements of truth: Eight White Sox players, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, perhaps the greatest pure hitter of his generation, did throw the World Series. And they did receive bribes of $5,000 or more to do the deed that got them kicked out of baseball.

But the devil is in the details, and it’s in those details where much of the popular narrative about the Black Sox Scandal falls apart under close scrutiny — specifically, any notion that the banished players were undereducated or underpaid, or that they were unwittingly seduced by gamblers, or that the Big Fix brought about a loss of innocence in baseball that nearly destroyed, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous phrase, “the faith of fifty million” fans until Babe Ruth came along to rescue the national pastime with his prodigious home runs. All of that is simply untrue.

We can say this with some certainty now because we have access to so much new information that Eliot Asinof and many other writers never had. In the late 1950s, when Asinof began his research for what turned into Eight Men Out, he searched high and low for the transcripts and testimony from the Black Sox grand-jury proceedings and criminal trial. He never found them. We know where to find a copy of them now: at the Chicago History Museum, which in 2007 acquired a “treasure trove” of documents related to the scandal that included hundreds of legal files that had eluded researchers for decades before.

We also have accurate salary information about major-league players in 1919 for the first time, thanks to a massive collection of organizational contract cards acquired in 2002 by the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York. We have access to hundreds of articles about gamblers and underworld figures involved in the scandal who were almost impossible to track down before.

Some of this information was both uncovered and included by the late Gene Carney in his seminal 2006 book Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. He broke new ground on the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s civil lawsuit against the White Sox after his suspension from baseball and he cast serious doubt on what baseball officials knew about the World Series fix, when they knew it, and what they did about it. Carney’s tremendous generosity in sharing his research also helped inspire another generation of Black Sox sleuths to pick up the cold — not closed — case after he died in 2009. Additional insight into the case was provided by author and retired prosecutor William F. Lamb in Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation, published in 2013. (Lamb is a contributing author to this book.)

All of these new pieces fit somewhere in the big Black Sox puzzle, providing definitive answers to some old mysteries and raising other questions in their place. The book you’re reading now, published by the Society for American Baseball Research, will integrate all of that new information about the scandal for the first time.

However, the Black Sox Scandal isn’t the only story worth telling about the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The team included three future Hall of Famers (Red Faber, Ray Schalk, and Eddie Collins), a 20-year-old spitballer who would go on to win 300 games in the minor leagues (Frank Shellenback), a rookie manager (Kid Gleason) who had a colorful playing career as a pitcher and second baseman for two decades, and even a batboy (Eddie Bennett) who later became a celebrity with the “Murderers’ Row” New York Yankees in the 1920s.

All of their stories are included in this book, too, which has full-life biographies of each of the 31 players who made an appearance for the White Sox in 1919, plus team executives like owner Charles Comiskey, Harry Grabiner, and Tip O’Neill. We’ve also included a comprehensive recap of the White Sox’ pennant-winning season, which culminated in Shoeless Joe Jackson’s dramatic walk-off single to clinch the American League championship in September at Comiskey Park. The year 1919 was a notorious one in Chicago, and baseball fans in the Windy City could not escape the real world during that hot, violent postwar summer of race riots, the anti-communist “Red Scare,” and the lingering flu epidemic, all of which had an effect on the White Sox’s season. Those stories are also in this book.

In addition, we’ll also clear up some of the misconceptions about the 1919 White Sox team that have been passed down through history. After reading this book, you’ll know the real story behind Charles Comiskey’s reputation as a greedy miser who forced his players to play in dirty, unlaundered uniforms. You’ll learn about the $10,000 bonus allegedly promised to star pitcher Eddie Cicotte if he won 30 games that season. You’ll learn new details about the complicated Black Sox legal proceedings, their “disappearing” confessions, and the reasons behind their acquittal in a Chicago courtroom. And you’ll learn how uneducated and underpaid the White Sox really were, as compared to other players around the American League.

This book isn’t a rewriting of Eight Men Out, but it is the complete story of everyone associated with the 1919 Chicago White Sox, told in full for the first time. We’ll help bring you up to date on what we collectively know about the Black Sox Scandal and the infamous team at the center of it all. We won’t take sides on whether certain players were guilty or whether they were punished fairly. We just present the best available information to you — and as you can tell by now, there’s a lot of new information out there. With this book, we hope to challenge your assumptions and help you gain a better understanding of what historians Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour called “baseball’s darkest hour” — the fixing of the 1919 World Series by key members of the Chicago White Sox.

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015).

In Eight Men Out, author Eliot Asinof wrote about the 1919 Chicago White Sox: “Many players of less status got almost twice as much on other teams. … (Charles Comiskey’s) ballplayers were the best and were paid as poorly as the worst.” This passage sums up the entire foundation of Asinof’s thesis: Low salaries and poor treatment by management are now widely considered to be the driving forces behind the White Sox players’ decision to fix the 1919 World Series. But the actual salary numbers tell a very different story. The White Sox were not among the worst-paid teams in baseball; in fact, they were one of the highest paid.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York, holds a collection of thousands of organizational contract cards that were provided to the Hall by Major League Baseball in 2002. As researcher Bob Hoie notes, these cards, which go back to the 1912 season, “contain salary, bonus payments, and any modifications to the standard contract covering each season (of a player’s career).” Although many other numbers have been tossed around by historians in the past, we can now say with certainty how much the Black Sox players were paid – and how much their teammates and peers were paid, too. The comparison helps shed light on whether any of the Chicago players had a legitimate reason to grumble about their salaries, at least any more than other teams around the league.

Hoie, with the help of fellow researcher Mike Haupert, analyzed the contract cards for a landmark 2012 article in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game on major-league salaries in 1919. Hoie discovered that the 1919 White Sox had one of the highest team payrolls in the major leagues; at $88,461, it was more than $10,000 higher than that of the National League champion Reds’ $76,870, which would have ranked sixth in the American League.

• Related link: A comprehensive examination of Black Sox salary histories, by Bob Hoie

As has been well documented, the White Sox team payroll was extremely top-heavy and the player with the biggest bankroll was future Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins. Collins’s $15,000 salary placed him number 2 among American League players behind only Ty Cobb at $20,000. The college-educated Collins, nicknamed “Cocky” and for good reason, wasn’t well liked by some of his teammates. Perhaps this included a sense of jealousy at his high salary. Indeed, Collins’s salary was nearly double that of anyone else on the team. But that wasn’t unusual in 1919: In Detroit, Cobb was making three times as much as any other Tiger and Cleveland’s Tris Speaker ($13,125) was also making twice as much as the next-highest-paid Indian.

But even if Collins’s salary was out of line with those of the rest of the team, the other White Sox stars were paid comparatively well, according to the Hall of Fame contract cards. Four other Chicago players ranked among the top 20 highest-paid players in the American League, including World Series fixers Eddie Cicotte ($8,000, number 8 in the AL), Buck Weaver ($7,250, number 11), and Shoeless Joe Jackson ($6,000, number 15). Another future Hall of Famer, catcher Ray Schalk, was the 13th-highest-paid player in the league at $7,083.

Eddie Cicotte’s salary deserves a closer look. The White Sox ace earned $8,000 in 1919 – which included a $5,000 base salary and a $3,000 performance bonus that Hoie says was a carryover from his 1918 contract (but unrelated to the mythical bonus “promised” to Cicotte if he won 30 games; that story is discussed elsewhere in this book). That also doesn’t include an additional $2,000 signing bonus paid to Cicotte before the start of the 1918 season, for a total compensation of $15,000 in 1918 and ’19. When he signed his contract, Cicotte had only one truly outstanding season (1917) to his credit. But he was the second-highest-paid pitcher in baseball behind the Washington Senators’ Walter Johnson, who had a much stronger track record. To put this in comparison, Eliot Asinof reported in Eight Men Out that Cincinnati Reds pitcher Dutch Ruether was “getting almost double (Cicotte’s) figure.” Ruether, whose sterling 1.82 ERA in 1919 matched Cicotte’s regular-season figure, was actually making $2,340. Talk about underpaid! 

The rest of the players who would later be banned in the Black Sox Scandal had little reason to squawk about salaries, either, at least compared with other players at their positions and experience level — and especially coming off a 1918 season in which the White Sox finished in sixth place. For instance, Chick Gandil’s $3,500 salary was fifth-highest among AL first baseman, and the four players ahead of him were far superior in talent: George Sisler (Browns), Stuffy McInnis (Red Sox), Wally Pipp (Yankees), and Joe Judge (Senators). Happy Felsch, an emerging star center fielder, might have felt disgruntled that Cobb and Speaker were making so much more than his $3,750, but he had only four seasons under his belt entering 1919. The only other center fielders with higher salaries, Clyde Milan (Senators) and Amos Strunk (Red Sox), had been in the league since 1907 and ’08, respectively.

Now that we have accurate salary information for all players in 1919, it’s hard to make the case that the Chicago White Sox were underpaid. There were many reasons that the eight Black Sox might have agreed to fix the World Series, but it wasn’t because they were being paid so much less than other major leaguers of equal or lesser talent.

Eliot Asinof, along with many writers before and after him, long insisted that the White Sox had the best talent and the worst payroll. But that claim just doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny. With few exceptions, owner Charles Comiskey — long portrayed as a greedy miser and a villain in the Black Sox story — paid salaries that were comparable, and in many cases even favorable, to the rest of the league. The numbers bear that out.

American League Opening Day team payrolls, 1919

1. Boston Red Sox, $93,475
2. New York Yankees, $91,330
3. Chicago White Sox, $88,461
4. Detroit Tigers, $81,433
5. Cleveland Indians, $78,913
6. St. Louis Browns, $63,000
7. Washington Senators, $63,000
8. Philadelphia A’s, $42,000

(Note: These figures are Opening Day payrolls and do not include any performance bonuses paid later in the season. According to Hoie, if you include total salary payouts plus earned bonuses at the end of the season, the White Sox ended up with the top payroll in the major leagues for 1919, $10,000 more than the Red Sox, who began dumping salaries as soon as it became apparent they weren’t going to repeat as AL champions.)

Top American League player salaries in 1919

1. Ty Cobb, DET, $20,000
2. Eddie Collins, CHW, $15,000
3. Tris Speaker, CLE, $13,125
4. Frank Baker*, NYY, $11,583
5. Babe Ruth, BOS, $10,000
6. Walter Johnson, WSH, $9,500
7. Harry Hooper, BOS, $9,000
8. Eddie Cicotte**, CHW, $8,000
9. Carl Mays, BOS/NYY, $8,000
10. Roger Peckinpaugh, NYY, $7,500
11. Buck Weaver, CHW, $7,250
12. George Sisler, SLB, $7,200
13. Ray Schalk, CHW, $7,083
14. Dutch Leonard, DET, $6,500
15. Del Pratt, NYY, $6,185
16. Joe Jackson***, CHW, $6,000
17. Bob Shawkey, NYY, $6,000
18. Ernie Shore, NYY, $6,000
19. Ray Chapman, CLE, $6,000
20. Donie Bush, DET, $5,500

American League player salaries in 1919, by position

First base

1. George Sisler, SLB, $7,200
2. Stuffy McInnis, BOS, $5,000
3. Wally Pipp, NYY, $5,000
4. Joe Judge, WSH, $3,675
5. Chick Gandil, CHW, $3,500
6. Harry Heilmann, DET, $3,500
7. George Burns, PHA, $2,625
8. Doc Johnston, CLE, $2,500

Second base

1. Eddie Collins, CHW, $15,000
2. Del Pratt, NYY, $6,185
3. Jack Barry, BOS, $4,500
4. Dave Shean, BOS, $4,000
5. Joe Gedeon, SLB, $3,675
6. Bill Wambsganss, CLE, $3,500
7. Ralph Young, DET, $3,500
8. Hal Janvrin, WSH, $2,625
9. Whitey Witt, PHA, $2,362

Shortstop

1. Roger Peckinpaugh, NYY, $7,500
2. Ray Chapman, CLE, $6,000
3. Donie Bush, DET, $5,500
4. Everett Scott, BOS, $5,000
5. Howie Shanks, WSH, $3,400
6. Swede Risberg, CHW, $3,250
7. Wally Gerber, SLB, $2,365
8. Joe Dugan, PHA, $2,100

Third base

1. Frank Baker, NYY, $11,583
2. Buck Weaver, CHW, $7,250
3. Larry Gardner, CLE, $5,000
4. Ossie Vitt, BOS, $4,500
5. Jimmy Austin, SLB, $3,675
6. Eddie Foster, WSH, $3,675
7. Fred McMullin, CHW, $2,750
8. Bob Jones, DET, $2,500
9. Fred Thomas, PHA, $2,100

Left field

1. Babe Ruth, BOS, $10,000
2. Joe Jackson, CHW, $6,000
3. Duffy Lewis, NYY, $5,500
4. Bobby Veach, DET, $5,000
5. Jack Graney, CLE, $4,000
6. Mike Menosky, WSH, $2,650
7. Jack Tobin, SLB, $2,500
8. Merlin Kopp, PHA, $2,400

Center field

1. Ty Cobb, DET, $20,000
2. Tris Speaker, CLE, $13,125
3. Clyde Milan, WSH, $5,000
4. Amos Strunk, BOS $4,800
5. Happy Felsch, CHW, $3,750
6. Tillie Walker, PHA, $3,750
7. Ping Bodie, NYY, $3,600
8. Baby Doll Jacobson, SLB, $1,969

Right field

1. Harry Hooper, BOS, $9,000
2. Joe Wood, CLE, $4,400
3. Braggo Roth, PHA/BOS, $4,200
4. Chick Shorten, DET, $3,200
5. Sam Rice, WSH, $3,150
6. Nemo Leibold, CHW, $2,650
7. Shano Collins, CHW, $2,625
8. Elmer Smith, CLE, $2,625
9. Ira Flagstead, DET, $2,500
10. Sammy Vick, NYY, $2,000
11. Earl Smith, SLB, $1,594

Catcher

1. Ray Schalk, CHW, $7,083
2. Steve O’Neill, CLE, $5,000
3. Oscar Stanage, DET, $4,500
4. Wally Schang, BOS, $4,500
5. Hank Severeid, SLB, $3,750
6. Sam Agnew, WSH, $3,675
7. Eddie Ainsmith, DET, $3,500
8. Truck Hannah, NYY, $3,000
9. Val Picinich, WSH, $2,750
10. Muddy Ruel, NYY, $2,700
11. Patsy Gharrity, WSH, $2,100
12. Cy Perkins, PHA, $1,890

Pitcher

1. Walter Johnson, WSH, $9,500
2. Eddie Cicotte, CHW, $8,000
3. Carl Mays, BOS/NYY, $8,000
4. Dutch Leonard, DET, $6,500
5. Bob Shawkey, NYY, $6,000
6. Ernie Shore, NYY, $6,000
7. Bullet Joe Bush, BOS, $5,700
8. Sam Jones, NYY, $5,000
9. Jim Shaw, WSH, $5,000
10. Jack Quinn, NYY, $4,850
11. Red Faber, CHW, $4,000
12. Stan Coveleski, CLE, $4,000
13. Ray Caldwell, BOS/CLE, $4,000
14. Pete Schneider, NYY, $4,000
15. Guy Morton, CLE, $4,000
16. George Mogridge, NYY, $3,800
17. Allan Sothoron, SLB, $3,625
18. Carl Weilman, SLB, $3,625
19. Hooks Dauss, DET, $3,600
20. Johnny Enzmann, CLE, $3,600
21. Jim Bagby, CLE, $3,600
22. Hooks Dauss, DET, $3,600
23. Lefty Williams****, CHW, $3,500

Notes

* Frank Baker’s salary includes a $1,000 performance bonus paid to him after the season.

** Eddie Cicotte’s salary includes a $3,000 performance bonus paid to him after the season, a carryover agreement from his 1918 contract. According to Bob Hoie, “this was apparently a verbal agreement, but it shows up in the White Sox ledgers presented during the criminal trial in 1921.”

*** Joe Jackson’s salary includes a $750 bonus paid to him for being “a member in good standing” of the White Sox at the end of the season, undoubtedly due in part to his abrupt departure in 1918. His $1,000-per-month contract normally earned him $6,000, but because of the shortened season in 1919, he was only due to make $5,250 instead. Comiskey made it up to him with an extra $750 after the season.

**** Lefty Williams’s salary includes a $375 performance bonus for winning 15 games and an additional $500 bonus for winning 20 games, both of which he earned in 1919.

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015).

Sources

Hoie, Bob, “1919 Baseball Salaries and the Mythically Underpaid Chicago White Sox,” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Volume 6, No. 1 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., Spring 2012), 17-34.

Michael Haupert Player Salary Database

Addendum: 1920 salaries

Following the 1919 World Series, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey began investigating rumors into what would become known as the Black Sox Scandal. However, as the 1920 season approached, neither the team nor the American League took any action against the players involved. When it came time to offer his players new contracts for the upcoming year, the White Sox owner was “exceedingly generous,” in the words of historian Gene Carney.

Here are the Black Sox salaries for the 1920 season:

Eddie Cicotte: $10,000, a raise of $5,000 from his 1919 base salary, which also included a $3,000 performance bonus. See above for details. Click here to view a copy of Cicotte’s signed 1920 contract, which is available at the Chicago History Museum.

Happy Felsch: $7,000, a raise of $3,250 from his 1919 salary. He had signed a three-year deal for $3,750 per year in 1917. The expiration of that contract and Felsch’s burgeoning stardom on the field meant he was overdue for a raise.

Chick Gandil: He was offered a contract by the White Sox, but did not report to the team in 1920. He was suspended indefinitely by Comiskey in mid-April for failing to sign a contract.

Joe Jackson: $8,000, a raise of $2,000 from his 1919 salary. After originally demanding $10,000 per season, Jackson signed a new three-year deal in the offseason. The details on when and how Jackson signed the contract were later disputed in the player’s civil lawsuit against the White Sox for back pay. The illiterate Jackson claimed he was pressured into signing the deal by GM Harry Grabiner without his wife Katie looking at the contract first.

Fred McMullin: $3,600, a raise of $975 from his 1919 salary. McMullin had signed for $500 a month (equivalent to $3,000 a year) as a rookie in 1916 and continued making that salary through 1919. The shortened 140-game season meant he only earned $2,625 in 1919.

Swede Risberg: $3,250, the same as his 1919 salary. Risberg had signed a two-year deal before the 1919 season.

Buck Weaver: $7,250, the same as his 1919 salary. Weaver had signed a three-year deal before the 1919 season.

Lefty Williams: $6,000, a raise of $3,375 from his 1919 base salary. According to salary records analyzed by historian Bob Hoie, there was also an off-contract agreement that Williams would receive a $500 bonus if he won 15 games in 1920 and an additional $1,000 if he won 20 games. But he was suspended in September 1920 before he could be paid the full $7,500. He did, however, receive a career-best $6,933.33.

The score stood at 5-5 with one out. The winning run — the American League pennant-clinching run — stood on third base in the form of Nemo Leibold. Jackson stepped in to face 20-game winner Allan Sothoron, on the mound for the St. Louis Browns. The right-handed spitballer was enjoying his finest season, but he was undoubtedly tiring in this ninth-inning jam after having allowed 13 hits to the White Sox. Jackson, Chicago’s powerful cleanup hitter boasting a .349 average, was the last man in the lineup Sothoron wanted to see right now.

The Browns had taken a 5-2 lead off White Sox ace Eddie Cicotte after 6½ innings, but the first-place White Sox were the toughest team in the major leagues to put away. On 13 previous occasions they had rallied from a deficit after the seventh inning to win; their propensity to score runs late made them dangerous in any situation.

The Sox had almost tied the game in the seventh, but Eddie Collins, Chicago’s team captain and a future Hall of Famer, was thrown out at the plate on an “extremely close” play. Collins protested the decision so vigorously that he was ejected from the game by umpire George Hildebrand (or as the Chicago Tribune reported it: “banished from the scrap by a peevish umpire for kicking over a hairline decision.”)

Cicotte, seeking his 30th victory, had been battered around by the Browns for five runs and he was removed for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the seventh. The 35-year-old veteran with an intoxicating “shine ball” had won six straight starts and even picked up two wins in relief since August 15.

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

A side note deserves mention here: One of the most compelling scenes in the 1988 film Eight Men Out shows Eddie Cicotte (played by David Strathairn) arguing with owner Charles Comiskey (played by Clifton James) about a promised bonus for winning 30 games. Comiskey’s miserliness is given as a reason why Cicotte joined the World Series fix, but later research has shown that this bonus was never promised. In fact, Cicotte did have his chances to win 30 games in 1919, including on this Wednesday afternoon in late September at Comiskey Park. But with the White Sox needing a win to secure their berth in the World Series and with his ace pitcher struggling, manager Kid Gleason decided to replace Cicotte, down by three runs in the seventh.

Gleason selected rookie left-hander Dickey Kerr to come on in relief of Cicotte. In the Deadball Era, long before bullpen specialization, Kerr was something of a relief specialist for the White Sox. In 1919 and ’20, he compiled an 11-2 record with a 2.80 ERA out of the bullpen. As the White Sox rallied against the St. Louis Browns on September 24, Kerr held his opponents at bay with two scoreless innings.

Meanwhile, the White Sox scored twice against Sothoron in the seventh, cutting the Browns’ lead to 5-4. In the ninth Kerr led off with a single and moved to third on Nemo Leibold’s base hit. Utility infielder Fred McMullin, who had taken Eddie Collins’s place in the lineup, worked Sothoron for a walk to load the bases. Then Buck Weaver slammed a long sacrifice fly to center field, which scored Kerr to tie the game and moved Leibold to third base. He was 90 feet away from clinching the pennant, with Shoeless Joe Jackson due up next.

The White Sox had been alone in first place since July 9, when Jackson had scored the go-ahead run in another patented late-inning rally to beat Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. On September 24 the Sox held a four-game lead over the Cleveland Indians with five left to play. Telegraph reports had already come in to Comiskey Park that the Indians had lost in Detroit, ensuring Chicago at least a share of its second AL pennant in three seasons. A win would send the White Sox to Cincinnati for a World Series matchup with the National League champion Reds.

Jackson came through with a flourish. He took a “vicious swat” at a Sothoron pitch and lined it to deep right-center field — the Chicago Tribune reported the hit would have gone “for two or three bases under ordinary circumstances” — but the White Sox mobbed Jackson after Leibold strolled across home plate with the winning run and a 6-5 White Sox victory.

Never before had an American League team clinched a pennant with a walk-off victory. The feat would not happen again for nearly a quarter-century.

In fact, a walk-off victory to clinch a World Series berth has happened only 21 times in baseball history (through the 2019 season). In addition to Shoeless Joe Jackson in 1919, here are the others:

• 1903: Claude Ritchey doubled to score Honus Wagner in the ninth as the Pittsburgh Pirates captured the first NL pennant in the World Series era with a 7-6 walk-off victory over the Boston Beaneaters on September 18.
• 1914: George “Possum” Whitted drove in Johnny Evers with a game-winning double in the ninth to clinch the NL pennant for the “Miracle” Boston Braves with a 3-2 win over the Chicago Cubs on September 29.
• 1922: George “High Pockets” Kelly singled in Frankie Frisch with the winning run in the 10th inning as the New York Giants won their second of four consecutive NL pennants with a 5-4 win over the St. Louis Cardinals on September 25.
• 1943: Lou Klein beat out a potential inning-ending double play in the ninth and Ray Sanders scored the winning run from third base as the St. Louis Cardinals clinched the pennant with a 2-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs on September 18.
• 1943: One week later, Bill Dickey clinched the AL pennant for the New York Yankees with a 14th-inning single over second base to score Billy Johnson from second base and give the Yankees a 2-1 win over the St. Louis Browns on September 25.
• 1951: Bobby Thomson’s famous ninth-inning home run off Brooklyn’s Ralph Branca sent the New York Giants to the World Series with a 5-4 win in the third and decisive game of an NL playoff tiebreaker.
• 1957: Henry Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves lined an 11th-inning home run against the St. Louis Cardinals to clinch the NL pennant on September 23, the only other time besides Thomson that a walk-off home run won a pennant in the pre-divisional era.
• 1959: Carl Furillo hit an infield single in the 12th inning and Gil Hodges scored from second base on an errant throw by Felix Mantilla as the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Milwaukee Braves 6-5 in Game Two of the NL playoff tiebreaker.
• 1968: Don Wert of the Detroit Tigers hit a ninth-inning RBI single off Lindy McDaniel of the New York Yankees to clinch the AL pennant on September 17.
• 1972: George Foster of the Cincinnati Reds scored on a ninth-inning wild pitch by Pittsburgh’s Bob Moose to end Game Five of the NL Championship Series and send the Reds to the World Series.
• 1976: Ken Griffey of the Cincinnati Reds hit an infield single to first base with the bases loaded to score Dave Concepcion in the ninth inning of Game Three of the NL Championship Series, breaking a 6-6 tie with the Philadelphia Phillies.
• 1976: Chris Chambliss of the New York Yankees knocked out the Kansas City Royals with a ninth-inning homer in Game Five of the AL Championship Series.
• 1978: Bill Russell of the Los Angeles Dodgers knocked out the Philadelphia Phillies with a 10th-inning single to score Ron Cey in Game Four of the NL Championship Series.
• 1992: Francisco Cabrera of the Atlanta Braves drove in David Justice and Sid Bream with a two-run single in the ninth inning to down the Pittsburgh Pirates in Game Seven of the NL Championship Series.
• 1999: Andruw Jones of the Atlanta Braves drew an 11th-inning bases-loaded walk from Kenny Rogers of the New York Mets to end Game Six of the NL Championship Series.
• 2002: Kenny Lofton of the San Francisco Giants hit a single to right field, scoring David Bell from second base to beat the St. Louis Cardinals 2-1 and end Game Five of the NL Championship Series.
• 2003: Aaron Boone’s 11th-inning home run off Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox ended Game Seven of the AL Championship Series, sending the New York Yankees to the Fall Classic.
• 2006: Magglio Ordonez of the Detroit Tigers finished a sweep of the Oakland A’s with a three-run home run in the ninth inning in Game Four of the AL Championship Series.
• 2014: Travis Ishikawa of the San Francisco Giants hit a three-run home run in the ninth inning off Michael Wacha of the St. Louis Cardinals to end Game Five of the NL Championship Series.
• 2019: Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros hit a two-run home run in the ninth inning off Aroldis Chapman of the New York Yankees to end Game Six of the AL Championship Series.

The day after Jackson’s game-ending blow, the Chicago Tribune feted the White Sox for their second pennant in three years. The headlines read “Gleasons’ Fight Among Hardest in Flag Annals” and “Eddie Collins of White Sox Great Money Player in Game.” But next to the game story on page 23 of the Tribune was a more ominous headline, previewing a World Series that would become the most notorious in baseball history:

“Bookies favor Sox.”

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015). A version of this article also appeared at TheNationalPastimeMuseum.com. It is reprinted here by permission.

Nonetheless, an eight-game series was played in which suspicion is cast on only a few key plays. There is even general agreement among knowledgeable observers that several of the games were played entirely on the up-and-up. What follows is a game-by-game description of this Series with minimal attention to the controversial plays. While some of the more obvious ones will be pointed out, the whys and wherefores will be left for others to study and write about here and elsewhere.

The Teams

The 1919 edition of Charles Comiskey’s Chicago White Sox entered their second World Series in three seasons with an American League record of 88-52. They led the Cleveland Indians by 3½ games at season’s end. Chicago hit .287 as a team and scored 668 runs, ranking the team number one in each category among AL teams. They had a team ERA of 3.04 (fourth in the AL) and allowed 534 runs (second). Their manager, William J. “Kid” Gleason, was in his first year in that position.

The Cincinnati Reds were owned by August “Garry” Herrmann and managed by Pat Moran, a veteran of four previous campaigns at the helm of the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds’ record of 96-44 was nine games better than the New York Giants in the National League pennant race. The Reds hit .263 as a team and scored 578 runs, both second-best figures among NL teams (to the Giants). They had a team ERA of 2.23 (second-best) and allowed an NL-low 401 runs. This was Cincinnati’s first World Series appearance.

Game One

Wednesday, October 1
Redland Field, Cincinnati
“White Sox Lose in Opener, 9 to 1” — Chicago Tribune
“Chicago, Outclassed, Loses First Game 9 to 1; Reds Quickly Hammer Eddie Cicotte From Box” — Cincinnati Enquirer

White Sox        010      000      000 — 1 6 1
Reds                100      500      21x — 9 14 1
WP: Dutch Ruether (1-0). LP: Eddie Cicotte (0-1).
Dutch Ruether: 9 IP, 6 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 1 K.
Eddie Cicotte: 3⅔ IP, 7 H, 6 R, 6 ER, 2 BB, 1 K.
Dutch Ruether: 3-3, 2 3B, BB, R, 3 RBI. Greasy Neale: 3-4, 2 R. Jake Daubert: 3-4, 3B, R, RBI.
Chick Gandil: 2-4, RBI. Joe Jackson: 0-4, R. Buck Weaver: 1-4. Eddie Collins: 1-4, CS.
Attendance: 30,511. Time: 1:42.

The starting pitchers for Game One were lefty Dutch Ruether (19-6 W-L, 1.82 ERA regular season) for the Reds and right-hander Eddie Cicotte (29-7, 1.82) for the White Sox. The Reds initiated the scoring with a run in the bottom of the first inning. Their leadoff batter was second baseman Morrie Rath. Cicotte’s second pitch struck him in the back. The pitch is one of the most analyzed in World Series history; many believing the pitch was a signal from Cicotte to bettors that the fix was in. The next batter up, first baseman Jake Daubert, singled Rath to third. Third baseman Heinie Groh’s sacrifice fly to deep left field sent Rath home with the first run of the Series.

In the top of the second, the White Sox struck back. Left fielder Joe Jackson led off the inning by reaching second base on a bad throw by shortstop Larry Kopf. Jackson reached third on a sacrifice bunt by center fielder Happy Felsch, then scored when first baseman Chick Gandil’s short fly to left dropped in for a hit. The inning ended with the score tied at 1 apiece.

The score remained tied until the Reds’ half of the fourth inning. Joe Jackson’s counterpart in left, Pat Duncan, started the ball rolling with a one-out single to right. Duncan was forced at second by Kopf for out number two. Eyebrows were raised by some who thought Cicotte hesitated before tossing the ball to shortstop Swede Risberg covering second. Others noted that Risberg seemed to stumble over the bag as he attempted unsuccessfully to double Kopf to end the inning. This proved costly as Reds right fielder Greasy Neale scratched out an infield single. That brought up catcher Ivey Wingo, who sent Kopf home with a single for what proved to be the winning run. The score jumped to 4-1 when pitcher Ruether tripled to deep left-center to drive Neale and Wingo across. The offensive show continued with Rath’s double scoring Ruether. The scoring for the inning ended with the Reds up 6-1 when Daubert’s single drove home Rath. At that point Kid Gleason removed Cicotte and replaced him with Roy Wilkinson. The right-hander ended the inning by retiring Groh on a fly ball to center.

Staked to a 6-1 lead, Ruether limited the White Sox to four hits, all singles, and no runs the rest of the way. In the meantime the Reds increased their lead with a pair of runs in the seventh as Groh followed a Daubert triple with a single and later scored on a force play. The Reds’ final run scored in their half of the eighth when Ruether stroked his second triple of the afternoon to score Neale, who had begun the inning with a single. Ruether then proceeded to complete his day’s work and secure the first-ever World Series win for the Reds by retiring Jackson, Felsch, and Gandil in order to end the game. The final score was 9-1.

Game Two

Thursday, October 2
Redland Field, Cincinnati
“White Sox Crushed Again, 4 to 2” — Chicago Tribune
“White Sox Sluggers Helpless With Men on Bases; Reds Defeat Kid Gleason’s Second Ace 4 to 2” — Cincinnati Enquirer

White Sox        000      000      200 — 2 10 1
Reds                000      301      00x — 4 4 3
WP: Slim Sallee (1-0). LP: Lefty Williams (0-1).
Slim Sallee: 9 IP, 10 H, 2 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 2 K.
Lefty Williams: 8 IP, 4 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 6 BB, 1 K.
Larry Kopf: 1-3, 3B, 2 RBI. Edd Roush: 1-2, R, 2 BB, RBI. Greasy Neale: 1-3, RBI.
Joe Jackson: 3-4, 2B, K. Ray Schalk: 2-4, R. Buck Weaver: 2-4, 2B.
Attendance: 29,698. Time: 1:42.

The White Sox sent Claude “Lefty” Williams (23-11, 2.64) to the mound for Game Two. The Reds countered with another lefty, Slim Sallee (21-7, 2.06). Both pitchers started off strong. It was the bottom of the fourth inning when the Reds broke the ice in a big way. It all started when Williams walked leadoff batter Rath, who reached second via a sacrifice and then watched as Groh was walked. A single by center fielder Edd Roush, the Reds’ best hitter, drove home Rath with the first run for the National Leaguers. After Roush was thrown out at second on an attempted steal, Williams issued yet another walk, to Duncan. This was Lefty’s third walk of the inning and fourth of a game that would see him pass six Reds in eight innings pitched. Skeptics of Williams’s efforts that day, and in the Series as a whole, could point to the left-hander’s reputation as one of the game’s premier control pitchers. In 1919, for example, he had issued 58 walks in 297 innings pitched. His career totals were 347 walks in 1,186 innings. Kopf made sure the last two fourth-inning walks were costly by tripling to left to score Groh and Duncan. The inning ended with the Reds ahead by three.

The White Sox did not score until the top of the seventh inning, breaking a string of 13 scoreless frames. By then the Reds had increased their lead to 4-0 when Williams began the bottom of the sixth inning by walking Roush. It was the third inning of six in which Williams had issued a free pass to the Reds’ leadoff batter. Twice the leadoff walk yielded a run, this time when Roush reached second on a sacrifice bunt by Duncan and scored on a single by Neale. When the White Sox finally scored, it was a pair of unearned runs. Their only runs of the afternoon came in the seventh when Risberg singled with one out. Catcher Ray Schalk followed with a single. Risberg scored on the play as a result of an errant throw to second by Reds right fielder Neale. Schalk scored as well when third baseman Groh threw wildly to home plate. That was the end of the scoring as a White Sox rally in the ninth fell short. The 4-2 victory, secured despite the fact that the White Sox had 10 hits – three by Jackson, two each by Schalk and Buck Weaver – to the winner’s four, put the Reds ahead in the Series by two games.

Game Three

Friday, October 3
Comiskey Park, Chicago
“Kerr Hurls Sox to Victory, 3 to 0” — Chicago Tribune
“Kerr Stops Reds, Registering Shut-Out; Fisher’s Wild Throw Gives Sox Two Runs” — Cincinnati Enquirer

Reds                000      000      000 — 0 3 1
White Sox        020      100      00x — 3 7 0
WP: Dickey Kerr (1-0). LP: Ray Fisher (0-1).
Dickey Kerr: 9 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 4 K.
Ray Fisher: 7 IP, 7 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 1 K.
Joe Jackson: 2-3, R. Chick Gandil: 1-3, K, 2 RBI. Swede Risberg: 1-2, 3B, BB, R. Ray Schalk: 1-3, RBI.
Attendance: 29,126. Time: 1:30.

Manager Kid Gleason’s choice to pitch his club back into the Series was Dickey Kerr (13-7, 2.88). The rookie left-hander was pressed into front-line duty due to the absence of Red Faber. The future Hall of Fame pitcher was battling illness and injury. The choice of Pat Moran to secure yet another Reds win was expected to be Hod Eller. Instead, right-handed veteran Ray Fisher (14-5, 2.17) received the starting nod.

In the bottom of the second inning the White Sox, playing for the first time at home, scored twice. Jackson led off with a single and reached third base when Fisher fielded Felsch’s attempt at a sacrifice and threw wildly to second attempting a force out. Felsch continued on to second on the miscue. The next batter, Gandil, drove in both baserunners with a single to right, Gandil ending up at second. Although Risberg walked, no further damage was done as the next three White Sox batters made outs. The first of those batters, Schalk, attempted to move Gandil and Risberg up with a sacrifice bunt, but Fisher’s throw to third forced Gandil. Some have argued that Gandil could have beaten the throw with a better effort.

The two-run lead held for the White Sox until the bottom of the fourth, when they scored their third and final run. A one-out triple by Risberg followed by a Schalk single did the trick. White Sox hitters had produced three runs in four innings. Kerr did the rest, twirling a three-hit shutout while retiring the last 15 Reds batters. Kerr’s magnificent performance – he struck out four and walked only one – was in stark contrast to the performances of his more heralded pitching colleagues, Cicotte and Williams.

Game Four

Saturday, October 4
Comiskey Park, Chicago
“Sox Humbled in Fourth Game, 2-0” — Chicago Tribune
“Ring Whitewashes Sox, Giving Reds 3-to-1 Lead; Cicotte Suffers His Second Defeat of Series” — Cincinnati Enquirer

Reds                000      020      000 — 2 5 2
White Sox        000      000      000 — 0 3 2
WP: Jimmy Ring (1-0). LP: Eddie Cicotte (0-2).
Jimmy Ring: 9 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 3 BB, 2 K.
Eddie Cicotte: 9 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 0 ER, 0 BB, 2 K.
Ivey Wingo: 2-3. Greasy Neale: 1-3, 2B, RBI. Larry Kopf: 1-3, R, RBI.
Joe Jackson: 1-4, 2B, K. Happy Felsch: 1-3, SH. Chick Gandil: 1-4, K.
Attendance: 34,363. Time: 1:37.

The largest crowd to date in the Series saw Cicotte take his second turn on the mound for the White Sox. Yet another top-flight hurler, righty Jimmy Ring (10-9, 2.26), was the Reds’ choice to oppose him. The game was scoreless into the top of the fifth inning, when the Reds scored the game’s only runs. It all started out quite harmlessly as Roush was thrown out at first by catcher Schalk. The second out seemed assured when the next Reds batter, left fielder Duncan, hit the ball right back to Cicotte. However, the Sox pitcher bobbled the ball, then threw wildly to first, allowing Duncan to reach second. Kopf promptly singled to left. The ball was fielded by Joe Jackson. He threw toward home plate to hold Duncan at third. While the ball was in flight, Cicotte reached up and deflected it. The ball rolled toward the stands as Duncan headed home with the game’s first run and Kopf took second base. Cicotte’s error, his second of the inning, ignited another wave of speculation that some of the White Sox were not in the Series to win. This was only emphasized further when the next man up, Neale, doubled to left to drive in Kopf. When the inning ended the score was 2-0, and there it stayed as the Reds took a three-games-to-one lead in the Series. Until that “fateful fifth,” Cicotte had given up only two harmless singles. In all he gave up five hits – only one single after the fifth – and walked none. In shutting down the White Sox, Ring gave up a mere three hits while issuing three walks.

Game Five

Monday, October 6
Comiskey Park, Chicago
“Sox Crumble Before Eller, 5 to 0” — Chicago Tribune
“Eller Humbles White Sox, Pitching Shut-Out, Practically Clinching Big Series For Cincinnati” — Cincinnati Enquirer

Reds                000      004      001 — 5 4 0
White Sox        000      000      000 — 0 3 3
WP: Hod Eller (1-0). LP: Lefty Williams (0-2).
Hod Eller: 9 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 9 K.
Lefty Williams: 8 IP, 4 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 2 BB, 3 K.
Edd Roush: 1-4, 3B, SB, 2 R, 2 RBI. Hod Eller: 1-3, 2B, R. Morrie Rath: 1-3, R, BB, RBI.
Buck Weaver: 2-4, 3B. Ray Schalk: 1-2, K. Nemo Leibold: 0-3, BB, K.
Attendance: 34,379. Time: 1:45.

Delayed one day by rain, the fifth game of the Series saw the Reds trot out their fifth different starter and third straight right-hander in Hod Eller (19-9, 2.39). Kid Gleason showed his continued faith in Williams, giving him the ball for the second time. The two starters gave evidence early on that this would be a classic pitchers’ duel. In the second and third innings Eller struck out six White Sox batters in a row, four on called third strikes. Williams was seemingly equal to the task, hurling hitless ball through four innings. The game was scoreless when the Reds came to bat in the top of the sixth. Then they hit pay dirt. Pitcher Eller led off the inning with a double to center, only the second Reds hit. He took third on the play when center fielder Felsch uncorked a bad throw. It was the second of three White Sox fielding errors in the game. Rath wasted no time in singling Eller home with the game’s first run. After Daubert was out sacrificing Rath to second, Williams walked Groh. Then Roush struck the game’s big blow, a triple to center, scoring both Rath and Groh. Some questioned Felsch’s positioning on the play as Roush’s drive went over his head. Schalk, who had protested vehemently when Groh was called safe at home, was ejected from the game for bumping and shoving home-plate umpire Cy Rigler. Duncan then drove Roush home with a sacrifice fly. The inning ended with the Reds in command at 4-0.

They scored an additional unearned run in the ninth off reliever Erskine Mayer. The final score was 5-0. Reds pitchers, fresh off a second straight three-hit gem, had now held the White Sox scoreless for 22 consecutive innings. Heading to Cincinnati, the AL champions were on the brink of elimination.

Game Six

Tuesday, October 7
Redland Field, Cincinnati
“Sox Fight to Victory in Tenth, 5-4” — Chicago Tribune
“Carelessness by Reds Gives Sox Game, Cincinnati ‘Blowing’ Four-Run Lead” — Cincinnati Enquirer

White Sox        000      013      000      1 — 5 10 3
Reds                002      200      000      0 — 4 11 0
WP: Dickey Kerr (2-0). LP: Jimmy Ring (1-1).
Dickey Kerr: 10 IP, 11 H, 4 R, 3 ER, 2 BB, 2 K.
Jimmy Ring: 5 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 2 K.
Buck Weaver: 3-5, 2 2B, 2 R. Joe Jackson: 2-4, BB, R, RBI. Happy Felsch: 2-5, 2B, R, RBI.
Greasy Neale: 3-4, 3B, R. Pat Duncan: 1-5, 2B, 2 RBI. Jake Daubert: 2-4, SB, R. Dutch Ruether: 1-2, 2B, R, RBI.
Attendance: 32,006. Time: 2:06.

For what they hoped would be the final game of the Series, the Reds sent a well-rested Ruether, the winning pitcher in Game One, to the mound. Kid Gleason countered by calling on Game Three winner Kerr for more heroics. Initially it did not appear to be such a good move. The Reds ended Kerr’s scoreless inning string at 11 by scoring a pair of runs in both the third and fourth innings to take a 4-0 lead. The Reds’ runs in the third came after one was out. Daubert singled and stole second as Groh struck out. Kerr then filled the vacancy at first base by hitting Roush, and Duncan followed with a double to drive home both Daubert and Roush. The Reds built upon their lead in the fourth. Neale led off the inning with a triple to deep right field. Neale remained at third as the next batter, catcher Bill Rariden, grounded out. Ruether, one of the hitting stars of Game One, then helped out his cause again; this time he doubled to left to score Neale. Rath was up next. He was safe at first when White Sox shortstop Risberg fielded his grounder cleanly but committed his second error of the game – fourth of the Series – trying to cut down Ruether at third. An unearned run scored as a result of the bad throw. The score jumped to 4-0 and could have been worse as Rath, who had taken second on Risberg’s miscue, promptly stole third. There was still only one out when Daubert lifted a fly ball to Jackson in left. After Jackson made the catch, Rath attempted to score. Jackson’s throw doubled him at home to end the inning. There were some who credited Jackson with a strong, accurate throw, while others claimed the throw was wide and the run saved when catcher Schalk lunged across to block the plate.

Now the White Sox trailed the Reds by four runs, a seemingly insurmountable lead to overcome for a team held scoreless for the previous 26 innings. In the top of the fifth, the Sox finally broke through, albeit for only a single run. Ruether, dominating to that point, suddenly lost his control, issuing leadoff walks to Risberg and Schalk. Kerr scratched out a single to load the bases. No one was able to move up as Shano Collins flied out to short center. Eddie Collins then lifted a fly ball to center field. It was deep enough to score Risberg with the first White Sox run, but Schalk remained at second. Kerr did not notice. He advanced to second and was tagged out. An error by Felsch in the bottom of the fifth did no damage. The score at the end of five was 4-1 in favor of the Reds.

The White Sox half of the sixth proved to be their best to date. Weaver started with a double to shallow left. He scored as Jackson singled and in turn scored on a double to left-center by Felsch. The Sox now trailed by only one. Pat Moran had seen enough. He replaced Ruether with Game Four winner Ring. He retired Gandil and Risberg, but Schalk tied the game with a single that scored Felsch, who had advanced to third.

The game remained tied through regulation. In the top of the 10th, the White Sox broke through against Ring. Again, Weaver led off the inning with a double. A successful Jackson bunt single placed runners at the corners with no one out. Felsch struck out, but then Gandil broke the deadlock with a groundball single to center that scored Weaver. Risberg ended the inning by lining into a double play. Nonetheless, Kerr secured his second win of the Series with a one-two-three 10th. There was talk of sloppy fielding and sloppy baserunning – in addition to Kerr’s gaffe, Jackson was also thrown out on the bases twice – but the bottom line was the White Sox win had extended the Series to a seventh game.  

Game Seven

Wednesday, October 8
Redland Field, Cincinnati
“Sox Battle to Third Victory, 4-1” — Chicago Tribune
“Cicotte Keeps Sox in Series, Trimming Cincinnati 4 to 1” — Cincinnati Enquirer

White Sox        101      020      000 — 4 10 1
Reds                000      001      000 — 1 7 4
WP: Eddie Cicotte (1-2). LP: Slim Sallee (1-1).
Eddie Cicotte: 9 IP, 7 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 4 K.
Slim Sallee: 4⅓ IP, 9 H, 4 R, 2 ER, 0 BB, 0 K.
Shano Collins: 3-5, 2B, 2 R. Eddie Collins: 2-4, R. Joe Jackson: 2-4, 2 RBI. Happy Felsch: 2-4, 2 RBI.
Heinie Groh: 1-4, 2B, R. Pat Duncan: 1-4, RBI. Ivey Wingo: 1-1, 3 BB.
Attendance: 13,923. Time: 1:47.

Pat Moran selected Sallee, the winning pitcher in Game Two, as the Reds took their second shot at wrapping up the Series. Kid Gleason, hoping the third time was a charm, gave the ball to Cicotte. By far the smallest crowd to date was on hand at Redland Field, in part because the Reds front office mishandled the availability of tickets. Shano Collins, playing center field, started the game with a single. He was sacrificed to second by Eddie Collins. Then, after another out, Jackson singled to left. Shano Collins scored to put the Chicagoans on top. The White Sox added a second run in the top of the third when Jackson again singled to drive in Shano Collins, this time from third base. They struck again in the top half of the fifth. After Shano Collins flied out, Eddie Collins singled to center. Weaver batted next, reaching first when Reds third baseman Groh misplayed his groundball. Yet another error on a grounder, this time by second baseman Rath, loaded the bases. Happy Felsch then singled, driving across both Eddie Collins and Weaver. Both runs were unearned.

The White Sox, behind much stronger pitching from Cicotte, held their 4-0 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning when a one-out ground-rule double to deep left by Groh and a two-out single by Duncan gave the Reds their only run of the afternoon. The final score was 4-1. Cicotte finally had a win. Sallee, who deserved better, took the loss. The Reds defense sprang a leak as they made four errors. The White Sox victory brought them to within a game of forcing the Series to its full nine games.

Game Eight

Thursday, October 9
Comiskey Park, Chicago
“Reds Are New World’s Champions” — Chicago Tribune
“Reds End Series With Slaughter of Sox Pitchers, Winning Baseball Classic, Five Games to Three” — Cincinnati Enquirer

Reds                410      013      010 — 10 16 2
White Sox        001      000      040 — 5 10 1
WP: Hod Eller (2-0). LP: Lefty Williams (0-3).
Hod Eller: 9 IP, 10 H, 5 R, 4 ER, 1 BB, 6 K.
Lefty Williams: ⅓ IP, 4 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 0 BB, 0 K.
Edd Roush: 3-5, 2 2B, 2 R, 4 RBI. Pat Duncan: 2-4, 2B, R, 3 RBI. Bill Rariden: 2-5, SB, 2 RBI. Morrie Rath: 2-4, SB, 2 BB, R.
Joe Jackson: 2-5, 2B, HR, 2 R, 3 RBI. Eddie Collins: 3-5, 2B, SB, R. Buck Weaver: 2-5, 2B, R.
Attendance: 32,930. Time: 2:27.

The eighth game of the Series presented each manager with an intriguing decision for his choice of a starting pitcher. Lefty Williams seemed a logical choice for Kid Gleason, but he had not performed well in two previous starts. The third time around had worked for Cicotte; Gleason decided to give Williams a third chance, too. Pat Moran had a number of seasoned starters to choose from to try to close out the Series. He went with Hod Eller, a shutout winner in Game Five. Williams quickly made Gleason regret his decision. After retiring the first batter on an infield pop fly, he gave up four straight hits. Jake Daubert opened the parade with a single to center and Heinie Groh followed suit with a single to right. A double by Edd Roush sent Daubert home and Groh to third. Pat Duncan’s double knocked in Groh and Roush to give the Reds a 3-0 lead. Gleason pulled his left-hander and replaced him with Bill James. Williams’s effort or lack thereof became the subject of endless discussion, including speculation that he pitched to lose due to threats of violence. James walked the first batter he faced, but limited the Reds to just one more run, a two-out single by Bill Rariden that drove in Duncan.

In their half of the first, the White Sox started strong. Nemo Leibold, playing center field, opened with a single and went to third on a double by Eddie Collins. However, Eller proceeded to shut down the threat by retiring the side on a pair of strikeouts and an infield pop fly. The Reds then added another run in the second. After two were out Groh singled and scored on a double by Roush. When Roush tried to take third on the throw to the plate, he was thrown out. In the bottom of the third the White Sox broke the ice when Jackson homered to right. Any thoughts of a quick comeback were dashed, however, as the Reds scored a run in the fifth and three more in the sixth. The score in the fifth was produced by a two-out triple by Kopf and a single to left by Neale. James was still on the mound for the White Sox in the sixth, but after giving up an opening single to pitcher Eller and issuing a walk to Morrie Rath, he was replaced by Roy Wilkinson. The first batter he faced, Daubert, bunted and was safe on an errant throw to third by Ray Schalk. This loaded the bases. After Groh struck out, Roush singled home both Eller and Rath. When Duncan followed with a single to center scoring Daubert, the Reds had what would prove to be an insurmountable 9-1 lead.

The Reds scored their 10th and final run of the Series in the top of the eighth. Wilkinson hit Roush with a pitch. A sacrifice bunt by Duncan moved Roush to second, where he watched as Larry Kopf popped up and Greasy Neale walked. Roush then scored on a single by Rariden. The White Sox started out the bottom half of the eighth with a flyout. Then suddenly their bats came alive. An Eddie Collins single was followed by a pair of doubles. The first one, by Weaver, sent Collins to third. The second, by Jackson, drove home both Collins and Weaver. After Felsch popped up to the first baseman, Gandil tripled to right to score Jackson. When Risberg reached first on an error by Roush in center, Gandil scored the fourth run of the inning. The rally ended one batter later, however, when Schalk grounded to second. Entering the bottom of the ninth the White Sox trailed 10-5. Although Eller hit one batter, pinch-hitter Eddie Murphy, and gave up a single to Eddie Collins, the game and the Series were over when Jackson’s groundout to second gave Eller his second complete-game victory. The Cincinnati Reds were World Series champions for the first time in team history.

Series Summary

Normally once the final out of a World Series is made, the shouting quickly dies. But in the aftermath of the 1919 World Series, the shouting had just begun. Perhaps more would be written about this World Series than any other because of what would become known as the Black Sox Scandal. But just like any World Series, the on-the-field play would produce a cold, hard set of numbers. No recap would be complete without a recitation of some of the key figures.

In winning the World Series five games to three, the Reds outscored the White Sox 35-20. The Reds batted .255, while the Sox team average was .224. The Reds accumulated 17 extra-base hits, including seven triples. The White Sox followed closely with 14, equaling the Reds with their 10 doubles.

Individually for the Reds’ regulars, Greasy Neale had the highest batting average at .357. Pat Duncan and Edd Roush knocked in eight and seven runners respectively. Pitcher Hod Eller won twice, while Dutch Ruether, Slim Sallee, and Jimmy Ring were credited with one win apiece. Joe Jackson topped White Sox batters with a .375 average and six RBIs. Chick Gandil had five RBIs. Other hitters topping .300 were Buck Weaver (.324) and Ray Schalk (.304). Future Hall of Famer Eddie Collins had only one extra-base hit and batted .226. Swede Risberg garnered but two hits in 25 at-bats and hit a woeful .080. Pitcher Dickey Kerr won twice for the White Sox and Eddie Cicotte once. Perhaps fittingly, the home run hit by Joe Jackson in the third inning of Game Eight was the only home run hit in the final World Series of the Deadball Era.

RICK HUHN is the author of full-length biographies of Hall of Famers Eddie Collins and George Sisler. His most recent book, “The Chalmers Race” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), analyzes the controversial 1910 batting race. He is a founding member and co-coordinator of the Hank Gowdy Columbus (Ohio) Chapter of SABR.

Sources

Information for this article was obtained from Retrosheet.org and Baseball-Reference.com.

Lefty Williams, left, and Eddie Cicotte carried the load for the Chicago White Sox in 1919. The two pitchers started, and won, more than half of the White Sox’s games during the regular season. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

As soon as Red Faber reported for spring training, Kid Gleason knew he had a big problem.

Entering the 1919 season, the Chicago White Sox’s first-year manager was counting on his workhorse aces Faber and Eddie Cicotte to lead his team back to the American League pennant they had won two years earlier. But Faber, the right-handed spitball specialist who had spent most of the 1918 season in the Navy during World War I, was weak from influenza and didn’t look well in his early throwing sessions at Mineral Wells, Texas, where the White Sox were getting in shape for the campaign. 

The White Sox were returning almost their entire championship team from 1917. (The 1918 season had been cut short by the war as players were forced to comply with the US government’s “work or fight” order.) But some writers, like Baseball Magazine’s W.A. Phelon, predicted they would finish no better than fourth in the AL standings, primarily due to their lack of pitching depth.

Kid Gleason quickly grew tired of the criticism, but he never stopped worrying about his pitchers. The White Sox’s unreliable rotation proved to be a concern all season long and was a contributing factor in their World Series loss to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. In fact, some historians have argued that the White Sox might have lost to the pitching-rich Reds even if the Series had been played on the level.

Long before it became known that some White Sox players were intentionally throwing the Series, American League umpire Billy Evans was among the experts to cast doubt on Chicago as heavy favorites, writing in a syndicated column a day before Game One, “I am much in doubt as to Chicago’s chances. It is a pretty big task to ask two pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, to carry the burden of a nine-game series.” 

Red Faber, the hero of the 1917 World Series and a future Hall of Famer, might have made the difference if he had been available. He tried for most of the year to assure Gleason that he was feeling fine, but the manager wasn’t fooled — and neither were American League hitters. Faber, weakened by illness and then hampered by arm and ankle injuries, started just 20 games in 1919 and compiled an 11-9 record with a 3.83 ERA, far above the league average of 3.22.

Without Faber at full strength, the White Sox’s pitching staff was extraordinarily thin, even by Deadball Era standards when complete games were common and bullpen specialization was a concept that was decades into the future. Faber’s struggles forced Gleason to conduct an extensive (and mostly unsuccessful) search for other pitchers to provide support and much-needed rest for his two stars, Cicotte and Williams.

The 35-year-old Eddie Cicotte was the team’s undisputed ace, using his dazzling array of trick pitches — including the knuckleball, the emery ball, and his patented “shine ball” — to dominate AL hitters. He finished 29-7 with a 1.82 ERA and five shutouts in a league-leading 306⅔ innings pitched. Near the end of the season, with the White Sox safely in first place, he took two weeks off to rest his tired arm in preparation for an extended best-of-nine World Series against the Reds. This layoff in early September, which was widely reported in the newspapers, has long fueled speculation that White Sox management benched its star pitcher to spoil Cicotte’s chance at a 30th victory and deny him a promised $10,000 bonus. But there appears to be no truth to that story.

In any case, Cicotte did have a chance to win his 30th game and clinch the AL pennant, on September 24, but he faltered in the seventh inning and was pulled before the White Sox rallied to dramatically beat the St. Louis Browns, 6-5. Cicotte pronounced himself ready for the Reds after making a final tune-up start four days later, but questions still lingered about his health up until Game One of the World Series.

Claude “Lefty” Williams had shown flashes of stardom as the White Sox won it all in 1917, but in spite of his 17 victories, his inconsistency caused then-manager Pants Rowland to use him for just a single inning of that year’s World Series against the New York Giants. By 1919 Kid Gleason still wasn’t convinced the slightly-built southpaw with the peculiar side-arm delivery could hold his own as a full-time starter. But the 26-year-old Williams proved he was up to the task and followed Cicotte’s lead to go 23-11 with a 2.64 ERA and five shutouts in a team-high 41 games. Together, they combined for 52 of the White Sox’s 88 wins and almost half of the team’s 1,265⅔ innings pitched in the regular season.

To help take the load off Cicotte and Williams, manager Gleason and team owner Charles Comiskey made trades for other pitchers, called up minor leaguers and aging veterans, and even signed stars from the Chicago sandlots in the hopes that one or two of them might work out for the White Sox as a replacement for Red Faber. 

Their biggest success story was a 25-year-old rookie named Dickey Kerr. The little left-hander, who stood just 5-feet-7, was a 20-game winner three times in the minor leagues before getting his chance in Chicago. In his first season with the White Sox, 1919, he went 13-7 with a 2.88 ERA in 39 games. But where he really shined was in his role as a bullpen ace, where he had a knack for holding opponents at bay as the White Sox’s explosive offense rallied for a victory in the late innings. Kid Gleason called on Kerr 22 times in relief and he went 7-1 with a 1.78 ERA in those appearances.

In the World Series, Kerr’s strong performances gave Chicago fans hope after Cicotte and Williams were trounced by the Reds. His three-hit shutout in Game Three and a 10-inning victory in Game Six helped keep the White Sox’s chances alive. After Kerr’s second win, Gleason was so frustrated by his team’s uncharacteristic performance in the Series that he suggested he might start Kerr in every game the rest of the way. He didn’t follow through on the threat, and the White Sox lost the World Series, but Kerr was a lone bright spot in the franchise’s darkest hour.

Two other young pitchers who went on to greater acclaim but didn’t contribute much for the White Sox in 1919 were Charlie Robertson and Frank Shellenback. Robertson made his major-league debut on May 13 against the St. Louis Browns but was clearly overmatched by big-league hitters; he lasted just two innings before he was relieved by Kerr. The White Sox sent Robertson down to the minors for more seasoning and he wouldn’t return to Chicago for three more years. But in his fourth career start, on April 30, 1922, he threw a perfect game — just the fifth in major-league history — against Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers, a once-in-a-lifetime highlight in an otherwise mediocre career.

Shellenback, who possessed an outstanding spitball, had pitched decently for the White Sox as a 19-year-old rookie in 1918 and was expected to be a steady member of the rotation in 1919. But Shelly struggled to post a 1-3 record with a 5.14 ERA in eight games before he, too, was sent down to the minors in July. Those were his only career appearances in the major leagues; he never made it back because the National Commission banned his best pitch, the spitter, that offseason. Fortunately for him, he was allowed to continue throwing the wet one in the Pacific Coast League and he went on to enjoy a long, illustrious career with the Hollywood Stars, winning more than 300 games as one of the greatest minor-league pitchers ever.

The surprising thing about the White Sox’s lack of pitching depth is that just a few years earlier, they actually had the deepest pitching staff in the major leagues. Chicago had led the AL in team ERA in 1913, 1916, and 1917, and finished runner-up in 1914. But two of their former mound stars, Joe Benz and Reb Russell, each pitched in just a single game in 1919. Benz, known as “Butcher Boy” because he spent his offseasons working in the family shop, had risen to fame in 1914 after pitching a no-hitter against the Cleveland Naps and taking another no-hitter into the ninth inning two starts later against the Washington Senators. He was a steady pitcher with the White Sox for several years afterward, but age and injuries hampered his effectiveness. His final big-league appearance was a two-inning relief stint on May 2, 1919, and he was released two weeks later.

The Mississippi-born Ewell “Reb” Russell had one of baseball’s all-time best rookie seasons in 1913, winning 22 games and tossing eight shutouts. But he later suffered an elbow injury that left him unable to throw his curveball effectively, and he barely made the team out of spring training in 1919. In his only appearance, on June 13, he was yanked after two batters without recording an out. Russell was also given his release, and never pitched another game in the majors. But he resurfaced a few years later as an outfielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates, hitting .368 in 60 games as a platoon player in 1922.

None of them helped Kid Gleason solve his pitching dilemma, however. Cicotte and Williams helped lead the White Sox into first place on Opening Day and rarely looked back, but their manager kept looking for more pitching all season long.

In mid-May the White Sox acquired one of the fastest but wildest pitchers in the big leagues, Grover Lowdermilk, from the St. Louis Browns. On his sixth team in eight seasons — Chicago would be his last stop — Lowdermilk was given numerous chances to harness his talent. But the 6-foot-4 right-hander never overcame his lack of control. While he pitched well for the White Sox overall (5-5, 2.79 ERA in 20 games), Gleason didn’t feel comfortable using him down the stretch in tight games. Lowdermilk made just one start after August 31 and pitched one mop-up inning in Game One of the World Series.

John “Lefty” Sullivan was another talented fireballer with one glaring shortcoming who was given a tryout by the White Sox that summer. Plucked off the Chicago sandlots when Lowdermilk abruptly quit the team in mid-July (he returned two weeks later), Sullivan made a big name for himself as the strikeout king of the city’s semipro leagues. During World War I, while pitching for a military team based at Camp Grant, in Rockford, Illinois, he caught the White Sox’s attention when he outpitched Red Faber in a service game in front of a reported 12,000 fans. Sullivan was invited to spring training in 1919 but didn’t make the team, and then refused a minor-league assignment until the desperate Gleason called him back to make a surprise start against Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators on July 19. There was just one problem: Sullivan couldn’t field his position because of a lifelong heart condition that caused him to feel dizzy whenever he bent over to pick up a ball. Major-league hitters had trouble with Sullivan’s great stuff, but they could exploit his one weakness — and they bunted him right out of the league. He made just four appearances for the White Sox, finishing with an 0-1 career record and three errors in five fielding chances.

As the summer rolled on and the first-place White Sox began to look ahead to the World Series, a handful of other pitchers, with varying degrees of talent and experience, tried to earn a spot in the postseason rotation: Win Noyes, Tom McGuire, Roy Wilkinson, Erskine Mayer, Dave Danforth, Big Bill James, and the superbly named Don Carlos Patrick Ragan. None were successful enough to warrant a start against the Reds.

Before the World Series began, prominent pundits like syndicated columnist Hugh Fullerton gave Cincinnati the edge on pitching strength and warned that the White Sox would be weakened if they had to rely solely on their two aces: “Critics … have been arguing that the Reds have a chance to beat the American Leaguers because of their superior pitching strength. … If Gleason gets away to a good start he will not force Cicotte or Williams to the limit of endurance, but will take a chance with others. But if the Reds get the jump on the Sox, Gleason has little choice but to fall back upon the two men who have won the championship for him.”

Cincinnati had five good starters — Dutch Ruether, Slim Sallee, Ray Fisher, Jimmy Ring, and Hod Eller — to Chicago’s two great ones, but they were plenty good enough to win the NL pennant by nine games over the New York Giants. The Reds’ 96-44 record was also eight games better than the White Sox’s at 88-52, although most observers agreed that the American League was the stronger circuit, having won eight of the previous nine World Series. The White Sox were heavy betting favorites entering the Series, but that all depended on Cicotte and Williams giving their best efforts. As Hugh Fullerton predicted, once they faltered in the first two games, Gleason had no one else but Dickey Kerr to fall back on.

Hall of Fame catcher Ray Schalk maintained for the rest of his life that if the White Sox had a healthy Red Faber for the 1919 World Series, they would have won it all even with eight of their teammates conspiring to hand it to the Reds. Back in 1917, Faber had appeared in four of the six World Series games against the Giants, winning three of them. There’s no telling how he would have fared against the Reds, but we can safely assume that he would have given the White Sox a better chance to win than the fixers Cicotte or Williams.

It’s also worth wondering how the White Sox might have fared if Gleason had been able to call on Joe Benz or Reb Russell or Frank Shellenback, too. The first two were proven winners (and Shelly would go on to win more pro games than anyone on the staff) who might have put a quicker stop to the bleeding after Cicotte was blasted out of the box in Game One and Williams lost his control in Game Two. Or Gleason might have chosen to start one of them in place of Cicotte on two days’ rest in Game Four or Williams in Game Five. (The tight World Series schedule, eight games played in nine days, also did the White Sox no favors.) Instead, the other pitchers Gleason did use — Roy Wilkinson, Grover Lowdermilk, Erskine Mayer, and Bill James — generally only made things worse when they took the mound. None of them were intentionally throwing games; the White Sox’s pitching just wasn’t all that strong outside of Cicotte and Williams.

Perhaps, then, we ought to give the Reds’ pitching staff a little more credit for winning the World Series. The White Sox batted only .224 in the World Series, and it wasn’t just the fixers who struggled. Leadoff man Nemo Leibold batted .056 (1-for-18) against Cincinnati pitching and future Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, who was considered one of the great “money” players in baseball by his contemporaries, hit .226 with just one RBI. Reds manager Pat Moran rotated his starting pitchers wisely, as he had been doing all season, and they responded well.

Kid Gleason didn’t have nearly as many good options, and he knew it. He spent all season trying to overcome his team’s one big weakness, and in the end it wasn’t enough. The White Sox just didn’t have enough pitching to beat the Reds.

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015).

Cincinnati Reds pitchers held the White Sox to a .224 batting average during the 1919 World Series. Pictured from left: Hod Eller, Jimmy Ring, Dutch Ruether, Slim Sallee. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)

Sources

All statistics were found using Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org. Biographical information was found in the players’ SABR biographies and by accessing newspaper archives at ProQuest and Newspapers.com. In addition, the following articles were used as sources:

Evans, Billy. “Hard to Predict Winner of Series,” New York Times, September 30, 1919.

Fullerton, Hugh. “Cincinnati Shows Superiority With Leading Twirlers,” Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1919.

Phelon, W.A. “Who Will Win the Big League Pennants?” Baseball Magazine, May 1919.

But few observers shared that opinion about the White Sox entering the 1919 season. Coming off a disastrous sixth-place finish in a year shortened by World War I, and with a surprising managerial change in the offseason, South Side fans weren’t sure what to expect when their team took the field on Opening Day. You could say the same about baseball itself: Now that the Great War was finally over, no one quite knew what to expect.

Baseball in 1919 was at a crossroads — between the pitching-dominated Deadball Era that was about to end and the glamorous, home-run-happy era that was to epitomize the Roaring Twenties. Babe Ruth was already a star with the Boston Red Sox, but he was known as the best left-handed pitcher in the American League and not for his hitting exploits yet to come. Earlier in the decade, the major leagues had survived the threat of the upstart Federal League, which had folded due to financial troubles after challenging the American League and National League for supremacy. Nearly every major-league team was playing its games in new concrete-and-steel stadiums built within the last decade. Few ballparks were more celebrated than Charles Comiskey’s “baseball palace of the world” at the corner of 35th Street and Shields Avenue in Chicago. The White Sox would call Comiskey Park home for 80 years.

Baseball then was still a rough-and-tumble game, played by “shysters, con men, drunks, and outright thieves … [and] midwestern farm boys who came out of cow pasture Sunday leagues,” as author Bill James put it in his Historical Baseball Abstract. Gambling was rampant within baseball, and the two pastimes enjoyed an intimate, mutually beneficial relationship. Thousands of fans participated in popular daily or weekly “baseball pools,” similar to modern fantasy football leagues and basketball tournament brackets. Ballplayers also mixed freely with underworld figures at saloons, casinos, and pool halls in every city, offering insider tips and sometimes even placing bets on their own games. At some ballparks, notably Fenway Park and Braves Field in Boston, bettors congregated in certain sections of the grandstands to conveniently make wagers on the game taking place on the field. Baseball’s powers-that-be looked the other way because profits were strong and attendance was high.

But America’s involvement in World War I had disrupted the entire sport in 1918. Attendance at Comiskey Park dropped by more than 70 percent from the White Sox’ championship season of a year before. In July, the US government issued a mandatory “work or fight” order that affected most major-league players, who were forced to decide between enlisting in the military or taking a job deemed essential to the war effort. With their teams’ rosters depleted, baseball owners abruptly ended the season in early September and a lackluster World Series was played between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs. Like many fall classics played during the Deadball Era, the 1918 World Series was troubled by rumors of game-fixing, although any evidence to prove that the Series had been tampered with was thin. The White Sox ended the disappointing season on an eight-game losing streak, finishing with a 57-67 record, 17 games behind the champion Red Sox.

Baseball owners were so rattled by the low attendance and lack of enthusiasm for baseball in 1918 that they decided to shorten the 1919 season to 140 games from the normal 154. Almost every team had lost money because of the war; the Yankees and White Sox each claimed a net loss of more than $45,000 in 1918 and, in a rare gesture, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey chose to cut his own salary to $5,000, lower than even those of a handful of his own players. In another attempt to cut costs, National League owners in January 1919 approved an $11,000-per-month player salary cap, which worked out to a team payroll of less than $58,000 in a 140-game season, according to baseball historian Bob Hoie. American League clubs refused to go along with the plan, and even some NL clubs completely ignored it, so the plan was quickly forgotten. The White Sox team payroll on Opening Day 1919 turned out to be $88,461, just under those of the Yankees and the defending champion Red Sox as the highest among all major-league clubs; the Cincinnati Reds were at $76,870, which would have ranked them only sixth highest in the American League.

The owners’ decision to shorten the schedule also had the effect of cutting most players’ salaries, since players were paid only for the time they were in season, from Opening Day to the final scheduled game. For instance, Joe Jackson’s $1,000-per-month contract, which normally earned him $6,000 from the White Sox, came out to only $5,250 in 1919. (Comiskey made it up to him, according to Hoie’s research, with a $750 bonus if he were a “member of the Chicago club in good standing” after the season, thereby bringing his compensation back to the usual $6,000.) Chick Gandil, on the other hand, was paid only $3,500 on his $666.66-per-month contract instead of his usual $4,000 because of the shortened season. He received no bonus, at least not from Comiskey.

The “work or fight” order was the major story in baseball in 1918. With the war looming over their heads all summer, ballplayers who chose to enlist in the military — like future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson — were celebrated for their service to the country. But any able-bodied professional athlete who chose to take a war-essential job rather than enlist, even if his draft status allowed him to do so when he had a family to support, came under heavy criticism from the press and the public.

No one in baseball found himself under more scrutiny in 1918 than the White Sox’ star left fielder, Joe Jackson. Just after the season began, he learned that his draft board in Greenville, South Carolina, had changed his status to 1-A. He had been initially spared from military service because he was married. Instead of waiting for the Army to call his number, Jackson controversially quit the team in May and took a job at a Delaware shipyard, where he and White Sox teammate Lefty Williams (who had left the Sox shortly after Jackson) led the company’s baseball team to an industrial-league championship.

Just one day after Jackson left the White Sox, Army Gen. Enoch Crowder began an investigation into the disproportionate number of professional athletes who had suddenly taken “bomb-proof” jobs in the shipyards. Jackson was by no means the only player with a cushy job where his most strenuous duties involved swinging a baseball bat, but he was singled out as a symbol of the “unpatriotic” draft-dodgers who were avoiding combat in Europe. In contrast, Jackson’s teammate Eddie Collins joined the Marine Corps in August 1918, three months before the war ended, and he was widely praised for his service — even though he spent most of his time at a military base in Pennsylvania, a few long fly balls away from where Jackson and Williams were stationed.

Comiskey publicly vowed never to let Jackson or the other “paint and putty league” ballplayers — Williams, outfielder Happy Felsch, and backup catcher Byrd Lynn — play for the White Sox again. Rumors circulated during the offseason that Comiskey intended to trade away one or both of his top outfielders, Jackson and Felsch. At the American League’s annual meeting in December, one month after the armistice was signed to end World War I, Comiskey supported a resolution to blacklist any shipyard players from rejoining the majors. But his stance softened when he realized he would have to rebuild his championship team all over again, and with a nudge from new manager Kid Gleason (who reportedly agreed to take the job only if Comiskey re-signed all of his old players), he soon sent contract offers to Jackson and the others. Still, no one knew how Shoeless Joe would be treated by the fans once the 1919 season began.

The division between enlisted soldiers and shipyard workers wasn’t the only fault line in the White Sox clubhouse. Even while the White Sox were winning the World Series in 1917, they were a team riddled with dissension.

One clique was led by the second baseman Eddie Collins, a college-educated aristocrat from New York whose nickname “Cocky” was well earned. The two rough-and-tumble Californians who flanked him in the infield, first baseman Chick Gandil and shortstop Swede Risberg, hated Collins so much that they reportedly refused to throw the ball his way during practice. Another group on the team consisted of quiet Southerners like Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams, who generally kept to themselves. Collins later said, “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 (the White Sox), and yet it was the greatest collection of players ever assembled, I would say.”

All of the White Sox starters from their 1917 World Series team had returned to the fold, including pitchers Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, and Red Faber, plus future Hall of Famers Eddie Collins at second base and Ray Schalk behind the plate. Joe Jackson and Happy Felsch anchored the outfield and powered the middle of Chicago’s potent lineup, while Buck Weaver, Swede Risberg, and Chick Gandil rounded out the AL’s best infield.

The faces on the field were familiar, but the manager leading them was new — sort of. On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1918, owner Charles Comiskey made a surprise announcement that he had dismissed Pants Rowland as manager after four seasons. Rowland had managed the White Sox since 1915 and had steadily improved their place in the standings each year, from third place to second place to a World Series championship. He could hardly be blamed for the sixth-place effort during the tumultuous 1918 campaign. But Comiskey — who had never retained a White Sox manager for longer than four seasons — sensed his veteran team needed a new man in charge.

Rowland’s replacement was the White Sox’ longtime coach, William “Kid” Gleason, who had spent more than three decades in baseball but had never managed in the major leagues. The 52-year-old Gleason had been a star pitcher and second baseman around the turn of the twentieth century. As a White Sox assistant coach since 1912 under Rowland and previous manager Nixey Callahan, Gleason had played a key role in developing the team’s young infielders like Weaver, Risberg, and Fred McMullin. The new boss was well liked and respected throughout the game.

But like Joe Jackson, Gleason had also quit the White Sox in 1918, sitting out the entire season in what was widely believed to be a financial dispute with Comiskey. On the day Gleason was hired as manager, Comiskey responded to newspaper reports that he had failed to pay Gleason a promised bonus after the White Sox won the 1917 World Series: “Nothing was ever at any time mentioned as to a bonus, and he received everything due him from the White Sox.” (The same accusation against Comiskey was later repeated by some of the banished Black Sox players when they filed lawsuits seeking back pay owed to them.) There is no record of how Comiskey and Gleason finally settled the grievance.

In any case, Comiskey put aside his personal problems with Gleason and hired a manager he felt could get the most out of his veteran ballclub. James Crusinberry of the Chicago Tribune praised the move, writing on January 1, “No one was ever shrewder in a game of ball. … There isn’t a ballplayer in the game today or any of those who played with the Kid in the old days who will not declare him as fair and square a man on and off the ball field as ever lived.”

As the White Sox headed to spring training in Mineral Wells, Texas, no one was quite sure how Gleason’s team would fare in the pennant race. The White Sox’ lack of pitching depth behind Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams was cited as a major concern by Chicago Tribune reporter Irving Sanborn, who predicted on April 20, “Unless he has a lot of luck developing new pitchers … (Gleason) is going to have a hard time keeping his team in the first division of the American League.” Veteran Red Faber, who had won three games in the 1917 World Series, was hampered by arm and ankle injuries, and he had come down with the flu virus and could not shake it. A global influenza epidemic had killed more than 600,000 Americans in the winter of 1918-19 alone. Faber’s condition was noticeably weak during spring training and it took him all year to fully recover.

The White Sox had plenty of unproven candidates to take Faber’s place in the pitching rotation. But only Dickey Kerr, a 25-year-old left-hander from Missouri, would emerge from the pack of rookies to contribute to Chicago’s success in 1919. Kid Gleason had to rely heavily on his stars Cicotte and Williams to carry the load, and they were up to the challenge, recording 52 of the team’s 88 wins during the regular season. Even Gleason was a bit surprised at how dependable his top two pitchers turned out to be.

The batting lineup didn’t have much depth, either — only Fred McMullin and Shano Collins received significant playing time among the reserves — and if not for the normal aches and pains and slumps over the course of a long season, Gleason would have been happy penciling in the same eight starters every day in this order:

• Nemo Leibold, RF
• Eddie Collins, 2B
• Buck Weaver, 3B
• Joe Jackson, LF
• Happy Felsch, CF
• Chick Gandil, 1B
• Swede Risberg, SS
• Ray Schalk, C

For a franchise long saddled with the nickname “Hitless Wonders,” these White Sox had a powerful offensive attack. They would go on to lead the American League in hits, runs scored, and stolen bases. Jackson batted .351, fourth highest in the AL, and finished among the league leaders in slugging, on-base percentage, RBIs, and total bases.

As the White Sox took the field for Opening Day on April 23, 1919, against the St. Louis Browns at Sportsman’s Park, it quickly became apparent to the rest of the American League that all the preseason fears about their chances were premature. Chicago’s 13-4 win behind Lefty Williams’s complete-game effort and Joe Jackson’s three hits showed that the Sox were back in championship form. Manager Kid Gleason never stopped worrying about his over-reliance on Williams and Eddie Cicotte and continued to look for pitching help wherever he could find it, but for now, the season’s outlook appeared extremely bright.

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015).

Sources

“Bombproof Jobs of Ball Players Due For Probing,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1918.

“Commy Tells His Side of the Felsch Story,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1919.

Crusinberry, Jim. “Kid Gleason Appointed Manager of the White Sox,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1919.

Deveney, Sean. The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009).

Hoie, Bob. “1919 Baseball Salaries and the Mythically Underpaid Chicago White Sox.” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., Spring 2012).

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

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001).

Leeke, Jim. “The Delaware River Shipbuilding League, 1918,” The National Pastime: From Swampoodle to South Philly (Phoenix, Arizona: Society for American Baseball Research, 2013).

Sanborn, Irving. “Baseball Races Start on Wednesday,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1919.

It was an empty promise, because Comiskey already had all the evidence he needed. According to reporter Hugh Fullerton, a friend and ally of the White Sox owner, Comiskey knew all about the fix before Game One — and he wasn’t alone, for the World Series fix was the worst-kept secret in baseball.

Comiskey, American League President Ban Johnson, and other baseball officials spent the offseason of 1919-20 investigating the ugly rumors that had plagued the fall classic, but ultimately they chose to ignore the many red flags they discovered. The revelation of the World Series fix to the public at large came about only after nearly another full season had been played, and even then it may have never come to light if not for a long-standing feud between Comiskey and Johnson, who pushed Chicago civic leaders to empanel a grand jury and look into the World Series rumors. In addition to airing baseball’s dirty laundry with the Black Sox Scandal, their feud led to the installation of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as commissioner and changed the power structure of baseball forever.

The World Series fix came as no surprise to anyone knowledgeable about baseball or its intimate relationship with gambling. Historians Harold and Dorothy Seymour later wrote, “When the scandal of 1919 became public knowledge, the men who controlled Organized Baseball acted as though it were a freakish exception, a sort of unholy mutation. … The evidence is abundantly clear that the groundwork for the crooked 1919 World Series, like most striking events in history, was long prepared.”

It took some time, however, for the dust to settle after the World Series ended. On October 10, the same day that Comiskey first defended his players publicly, Fullerton’s syndicated newspaper column asserted that seven unnamed members of the White Sox would not be back with the club in 1920. Years later, Fullerton claimed that he got their names — which turned out to be the seven accused Black Sox, minus Buck Weaver, who by most accounts had played his best and had not received a dime from gamblers — from Comiskey himself. In a vivid (possibly apocryphal) description of their meeting written in 1935, Fullerton tells of “a broken and bitter” Comiskey banging a table with his fist and crying, “Keep after them, Hughie; they were crooked. Some day you and I will prove it.”

Unbeknownst to Fullerton, Comiskey was already hard at work behind the scenes gathering more information about the fix. Three days after the World Series ended, on October 12, Comiskey sent White Sox manager Kid Gleason to St. Louis to meet with theater owner Harry Redmon, who claimed to have lost more than $5,000 betting on the World Series. Redmon, apparently seeking some of Comiskey’s reward money to recoup his gambling losses, confirmed to Gleason the names of the eight ballplayers involved in the fix, including Weaver, who had attended multiple pre-Series meetings with the rest of the players.

Redmon had firsthand knowledge: After the White Sox had surprisingly won Game Three and it appeared as if the fix had been called off, Redmon was connected with a group of Midwestern gamblers who launched an attempt to raise more money to pay off the players and revive the fix. Redmon and fellow St. Louis gambler Joe Pesch repeated the fix details to Comiskey in a second meeting in late December at the White Sox offices. Comiskey again ignored his pleas for the reward.

Near the end of October, White Sox team counsel Alfred Austrian met with the head of a private investigation firm, John R. Hunter of Hunter’s Secret Service, and hired him to find out as much as possible about the suspected players: Eddie Cicotte, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams.

For the next three months, Hunter and his detectives trailed the White Sox players around the country, interviewing their families and checking their bank accounts. Hunter’s first stop was California, where he met with McMullin, Gandil, Risberg, and Weaver, posing at one point as a real-estate salesman or as a reporter in an attempt to talk about the World Series with them. Hunter found nothing especially incriminating, but he filed regular reports back to Austrian and Comiskey throughout the offseason.

Another Hunter operative traveled to Milwaukee in November to check up on Happy Felsch, who was busy selling Christmas trees when he wasn’t fishing and hunting. The detectives also befriended two female acquaintances of Swede Risberg’s in Chicago to whom he had allegedly given money, but came back with no fruitful information. They were instructed, however, not to visit Eddie Cicotte at home in Detroit or Joe Jackson in Savannah, Georgia — the two players who would later crack open the case by testifying before a grand jury to their involvement.

The detectives’ reports themselves were filed away by Comiskey and not publicly revealed until 2007, when the Chicago History Museum acquired them as part of a large collection of Black Sox-related legal documents. Historian Gene Carney, in his seminal book Burying the Black Sox, argued that “the investigating Comiskey did — through his employees, his reporter friends like Fullerton, and his paid detectives — was carried on to ensure that any hard evidence found would remain hidden from public view.”

But too many people knew about the fix for it to remain hidden for long. In mid-November, reporter Frank O. Klein of a Canadian-based gambling publication called Collyer’s Eye became the first to publicly name the suspected White Sox fixers. (Although here too, Buck Weaver was omitted from the list of the accused.) American League President Ban Johnson, whose feud with Comiskey caused him to dismiss any opportunities to learn more about the fix during the World Series and perhaps even put a stop to it then, also began his own private investigation. His efforts uncovered additional evidence of the plot and, more important, key witnesses — namely, the gamblers Sleepy Bill Burns and Billy Maharg — who would later be used against the White Sox players in their criminal trial.

Another group that knew about, or at least strongly suspected, the World Series fix started talking during the offseason, too: teammates of the fixers who later became known as the “clean Sox.” Future Hall of Fame catcher Ray Schalk got into hot water when he bluntly told Collyer’s Eye on December 13, 1919, that seven White Sox players would not return to the team in 1920. Unlike Hugh Fullerton months earlier, Schalk even named them. (As usual, Buck Weaver was not among them.)

Although Fullerton continued to write about the rumors, railing against the baseball establishment for not taking the fix seriously, no other whistle-blowers besides Collyer’s Eye took up the cause that offseason. Fullerton’s accusations were routinely dismissed and even mocked in The Sporting News, Baseball Magazine, and other publications considered friendly to Organized Baseball. “There is not a breath of suspicion attached to any player, nor a hint that any effort in any manner was made to influence a player’s performance,” editor J.G. Taylor Spink wrote in the October 9, 1919, issue of The Sporting News.

As the calendar flipped over to the new year, talk of the World Series died down and Charles Comiskey likely breathed a sigh of relief. His championship team would remain mostly intact for the 1920 season. He began sending out new contracts to his players — even some of the suspected fixers — and the terms tended to be more generous than usual. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte agreed to a doubling of his base salary, from $5,000 to $10,000 (the same amount he later admitted receiving from gamblers to fix the World Series). Joe Jackson, who had been making $6,000 since 1914, signed a three-year deal for $8,000 per season. On average, according to Black Sox researcher Bob Hoie, White Sox players “received raises of about 32 percent, with no significant difference between the suspected and the clean Sox.” Although the White Sox already had one of the top payrolls in baseball, everyone in baseball was making more money.

Part of the reason for Comiskey’s extra generosity was that baseball had enjoyed a tremendous resurgence in popularity after World War I, leading to record profits for owners. This would continue in the 1920s as baseball entered a new era defined by high-scoring offenses and home-run records by the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Rogers Hornsby.

Attendance had soared across the major leagues in 1919, with three teams (the Reds, Tigers, and Yankees) setting single-season records at their home ballparks. In 1920 seven more teams would set attendance records, including the White Sox who, despite the lingering rumors of corruption, drew more than 833,000 fans to Comiskey Park. The Yankees, thanks in large part to Ruth’s record-setting 54 homers, became the first major-league team to surpass 1 million fans in a single season.

The offensive explosion that contributed greatly to baseball’s expanded popularity was triggered by several new rules instituted in February 1920, including an attempt at banning intentional walks and the prohibition of the spitball and other “freak deliveries” like the emery ball and Eddie Cicotte’s signature “shine ball.” Only a handful of spitballers were allowed to continue throwing the wet one in the major leagues; teams were forced to designate two players from their active rosters who could use the pitch. The White Sox selected Cicotte and future Hall of Famer Red Faber, who continued to throw the spitter until he retired in 1933; the last legal spitball was thrown a year later, in 1934, by Burleigh Grimes, who had also been grandfathered in.

Many modern fans have been led to believe that these changes were put in place as a result of the Black Sox Scandal, as a concerted effort to excite fans and clean up the game from the corruption and pitching-dominant style of play that characterized the Deadball Era (commonly defined as 1901 through 1919). But the spitball ban was enacted seven months before Cicotte, Jackson, and Lefty Williams testified to a Chicago grand jury, confirming their involvement with the World Series fix. And by Opening Day 1920, Babe Ruth was already one of baseball’s biggest stars, having broken the single-season home-run record with 29 homers for the Boston Red Sox the year before. His sale to the Yankees for the unprecedented price of $125,000 was the biggest story of that offseason, not the Black Sox Scandal.

One big change also being discussed in 1919-20 was an overhaul of baseball’s governing body, the three-man National Commission, and this would have more far-reaching consequences. The Commission — consisting then of AL President Ban Johnson, NL President John Heydler, and chairman August “Garry” Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds — was considered by just about everyone in baseball to be ineffective, with Johnson’s authoritarian ways alienating owners and players alike. Herrmann’s term was also up and the NL owners refused to reappoint him. In February 1920 he resigned from the National Commission and his absence threw Organized Baseball into even more turmoil.

Baseball’s inability to deal with its gambling problems was in no small measure due to the weakness of the National Commission, which had ignored most signs of game-fixing, betting on games by players or fans, and bribe offers. These transgressions generated a lot of smoke during the Deadball Era, and sometimes even fire. The poster child for this behavior was Hal Chase, a supremely talented but morally challenged first baseman who bounced from team to team fixing games for more than a decade. Even when he was caught red-handed by his manager, Christy Mathewson — the former New York Giants superstar whose credibility was as high as that of anyone else in the game — nothing had been done to stop Chase. Mathewson’s suspension of his player in 1918 was overturned by the National Commission and Chase was allowed to move on to the New York Giants, Matty’s old team. Chase promptly organized a new game-fixing ring with the Giants. When Mathewson learned about the World Series fix later, he reportedly told Hugh Fullerton, “Damn them, they [baseball officials] deserve it. I caught two crooks [Chase and Lee Magee] and they whitewashed them.” It was an out-of-character outburst for Matty, but his sentiments reflected baseball’s widespread frustration with the National Commission.

By the time the Black Sox affair finally came to light in the fall of 1920, the (now two-man) National Commission was in its final days. In the midst of the biggest scandal in baseball history, three American League owners who had been fighting with Ban Johnson for years were now in full-scale revolt against their league president. This group of “Insurrectos,” as they came to be called, included the White Sox’ Charles Comiskey, the Red Sox’ Harry Frazee, and Yankees co-owner Jacob Ruppert. The other five AL owners remained loyal to Johnson. This rift threatened to tear baseball apart and there was even talk of forming a new 12-team league with the eight NL teams, the three AL “Insurrectos,” and whichever owner who was loyal to Johnson broke ranks first.

In November 1920 the baseball owners decided to break up the National Commission once and for all by hiring a new single authority figure, federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who would rule the game with an iron fist for the next 24 years. Landis single-handedly solved the game’s gambling problem, too, with his decision in August 1921 to ban the eight White Sox World Series fixers for life. Not only did he punish acknowledged game-fixers and bribe-takers like Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson, but he also banished those with lesser degrees of guilt like Buck Weaver, who had only been accused of sitting in on meetings with gamblers. While the fairness of Landis’s decision has been debated for nearly a century afterward, there can be no doubting its effectiveness. As Landis biographer David Pietrusza has written, banning the Eight Men Out “had a great chilling effect on dishonest play — and talk of dishonest play. … Once prospectively crooked players knew that honest players would no longer shield them, the scandals stopped.” The commissioner’s decision cleaned up the game for good, which the National Commission had never been able to do.

The scandal also put an end to Charles Comiskey’s hopes for another championship. The White Sox were just a half-game behind the first-place Cleveland Indians on September 28, 1920 — the day the Black Sox players were suspended after Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams testified before the grand jury. With a depleted lineup for the season-ending series against the St. Louis Browns, the White Sox finished two games back with a 96-58 record.

From 1916 to 1920, Chicago had won two AL pennants and barely missed two more in five seasons. And with just three of the White Sox’ starting position players over the age of 30 in 1920 — not to mention four 20-game winners on the pitching staff in Cicotte, Williams, Red Faber, and Dickey Kerr, a first in baseball history — they were poised to contend for many years to come. Chicago might have provided strong competition for the New York Yankees’ emerging dynasty in the early 1920s. Even after the scandal broke up his team, Comiskey continued paying top dollar for new talent, bringing in the likes of infielders Luke Appling and Willie Kamm, outfielders Johnny Mostil and Bibb Falk, and pitcher Ted Lyons. Appling and Lyons were later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but they played almost their entire careers with the White Sox on second-division teams.

The scandal ended any chance of the White Sox establishing their own dynasty, and four decades passed before fans saw another World Series game on the South Side. That took place in 1959 — one year after the Comiskey family heirs sold the team to an ownership group led by Bill Veeck. The team set another attendance record that year, drawing 1.4 million fans to Comiskey Park, once known as the “Baseball Palace of the World.” The venerable ballpark was replaced in 1991 by a $167 million facility also named Comiskey Park at 35th Street and Shields Avenue. In 2005 that stadium, since renamed U.S. Cellular Field, finally celebrated the franchise’s first World Series championship since the Black Sox Scandal.

JACOB POMRENKE is SABR’s Director of Editorial Content, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee, and editor of “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (2015).

Sources

Carney, Gene. Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006).

Carney, Gene. “Comiskey’s Detectives,” Baseball Research Journal, Volume 38, Issue 2 (Cleveland, Ohio: Society for American Baseball Research, Fall 2009).

Felber, Bill. Under Pallor, Under Shadow: The 1920 American League Pennant Race That Rattled and Rebuilt Baseball (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

Fullerton, Hugh. “Fullerton Says Series Should Be Called Off,” Atlanta Constitution, October 10, 1919.

Fullerton, Hugh. “I Recall.” The Sporting News, October 17, 1935.

Klein, Frank O. “Catcher Ray Schalk in Huge White Sox Exposé.” Collyer’s Eye, December 13, 1919.

Klein, Frank O. “Discover ‘Pay Off’ Joint in White Sox Scandal?” Collyer’s Eye, November 15, 1919.

Pietrusza, David. Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1998).

Seymour, Harold, and Dorothy Z. Seymour. Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

Spink, J.G. Taylor. “Concerning Bets and Bettors.” The Sporting News, October 9, 1919.

“When Baseball Gets Before The Grand Jury.” The Sporting News, October 7, 1920.

Over the decades, major-league baseball has produced a host of memorable teams, but only one infamous one — the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Almost a century after the fact, the exact details of the affair known in sports lore as the Black Sox Scandal remain murky and subject to debate. But one central and indisputable truth endures: Talented members of that White Sox club conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the 1919 World Series.

Another certainty attends the punishment imposed in the matter. The permanent banishment from the game of those players implicated in the conspiracy, while perhaps an excessive sanction in certain cases, achieved an overarching objective. Game-fixing virtually disappeared from the major-league landscape after that penalty was imposed on the Black Sox.

Something else is equally indisputable. The finality of the expulsion edict rendered by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis has not quelled the controversy surrounding the corruption of the 1919 Series. Nor has public fascination abated. To the contrary, interest in the scandal has only grown over the years, in time even spawning a publishing subgenre known as Black Sox literature. No essay-length narrative can hope to capture the entirety of events explored in the present Black Sox canon, or to address all the beliefs of individual Black Sox aficionados. The following, therefore, is no more than one man’s rendition of the scandal.

*****

The plot to transform the 1919 World Series into a gambling insiders’ windfall did not occur in a vacuum. The long-standing, often toxic relationship between baseball and gambling dates from the sport’s infancy, with game-fixing having been exposed as early as 1865. Postseason championship play was not immune to such corruption. The first modern World Series of 1903 was jeopardized by gambler attempts to bribe Boston Americans catcher Lou Criger into throwing games. Never-substantiated rumors about the integrity of play dogged a number of ensuing fall classics.

The architects of the Black Sox Scandal have never been conclusively identified. Many subscribe to the notion that the plot was originally concocted by White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil and Boston bookmaker Joseph “Sport” Sullivan. Surviving grand-jury testimony portrays Gandil and White Sox pitching staff ace Eddie Cicotte as the primary instigators of the fix. In any event, the fix plot soon embraced many other actors, both in uniform and out. Indeed, dissection of the scandal has long been complicated by its scope, for there was not a lone plot to rig the Series, but actually two or more, each with its own peculiar cast of characters.

Since it was first deployed as a trial stratagem by Black Sox defense lawyers in June 1921, motivation for the Series fix has been ascribed to the miserliness of Chicago club owner Charles A. Comiskey. The assertion is specious. Comiskey paid his charges the going rate and then some. In fact, salary data recently made available establish that the 1919 Chicago White Sox had the second highest player payroll in the major leagues, with stalwarts like second baseman Eddie Collins, catcher Ray Schalk, third baseman Buck Weaver, and pitcher Cicotte being at or near the top of the pay scale for their positions.

But the White Sox clubhouse was an unhealthy place, with the team long riven by faction. One clique was headed by team captain Eddie Collins, Ivy League-educated and self-assured to the point of arrogance. Aligned with Cocky Collins were Schalk, spitballer Red Faber, and outfielders Shano Collins and Nemo Leibold. The other, a more hardscrabble group united in envy, if not outright hatred, of the socially superior Collins, was headed by tough guy Gandil and the more amiable Cicotte. Also in their corner were Weaver, shortstop/fix enforcer Swede Risberg, outfielder Happy Felsch, and utilityman Fred McMullin.

According to the grand-jury testimony of Eddie Cicotte, his faction first began to discuss the feasibility of throwing the upcoming World Series during a train trip late in the regular season. Even before the White Sox clinched the 1919 pennant, Cicotte started to feel out Bill Burns, a former American League pitcher turned gambler, about financing a Series fix. Again according to Cicotte, the Sox were envious of the $10,000 payoffs rumored to have been paid certain members of the Chicago Cubs for dumping the 1918 Series against the Boston Red Sox. The lure of a similar score was enhanced by the low prospect of discovery or punishment.

Although they surfaced periodically, reports of player malfeasance were not taken seriously, routinely dismissed by the game’s establishment and denigrated in the sporting press. And the imposition of sanctions arising from gambling-related activity seemed to have been all but abandoned. Even charges of player corruption lodged by as revered a figure as Christy Mathewson and corroborated by affidavit were deemed insufficient grounds for disciplinary action, as attested by the National League’s recent exoneration of long-suspected game-fixer Hal Chase. By the fall of 1919, therefore, the fix of the World Series could reasonably be viewed from a player standpoint as a low risk/high reward proposition.

In mid-September the Gandil-Cicotte crew committed to the Series fix during a meeting at the Ansonia Hotel in New York. Likelihood of the scheme’s success was bolstered by the recruitment of the White Sox’ No. 2 starter, Lefty Williams, and the club’s batting star, outfielder Joe Jackson. In follow-up conversation with Burns, the parties agreed that the World Series would be lost to the National League champion Cincinnati Reds in exchange for a $100,000 payoff.

Financing a payoff of that magnitude was beyond Burns’s means, and efforts to secure backing from gambling elements in Philadelphia came up empty. Thereafter, Burns and sidekick Billy Maharg approached a potential fix underwriter of vast resource, New York City underworld financier Arnold Rothstein, known as the “Big Bankroll.” In all probability, word of the Series plot had reached Rothstein well before Burns and Maharg made their play. According to all concerned (Burns, Maharg, and Rothstein), Rothstein flatly turned down the proposal that he finance the Series fix. And from there, the plot to corrupt the 1919 World Series thickened.

The prospect of fix financing was revived by Hal Chase who, by means unknown, had also gotten wind of the scheme. Chase put Burns in touch with one of sportdom’s shadiest characters, former world featherweight boxing champ Abe Attell. A part-time Rothstein bodyguard and a full-time hustler, the Little Champ was constantly on the lookout for a score. Accompanied by an associate named “Bennett” (later identified as Des Moines gambler David Zelcer), Attell met with Burns and informed him that Rothstein had reconsidered the fix proposition and was now willing to finance it. The credulous Burns thereupon hastened to Cincinnati to rendezvous with the players on the eve of Game One.

In the meantime, the campaign to fix the Series had opened a second front. Shortly before the White Sox were scheduled to leave for Cincinnati, Gandil, Cicotte, Weaver, and other fix enlistees met privately at the Warner Hotel in Chicago. A mistrustful Cicotte demanded that his $10,000 fix share be paid in full before the team departed for Cincinnati. He then left the gathering to socialize elsewhere. The others remained to hear two men identified as “Sullivan” and “Brown” from New York. A confused Lefty Williams later testified that he was unsure if these men were the gamblers financing the fix or their representatives.

The first Warner Hotel fixer has always been identified as Gandil’s Boston pal, Sport Sullivan, but the true identity of “Brown” would remain a mystery to fix investigators. Decades later, first Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher and thereafter Abe Attell asserted that “Brown” was actually Nat Evans, a capable Rothstein subordinate and Rothstein’s junior partner in several gambling casino ventures. Whoever “Brown” was, $10,000 in cash had been placed under the bed pillow in Cicotte’s hotel room before the evening was over. The Series fix was now on, in earnest.

The Warner Hotel conclave was unknown to Burns, then trying to finalize his own fix arrangement with the players. He, Attell, and Bennett/Zelcer met with all the corrupted players, save Joe Jackson, at the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati sometime prior to the Series opener. After considerable wrangling, it was agreed that the players would be paid off in $20,000 installments following each White Sox loss in the best-five-of-nine Series.

Later that evening, Burns encountered an old acquaintance, Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. Like most experts, Fullerton had confidently predicted a White Sox triumph. But something in the tone of Burns’s assurance that the Reds were a “sure thing” unsettled Fullerton. Burns made it sound as though the Series had already been decided. Almost simultaneously, betting odds on the Series shifted dramatically, with a last-minute surge of money transforming the once-underdog Reds into a slight Series favorite. To Fullerton and other baseball insiders, something ominous seemed to be afoot.

*****

To those unaware of these developments, the Game One matchup typified the inequity between the two sides. On the mound for the White Sox was 29-game-winner Eddie Cicotte, a veteran member of Chicago’s 1917 World Series champions and one of the game’s finest pitchers. Starting for Cincinnati was left-hander Dutch Ruether, who, prior to his 1919 season’s 19-win breakout, had won exactly three major-league games.

Aside from control master Cicotte plunking Reds leadoff batter Morrie Rath with his second pitch, the match proceeded unremarkably in the early going. Then Cicotte suddenly fell apart in the fourth. By the time stunned Chicago manager Kid Gleason had taken him out, the White Sox were behind 6-1. The final score was a lopsided Cincinnati 9, Chicago 1. Following their delivery of the promised loss, the players were stiffed, fix paymaster Attell reneging on the $20,000 payment due.

The White Sox fulfilled their side of the fix agreement in Game Two, in which Lefty Williams’s sudden bout of wildness in the fourth inning spelled the difference in a 4-2 Cincinnati victory. With the corrupted players now owed $40,000, Burns was hard-pressed to get even a fraction of that from Attell. Accusations of a double-cross greeted Burns’s delivery of only $10,000 to the players after the Game Two defeat. Still, he and Maharg accepted Gandil’s assurance that the Sox would lose Game Three. The two fix middlemen were then wiped out, losing their entire wagering stake when the White Sox posted a 3-0 victory behind the pitching of Dickey Kerr.

Whether the Series fix continued after Game Two is a matter of dispute. Joe Jackson would later inform the press that the Black Sox had tried to throw Game Three, only to be thwarted by Kerr’s superb pitching performance. Those maintaining that the White Sox were now playing to win often cite the decisive two-RBI single of erstwhile fix ringleader Chick Gandil.

With the Series now standing two games to one in Cincinnati’s favor, Cicotte retook the mound for Game Four, the most controversial of the Series. Locked in a pitching duel with Reds fireballer Jimmy Ring, Cicotte exhibited the pitching artistry that had been expected from him at the outset. His fielding, however, was another matter, with the game turning on two egregious defensive misplays by Cicotte in the Cincinnati fifth. Those miscues provided the margin in a 2-0 Cincinnati victory.

Cicotte later maintained that he had tried his utmost to win Game Four, but whether true or not, Eddie had received little offensive help from his teammates. The White Sox, both Clean and Black variety, were mired in a horrendous batting slump that would see the American League’s most potent lineup go an astonishing 26 consecutive innings without scoring. Chicago bats were silent again in Game Five, managing but three hits in a 5-0 setback that pushed the Sox to the brink of Series elimination.

Meanwhile, uncertainty reigned in gambling quarters. After the unscripted White Sox victory in Game Three, Burns, reportedly acting at the behest of Abe Attell, approached Gandil about resuming the fix. Gandil spurned him. But whether that brought the curtain down on the debasement of the 1919 World Series is far from clear. The Burns/Attell/Zelcer combine was not the only gambler group that the White Sox had taken money from. Admissions later made by the corrupted players make it clear that far more than the $10,000 post-Game Two payoff was disbursed during the Series. But who made these payoffs; when/where/how they were made; how much fix money in total was paid out by gambler interests, and how much of that money Gandil kept for himself, remain matters of conjecture.

More well-settled is the fact that awareness of the corruption of the World Series was fairly widespread in professional gambling circles. After the post-Game Two player/gambler falling-out, a group of Midwestern gamblers convened in a Chicago hotel to discuss a fix revival. Spearheading this effort were St. Louis clothing manufacturer/gambler Carl Zork and an Omaha bookmaker improbably named Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were heavily invested in a Reds Series triumph. The action, if any, taken by these Midwesterners is another uncertain element in the fix saga.

Back on the diamond, the White Sox teetered on the brink of elimination, having won only one of the first five World Series games. Their outlook turned bleaker in Game Six when the Reds rushed to an early 4-0 lead behind Dutch Ruether. At that late moment, slumbering White Sox bats finally awoke. Capitalizing on timely base hits from the previously dormant middle of the batting order (Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson, and Happy Felsch), the White Sox rallied for a 5-4 triumph in 10 innings. The ensuing Game Seven was the type of affair that sporting pundits had anticipated at the Series outset: a comfortable 4-1 Chicago victory behind masterly pitching by Eddie Cicotte and RBI-base hits by Jackson and Felsch.

Now only one win away from evening up the Series, the hopes of the White Sox faithful were pinned on regular-season stalwart Lefty Williams. Williams had pitched decently in his two previous Series outings, only to see his starts come undone by a lone big inning in each game. In Game Eight, disaster struck early. Lefty did not make it out of the first inning, leaving the White Sox an insurmountable 4-0 deficit. The Reds continued to pour it on against second-line Chicago relievers. Only a forlorn White Sox rally late in the contest made the final score somewhat respectable: Cincinnati 10, Chicago 5.

*****

The next morning, the sporting world’s approbation of the Reds’ World Series triumph was widespread, tempered only by a discordant note sounded by Hugh Fullerton. In a widely circulated column, Fullerton questioned the integrity of the White Sox’ Series performance. He also made the startling assertion that at least seven White Sox players would not be wearing a Chicago uniform the next season. More explicit but little-noticed charges of player corruption quickly followed in Collyer’s Eye, a horse-racing trade paper.

Although a few other intrepid baseball writers would later voice their own reservations about the Series bona fides, Fullerton’s commentary was not well-received by most in the profession. A number of fellow sportswriters characterized the Fullerton assertions as no more than the sour grapes of an “expert” embarrassed by the misfire of his World Series prediction. In a prominent New York Times article, special World Series correspondent Christy Mathewson also dismissed the Fullerton suspicions, informing readers that a fix of the Series was virtually impossible.

For its part, Organized Baseball mostly ignored Fullerton’s charges, leaving denigration of Fullerton and his allies to friendly organs like Baseball Magazine and The Sporting News. In the short run, the strategy worked. Despite reiteration in follow-up columns, Fullerton’s concerns gained little traction with baseball fans. By the start of the new season, the notion that the 1919 World Series had not been on the level was mostly forgotten — except at White Sox headquarters.

Unbeknownst to the sporting press or public, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey had not dismissed the allegations made against his team. While the 1919 Series was in progress, Comiskey had been disturbed by privately received reports that his team was going to throw the championship series. Shortly after the Series was over, club officials were dispatched to St. Louis to make discreet inquiry into fix rumors. Much to Comiskey’s chagrin, disgruntled local gambling informants endorsed the charge that members of his team had thrown the Series in exchange for a promised $100,000 payoff. Lingering doubt on that score was subsequently erased when in-the-know gamblers Harry Redmon and Joe Pesch repeated the fix details to Comiskey and other club brass during a late December meeting in Chicago.

Of the courses available to him, Comiskey opted to pursue the one of self-interest. Rather than expose the perfidy of his players and precipitate the breakup of a championship team, Comiskey kept his fix information quiet. Early in the new year, the corrupted players were re-signed for the 1920 season, with Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Lefty Williams receiving substantial pay raises, to boot. Only fix ringleader Chick Gandil experienced any degree of Comiskey wrath; Gandil was tendered a contract for no more than his previous season’s salary. When, as expected, Gandil rejected the pact, Comiskey took pleasure in placing him on the club’s ineligible list. That suspension continued in force all season and effectively ended Chick Gandil’s playing career. He never appeared in a major-league game after the 1919 World Series.

From a financial standpoint, Comiskey’s silence paid off. Fueled by a return to pre-World War I “normalcy” and the unprecedented slugging exploits of a pitcher-turned-outfielder named Babe Ruth, major-league baseball underwent an explosion in popularity. With its defending AL champion team intact except for Gandil, the White Sox spent the 1920 season in the midst of an exciting three-way pennant battle with New York and Cleveland. With attendance at Comiskey Park soaring to new heights, club coffers overflowed with revenue. Then late in the 1920 season, it all began to unravel. The immediate cause was an unlikely one: the suspected fix of a meaningless late August game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

At first the matter seemed no more than a distraction, the latest of the minor annoyances that bedeviled the game that season. That spring, baseball had been mildly discomforted by exposure of the game-fixing proclivities of Hal Chase, revealed during the trial of a breach-of-contract lawsuit instituted by black-sheep teammate Lee Magee. Then in early August, West Coast baseball followers were shaken by allegations that cast serious doubt upon the legitimacy of the 1919 Pacific Coast League crown won by the Vernon Tigers. In time, the PCL scandal would have momentous consequences, providing Commissioner Landis with instructive precedent for dealing with courtroom-acquitted Black Sox defendants. In the near term, however, the significance of these matters resided mainly in their effect upon Cubs president William L. Veeck Sr. Unhappy connection to both the Magee affair and the PCL scandal — Veeck’s boss, Cubs owner William Wrigley, was livid over the prospect that his Los Angeles Angels might have been cheated out of the PCL pennant — prompted Veeck to make public disclosure of the Cubs-Phillies fix reports and to pledge club cooperation with any investigative body wishing to delve into the matter.

Revelation that the outcome of the Cubs-Phillies game might have been rigged engaged the attention of two of the Black Sox Scandal’s most formidable actors: Cook County Judge Charles A. McDonald and American League President Ban Johnson. Only recently installed as chief justice of Chicago’s criminal courts and an avid baseball fan, McDonald promptly empaneled a grand jury to investigate the game fix reports.

But within days, influential sportswriter Joe Vila of the New York Sun, prominent Chicago businessman-baseball fan Fred Loomis, and others were pressing a more substantial target upon the grand jury: the 1919 World Series. Privately, Johnson, a longtime acquaintance of Judge McDonald, urged a similar course upon the jurist. Like Comiskey, Johnson had conducted his own confidential investigation into the outcome of the 1919 Series. And he too had uncovered evidence that the Series had been corrupted. McDonald was amenable to expansion of the grand jury’s probe, and by the time the grand jury conducted its first substantive session on September 22, 1920, inquiry into the Cubs-Phillies game had been relegated to secondary status. The panel’s attention would be focused on the 1919 World Series.

The ensuing proceedings were remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the wholesale disregard of the mandate of grand-jury secrecy. Violation of this black-letter precept of law was justified on the dubious premise that baseball would benefit from the airing of its dirty laundry, and soon newspapers nationwide were reporting the details, often verbatim, of grand-jury testimony.

This breach of law was accompanied by another extra-legal phenomenon: almost daily public commentary on the proceedings by the grand-jury foreman, the prosecuting attorney, and, on occasion, Judge McDonald himself. In a matter of days, the transparency of the proceedings permitted the Chicago Tribune to announce the impending indictment of eight White Sox players: Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil, Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin — the men soon branded the Black Sox. For the time being, the charge against them was the generic conspiracy to commit an illegal act. The scandal spotlight then shifted briefly to Philadelphia, where a fix insider was giving the interview that would blow the scandal wide open.

In the September 27, 1920, edition of the Philadelphia North American, Billy Maharg declared that Games One, Two, and Eight of the 1919 World Series had been rigged. According to Maharg, the outcome of the first two games had been procured by the bribery of the White Sox players by the Burns/Attell/Bennett combine. The abysmal pitching performance that cost Chicago any chance of winning Game Eight was the product of intimidation of Lefty Williams by the Zork-Franklin forces, Maharg implied.

Wire service republication of the Maharg expose produced swift and stunning reaction. A day later, first Eddie Cicotte and then Joe Jackson admitted agreeing to accept a payoff to lose the Series when interviewed in the office of White Sox legal counsel Alfred Austrian. The two then repeated this admission under oath before the grand jury. Interestingly, neither Cicotte nor Jackson confessed to making a deliberate misplay during the Series. Press accounts that had Cicotte describing how he lobbed hittable pitches to the plate and/or had Jackson admitting to deliberate failure in the field or at bat were entirely bogus. According to the transcriptions of their testimony, the two had told the grand jury no such thing. While each had taken the gamblers’ money, Cicotte and Jackson both insisted that they had played to win at all times against the Reds. The other player participants in the Series fix were identified by Cicotte and Jackson, but apart from laying blame on Gandil, neither man disclosed much knowledge of how the fix had been instigated or who had financed it.

This exercise repeated itself when Lefty Williams spoke the following day. Like Cicotte and Jackson, Lefty admitted joining the fix conspiracy and accepting gamblers’ money, first confessing in the Austrian law office, and thereafter in testimony before the grand jury. But Williams also denied that he had done anything corrupt on the field to earn his payment. He said he had tried his best at all times, even during his dismal Game Eight start. For the grand-jury record, Lefty officially identified the fix participants as “Cicotte, Gandil, Weaver, Felsch, Risberg, McMullin, Jackson, and myself.” Williams also put names on some of the gambler co-conspirators. At the Warner Hotel in Chicago, they had been named “Sullivan” and “Brown.” At the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati, the fix proponents had been Bill Burns, Abe Attell, and a third man named “Bennett.”

A similar tack was taken by Happy Felsch when interviewed by a reporter for the Chicago Evening American. Like the others, Felsch admitted his complicity in the fix plot and his acceptance of gamblers’ money. But his subpar Series performance, particularly in center field, had not been deliberate, he said. Lest the underworld get the wrong idea, Felsch hastened to add that he had been prepared to make a game-decisive misplay, but the opportunity to do so had not presented itself during the Series. Unlike the others, Happy confined admission of wrongdoing to himself, although he had come to admire the way that Cicotte had demanded his payoff money up-front. Felsch did not know who had financed the fix, but he was willing to subscribe to press reports that it had been Abe Attell.

A far different public stance was adopted by the other Black Sox. Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin, and Buck Weaver all protested their innocence, with Weaver in particular adamant about his intention to obtain legal counsel and fight any charges preferred against him in court. Those charges would not be long in coming. On October 29, 1920, five counts of conspiracy to obtain money by false pretenses and/or via a confidence game were returned against the Black Sox by the grand jury. Gamblers Bill Burns, Hal Chase, Abe Attell, Sport Sullivan, and Rachael Brown were also charged in the indictments.

*****

The stage thereupon shifted to the criminal courts for a whirl of legal events, few of which are accurately described or well understood in latter-day Black Sox literature.

The return of criminal charges in the Black Sox case coincided with the Republican Party’s political landslide in the November 1920 elections. An entirely different administration soon took charge of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the prosecuting agency in the baseball scandal. When the regime of new State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe assumed office, it found the high-profile Black Sox case in disarray. The investigation underlying the indictments was incomplete. Evidence was missing from the prosecutors’ vault, including transcriptions of the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony.

Worse yet, it appeared that their predecessors in office had premised prosecution of the Black Sox case on cooperation anticipated from Cicotte, Jackson, and/or Williams, each of whom had admitted fix complicity before the grand jury. But now, the trio was standing firm with the other accused players, and seeking to have their grand-jury confessions suppressed by the court on legal grounds. This placed the new prosecuting attorneys in desperate need of time to rethink and then rebuild their case.

In March 1921, prosecutors’ hopes for an adjournment were dashed by Judge William E. Dever, who set a quick peremptory trial date. This prompted a drastic response from prosecutor Crowe. Rather than try to pull the Black Sox case together on short notice, he administratively dismissed the charges. Crowe coupled public announcement of this stunning development with the promise that the Black Sox case would be presented to the grand jury again for new indictments.

Before the month was out, that promise was fulfilled. Expedited grand-jury proceedings yielded new indictments that essentially replicated the dismissed ones. All those previously charged were re-indicted, while the roster of gambler defendants was enlarged to include Carl Zork, Benjamin Franklin, David (Bennett) Zelcer, and brothers Ben and Lou Levi, reputedly related to Zelcer by marriage and long targeted for prosecution by AL President Ban Johnson.

With the legal proceedings now reverting to courtroom stage one, prosecutors had acquired the time necessary to get their case in better shape. That extra time was needed, as the prosecution remained besieged on many fronts. The State was deluged by defense motions to dismiss the charges, suppress evidence, limit testimony, and the like. Prosecutors were also having trouble getting the gambler defendants into court. Sport Sullivan and Rachael Brown remained somewhere at large. Hal Chase and Abe Attell successfully resisted extradition to Chicago, and Ben Franklin was excused from the proceedings on grounds of illness.

Former major-league pitcher Bill Burns was the prosecution’s star witness in the Black Sox criminal trial in 1921. It took quite an adventure — and a lot of money from the American League treasury — to get him on the stand. (BaseballHall.org)

In the run-up to trial, however, prosecution prospects received one major boost. Retrieved from the Mexican border by his pal Billy Maharg (via a trip financed by Ban Johnson), Bill Burns had agreed to turn State’s evidence in return for immunity. Now, prosecutors had the crucial fix insider that their case had been lacking.

Jury selection began on June 16, 1921, and dragged on for several weeks. Appearing as counsel on behalf of the accused were some of the Midwest’s finest criminal defense lawyers: Thomas Nash and Michael Ahern (representing Weaver, Felsch, Risberg, and McMullin; McMullin did not arrive in Chicago until after jury selection had begun, and for this reason, the trial went on without him and the charges against him were later dismissed); Benedict Short and George Guenther (Jackson and Williams); James O’Brien and John Prystalski (Gandil); A. Morgan Frumberg and Henry Berger (Zork), and Max Luster and J.J. Cooke (Zelcer and the Levi brothers). Cicotte, meanwhile, was represented by his friend and personal attorney Daniel Cassidy, a civil lawyer from Detroit.

Although outnumbered, the prosecution was hardly outgunned, with its chairs filled by experienced trial lawyers: Assistant State’s Attorneys George Gorman and John Tyrrell, and Special Prosecutor Edward Prindiville, with assistance from former Judge George Barrett representing the interests of the American League in court, and a cadre of attorneys in the employ of AL President Johnson working behind the scenes.

About the only unproven commodity in the courtroom was the newly assigned trial judge, Hugo Friend. Judge Friend would later go on to a distinguished 46-year career on Illinois trial and appellate benches. But at the time of the Black Sox trial, he was a judicial novice, presiding over his first significant case. Although his mettle would often be tested by a battalion of fractious barristers, Friend’s intelligence and sense of fairness would stand him in good stead. The Black Sox case would be generally well tried, if not error-free.

In a sweltering midsummer courtroom, the prosecution commenced its case with the witnesses needed to establish factual minutiae — the scores of 1919 World Series games, the employment of the accused players by the Chicago White Sox, the winning and losing Series shares, etc. — that the defense, for tactical reasons, declined to stipulate. Then, chief prosecution witness Bill Burns assumed the stand. For the better part of three days, Burns recounted the events that had precipitated the corruption of the 1919 World Series. Those who had equated Burns with his “Sleepy Bill” nickname were in for a shock. Quick-witted and unflappable, Burns was more than a match for sneering defense lawyers, much to the astonishment, then delight, of the jaded Black Sox trial press corps. Newspaper reviews of Burns’s testimony glowed and, by the time their star witness stepped down, prosecutors were near-jubilant. Thereafter, prosecution focus temporarily shifted to incriminating Zork and the other Midwestern gambler defendants.

Halfway through the State’s case, the jury was excused while the court conducted an evidentiary hearing into the admissibility of the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony. Modern accounts of the Black Sox saga often relate that the prosecution was grievously injured by the loss of grand-jury documents. That was hardly the case. When prosecutors discovered that the original grand-jury transcripts were missing, they merely had the grand-jury stenographers create new ones from their shorthand notes. These second-generation transcripts were available throughout the proceedings, and Black Sox defense lawyers did not contest their accuracy.

What was contested was whether, and to what extent, the trial jury should be made privy to what Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams had told the grand jurors. According to the defense, the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand-jury testimony had been induced by broken off-the-record promises of immunity from prosecution. If this were true, the testimony would be deemed involuntary in the legal sense and inadmissible against the accused.

With testimony restricted exclusively to what had happened in and around the grand-jury room, the proceedings devolved into a swearing contest. Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams testified that they had been promised immunity. Lead grand-jury prosecutor Hartley Replogle and Judge McDonald denied it. During the hearing, grand-jury excerpts were read into the record at length. After hearing both sides, Judge Friend determined that the defendants had confessed freely, without any promise of leniency. Their grand-jury testimony would be admissible in evidence — but not before each grand-jury transcript had been edited to delete all reference to Chick Gandil, Buck Weaver, or anyone else mentioned in it, other than the speaker himself. Once this tedious task was accomplished, the redacted grand-jury testimony of Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams was read to the jury, a prolonged and dry exercise that seemed to anesthetize most panel members.

The numbing effect that the transcript readings had on the jury was not lost on prosecutors. Wishing to close their case while it still enjoyed the momentum of the Burns testimony, prosecutors made a fateful strategic decision. They jettisoned the remainder of their scheduled witnesses (Ban Johnson, Joe Pesch, St. Louis Browns second baseman Joe Gedeon, et al.) and wrapped up the State’s case with another fix insider: unindicted co-conspirator Billy Maharg. The affable Maharg provided an account of the fix developments that he was witness to, providing firm and consistent corroboration of many fix details supplied by Bill Burns earlier.

Pleased with Maharg’s performance, prosecutors rested their case. Now they would be obliged to accept the cost of short-circuiting their proofs. In response to defense motions, Judge Friend dismissed the charges against the Levi brothers for lack of evidence. He also signaled that he would be disposed to overturn any guilty verdict returned by the jury against Carl Zork, Buck Weaver, or Happy Felsch, given the thinness of the incriminating evidence presented against them. These rulings, however, did not visibly trouble the prosecutors, for they had plainly decided to concentrate their efforts on convicting defendants Gandil, Cicotte, Jackson, Williams, and the gambler David Zelcer.

The defense had long advertised that the Black Sox would be testifying in their own defense. But that would have to wait, as the gambler defendants would be going first. Once the Zelcer and Zork defenses had presented their cases, the Gandil defense took the floor, calling a series of witnesses mainly intended to make a liar out of Bill Burns.

Also presented was White Sox club secretary Harry Grabiner, whose testimony about soaring 1920 club revenues undermined the contention that team owner Comiskey or the White Sox corporation had been injured by the fix of the 1919 World Series. (Years later, jury foreman William Barry would tell Judge Friend that the Grabiner testimony had had more influence on the jury than that of any other witness.)

Then, with the stage finally set for Chick to take the stand, the Gandil defense abruptly rested. So did the other Black Sox. Little explanation for this change in defense plan was offered, apart from the comment that there was no need for the accused players to testify because the State had made no case against them. Caught off-guard by defense maneuvers, the prosecution scrambled to present rebuttal witnesses, most of whom were excluded from the testifying by Judge Friend. As little in the way of a defense had been mounted by the player defendants, there was no legal justification for admitting rebuttal.

The remainder of the trial was devoted to closing stemwinders by opposing counsel and the court’s instructions on the law. Then the jury retired to deliberate. Less than three hours later, it reached a verdict. With the parties reassembled in a courtroom packed with defense partisans, the court clerk announced the outcome: Not Guilty, as to all defendants on all charges. A smiling Judge Friend concurred, pronouncing the jury’s verdict a fair one.

Minutes after the Black Sox were acquitted on August 2, 1921, the players, their attorneys, and members of the jury (in shirt sleeves) celebrated the verdict by posing for a photo on the courthouse steps. (Chicago Tribune)

With that, pandemonium erupted. Jurors shook hands and congratulated the men whom they had just acquitted. Some in the crowd even hoisted defendants onto their shoulders and paraded them around. Thereafter, defendants, defense lawyers, jurors, and defense followers gathered on the courthouse steps, where their mutual joy was captured in a photo published by the Chicago Tribune. Later, a post-verdict celebration brought the defendants and the jurors together once again at a nearby Italian restaurant. There, the revelry continued into the wee hours of the morning, closing with jurors and Black Sox singing “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here.”

This extraordinary exhibition of camaraderie suggests that the verdict may have been a product of that courthouse phenomenon that all prosecutors dread: jury nullification. In a criminal case, jurors are carefully instructed to abjure passion, prejudice, sympathy, and other emotion in rendering judgment. They are to base their verdict entirely on the evidence presented and the law. But during deliberations in highly charged cases, this instruction is susceptible to being overridden by the jury’s identification with the accused. Or by dislike of the victim. Or by the urge to send some sort of message to the community at large.

In the Black Sox case, defense counsel, notably Benedict Short and Henry Berger, worked assiduously to cultivate a bond between the working-class men on the jury and the blue-collar defendants. The defense’s closing arguments to the jury, particularly those of Short, Thomas Nash, A. Morgan Frumberg, and James O’Brien, stridently denounced the wealthy victim Comiskey and his corporation. The defense lawyers also raised the specter of another menace: AL President Ban Johnson, portrayed as a malevolent force working outside of jury view to ensure the unfair condemnation of the accused.

In the end, of course, the underlying basis for the jury’s acquittal of the Black Sox is unknowable all these years later. Significantly, the fair-minded Judge Friend concurred in the outcome. Still, jury nullification remains a plausible explanation for the verdict, particularly when it came to jurors’ resolution of the charges against defendants Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams, against whom the State had presented a facially strong case.

Few others shared the jurors’ satisfaction in their verdict, with many baseball officials vowing never to grant employment to the acquitted players. That sentiment was quickly rendered academic. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had taken note of the minor leagues’ prompt expulsion of the Pacific Coast League players who had had their indictments dismissed by the judge in that game-fixing case. Landis, who had been hired as commissioner in November 1920, now utilized that action as precedent.

With a famous edict that began “Regardless of the verdict of juries …,” Landis permanently barred the eight Black Sox players from participation in Organized Baseball. And with that, Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and the rest were consigned to the sporting wilderness. None would ever appear in another major-league game. The Black Sox saga, however, was not quite over.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the eight Black Sox players for life from Organized Baseball in 1921. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

*****

In the aftermath of their official banishment from the game, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Joe Jackson instituted civil litigation against the White Sox, pursuing grievances grounded in breach of contract, defamation, and restraint on their professional livelihoods.

Outside of Milwaukee, where the Felsch/Risberg/Jackson suits were filed, little attention was paid to their complaints. Jackson’s breach-of-contract suit was the only one that ever went to trial. It was founded on the three-year contract that Jackson had signed with the White Sox in late February 1920, months after the World Series. The club had unilaterally voided the pact when it released Jackson in March 1921, and he had gone unpaid for the 1921 and 1922 baseball seasons.

In a pretrial deposition, plaintiff Jackson disputed that his termination by the White Sox had been justified by his involvement in the Series fix. On that point, Jackson swore to a set of fix-related events dramatically at odds with his earlier grand-jury testimony. Jackson now maintained that he had had no connection to the conspiracy to rig the 1919 Series. He had not even known about it until after the Series was over, when a drunken Lefty Williams foisted a $5,000 fix share on Jackson, telling him that the Black Sox had used Jackson’s name while trying to persuade gamblers to finance the fix scheme.

When the suit was tried in early 1924, its highlight was Jackson’s cross-examination by White Sox attorney George Hudnall. Confronted with his grand-jury testimony of September 28, 1920, Jackson did not attempt to explain away the contradiction between his civil deposition assertions and his grand-jury testimony. Nor did he attempt to harmonize the two. Rather, Jackson maintained — more than 100 times — that he had never made the statements contained in the transcript of his grand-jury testimony.

An outraged Judge John J. Gregory subsequently cited Jackson for perjury and had him jailed overnight. The court vacated the jury’s $16,711.04 award in Jackson favor, ruling that it was grounded in false testimony and jury nonfeasance. After the proceedings were over, civil jury foreman John E. Sanderson shed light on the jury’s thinking. Sanderson informed the press that the jury had entirely disregarded Jackson’s testimony about disputed events. The foreman also rejected the notion that the panel had exonerated Jackson of participation in the 1919 World Series fix.

Rather, the jury had premised its judgment for Jackson on the legal principle of condonation. As far as the jury was concerned, White Sox team brass had known of Jackson’s World Series fix involvement well before the new three-year contract was tendered to him in February 1920. Having thus effectively condoned (or forgiven) Jackson’s Series misconduct by re-signing him, the club was in no position to void that contract once the public found out what club management had known about Jackson all along. Jackson was, according to the Milwaukee jury, therefore entitled to his 1921 and 1922 pay.

In time, the four civil lawsuits, including that of Jackson, were settled out of court for modest sums. Little notice was taken, as the baseball press and public had long since moved on. In the ensuing years, the Black Sox Scandal receded in memory, recalled only in the random sports column, magazine article, or, starting with the death of Joe Jackson in December 1951, the obituary of a Black Sox player.

Revival of interest in the scandal commenced in the late 1950s, but did not attract widespread attention until the publication of Eliot Asinof’s classic Eight Men Out in 1963. Regrettably, this spellbinding account of the scandal was marred by historically inaccurate detail, attributable presumably to the fact that much of the criminal case record had been unavailable to Asinof, having disappeared from court archives over the years. This had compelled Asinof to rely upon scandal survivors, particularly Abe Attell, an engaging but unreliable informant.

Asinof also exercised artistic license in his work, creating, apparently for copyright protection purposes, a fictitious villain named “Harry F.” to intimidate Lefty Williams into his dreadful Game Eight pitching performance. Asinof likewise embellished his tale of the Jackson civil case, inserting melodramatic events, such as White Sox lawyer Hudnall pulling a supposedly lost Jackson grand-jury transcript out of his briefcase in midtrial, into Eight Men Out that are nowhere memorialized in the fully extant record of the civil proceedings.

Over the years, the embrace of such Asinof inventions, as well as the repetition of more ancient canards — the miserly wage that Comiskey supposedly paid the corrupted players, the notion that disappearing grand-jury testimony hamstrung the prosecution, and other fictions – has become a recurring feature of much Black Sox literature.

In 2002 scandal enthusiast Gene Carney commenced a near-obsessive re-examination of the Black Sox affair. First in weekly blog posts and later in his important book Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Potomac Books, 2006), Carney circulated his findings, which were often at variance with long-accepted scandal wisdom. Sadly, this work was cut short by Carney’s untimely passing in July 2009. But the mission endures, carried on by others, including the membership of the SABR committee inspired by Carney’s zeal.

That scandal revelations are still to be made is clear, manifested by events like the surfacing of a treasure trove of lost Black Sox documents acquired by the Chicago History Museum several years ago. As the playing of the 1919 World Series approaches its 100th anniversary, the investigation continues. And the final word on the Black Sox Scandal remains to be written.

WILLIAM F. LAMB is the author of “Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation” (McFarland & Co., 2013). He spent more than 30 years as a state/county prosecutor in New Jersey. In retirement, he lives in Meredith, New Hampshire, and serves as the editor of “The Inside Game,” the quarterly newsletter of SABR’s Deadball Era Research Committee. He has contributed more than 50 bios to the SABR BioProject.

Sources

This essay is drawn from a more comprehensive account of the Black Sox legal proceedings provided in the writer’s Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial, and Civil Litigation (McFarland & Co., 2013). Underlying sources include surviving fragments of the judicial record; the Black Sox Scandal collections maintained at the Chicago History Museum and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Giamatti Research Center; the transcript of Joe Jackson’s 1924 lawsuit against the Chicago White Sox held by the Chicago Baseball Museum; newspaper archives in Chicago and elsewhere; and contemporary Black Sox scholarship, particularly the work of Gene Carney, Bob Hoie, and Bruce Allardice.