The Economic History of Baseball, Part 2: What They Don't Tell You About The Black Sox Scandal

 

To understand the roots of the Black Sox scandal, one should start at the beginning of the 1910s with a pitcher named Addie Joss. Joss had the potential to be one of the greatest pitchers of his era: he won twenty games or more four times with Cleveland, he pitched a perfect game during the 1908 AL Pennant Race against the Chicago White Sox, and his lifetime ERA of 1.88 is the second lowest in major history.

But prior to the 1910 season, he developed spinal meningitis. He managed somehow to complete it – he even pitched a no-hitter that year but collapsed in spring training and died early in 1911. Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary recounts this and many other sad facts – Joss’ teammates skipping town rather than ask their owner time off for the funeral, the first All-Star game being staged in 1912 to raise money for Joss’ widow, and how the players formed the first union. Left unsaid, but pretty much implied, is why Joss, despite being mortally ill told no one and just kept pitching.

The players had no support system back then. If you got hurt, you could be replaced at a moment’s notice, possibly traded. There was no pension system in place at the time, and one would not be established for nearly half a century more. Ballplayers usually had to work second jobs during the winters to make ends meet. When the Players tried to meet with the owners to negotiate, they were ignored.

In 1914 a new group of owners wanted to get in on the action and formed the Federal League. They established teams in Chicago, Kansas City, Baltimore and Indianapolis (the only time that city has ever had a professional baseball team.) Several players jumped their contracts to join the league, among them future Hall of Famers, Three-Finger Brown, Joe Tinker, Eddie Plank and Chief Bender. New ballparks were built, including one in Chicago that one day would be known as Wrigley Field. They even offered players the possibility of being able to make their own destiny, calling them ‘free agents’.

For a time the Federal League would be successful, particularly in cities that only had access to minor league clubs. (Babe Ruth was sold from the then-minor league Baltimore Orioles to the Red Sox in the summer of 1914 because owner Jack Dunn was going broke competing against the Baltimore Terrapins of the Federal League.) And there was exciting baseball being played – one of the closest pennant races in history occurred during the 1915 Federal League season, with Chicago beating St. Louis by one percentage point in the standings and Pittsburgh by half a game.

If Ban Johnson, who had basically done the same thing when he founded the American League in 1901 to National League owners, was aware of the irony he didn’t show in. He threatened anyone who jumped from the Federal League with banishment, threatened costly lawsuits and raised the salaries of players who agreed to stay in the two professional leagues, promising to do better with average players. The Federal League fought back filing lawsuits charging that Major League Baseball was a monopoly. The federal judge who was handed the case refused to rule until the Federal League eventually collapsed, finally ruling in favor of Major League Baseball. The judges name was Kennesaw Mountain Landis, and professional baseball did not forget. (The suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in 1921, and the court unanimously upheld Major League Baseball. The court’s bizarre decision still stands more than a century later.)

When the Federal League collapsed, Johnson immediately recanted all his offers. Tris Speaker, whose salary had been doubled to $18,000 in 1915, faced a salary cut to $9000 prior to the 1916 season. When he refused to accept it, the Red Sox decided to sell one of the greatest outfielders of all time to Cleveland for $50,000.

Baseball’s desire to protect the bottom line extended when America entered World War I. They saw no reason to stop doing business and tried to claim that ballplayers should be exempt from the draft. This decision ultimately failed and in June of 1918 many ballplayers ended up going to war. Of course, while the war was going on, the owners took this opportunity to cut the salaries of their teams because ‘sacrifice was the order of the day.’ Naturally, that didn’t stop from spreading whatever wealth they had. In 1918, they made the decision that the revenue from World Series Games would be shared not just among the teams that played, but by the teams that finished in the first division (a term that referred to all teams that finished from first to fourth place). Unhappily the Cubs and Red Sox threatened a strike, but Ban Johnson and the owners, aided by the press, forced them to play.

Given the economic realities, it is small wonder that ballplayers began throwing games for gamblers. What is generally forgotten by many is that management was aware of this well before the 1919 World Series – and seemed fine with it. The best example of this came in the case of Hal Chase.

Chase was considered by his contemporaries as one of the greatest fielding first basemen of all time. He also notoriously threw games for gamblers. Three different managers on three different teams accused him of this, and management’s reaction was either to fire the manager or to trade Chase. When Chase finally ended up in Cincinnati in 1916, manager Christy Mathewson, not only one of the greatest pitchers in history but one of the most upright men to play the game, accused Chase and baseball finally banned him. From the major leagues. No one had any problem for him playing with the minors, which he did well into his forties. Considering this is how baseball treating the Hal Chase’s (and there have to been have been countless more of them) its perhaps inevitable that the Black Sox scandal happened.

In recent years, some have suspected previous world series might have been fixed. Some suspect that Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s were swept in four games by the Boston Braves because they had been paid off.  Others believes that the Chicago Cubs were bought up by mobsters during the 1918 World Series, leading to Boston’s six game victory. (Kind of puts a different spin on the ‘curses’ both franchises suffered for the rest of the 20^th Century.) But everyone knows the White Sox threw the series – indeed, the only people who didn’t seem to know when it was happening was the average sports fan.

Like other major historical figures, players in the early days of baseball have been subject to revisionist history in recent years. The most pertinent in this case is Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox whose salaries for his team were artificially lower, and who even may have forced his players to launder their own uniforms during the 1919 season, eventually leading them to become so dirty that the Black Sox name became notorious even before then.

I am always reluctant to accept the idea of a revisionist version of history, but trying to clean Comiskey’s name is particularly ludicrous. The best argument that writers can make comes down to ‘he didn’t pay salaries that were worse than the major league average’. This is the baseball equivalent of saying: “he wasn’t a worse plantation owner than the rest of them.” It also has the added onus of using a variation of the ‘blame the victim’ argument, as if the eight men who were convicted of throwing the Series didn’t already have a horrible reputation as it was.

To be clear, I’m not saying that what the White Sox players did wasn’t a crime and they didn’t deserve the punishment they got. For decades, Hollywood has done everything in its power to turn Shoeless Joe Jackson into a saint who was exploited by his owners, used by crooked gamblers and tossed away by both of them. I don’t deny the truth of this statement; it does nothing to change the fact that he took a bribe to throw a game. All the fans in the world can argue that Jackson made no errors in the field, hit .375 during the series and played to win. None of them will deny that he took the money. Ken Burns is sympathetic to Jackson in the documentary but while they defend his conduct, none will excuse his actions. (I honestly am more inclined to defend the induction of Pete Rose into Cooperstown than I am Joe Jackson. But we’ll save that for a different article.)

That said, I won’t pretend that the eight White Sox who threw the series were exploited twice: first by an ownership system that was keeping them underpaid, and then by crooked gamblers who promised them a lot of money to throw the series and then gave them far less than they were promised. Indeed, the White Sox decided after Game 5 to play to win, but Lefty Williams (one of the ones who’d been bought) had the lives of his family threatened before Game 8.

And its worth noting that Major League Baseball would have gladly buried the scandal along with all the other ones had it not been due to a separate investigation spearheaded by Ban Johnson. It was not until September of 1920, when the White Sox were in contention for a second straight pennant, that the truth came out.

No one went to jail, for the record, not the ballplayers and not the gamblers. Because this was 1920s Chicago and the justice system was more obviously corrupt then it is today, vital evidence ‘mysteriously’ vanished before the trial began. The players were acquitted, and no doubt hoped they could resume playing again, even though the new Commissioner – Kennesaw Mountain Landis – had made one of the most famous statements in baseball history not long after the scandal broke:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, shall ever play professional baseball.”

Note the first six words. Landis had made it clear from the beginning that he was going to rule the game as an absolute autocrat. He was probably the only man in the history of baseball who could make the owners follow him without question. No doubt it was done partly out of desperation: they thought that the survival of their business was at stake, and they needed someone whose integrity no one would question. The decision was simple: Landis would act in the best interest of baseball.

What has been forgotten is that with this exception, the best interest of baseball basically meant cleaning up the scandal and then trying to make the fans focus on the game. It was destroying the symptom and not the cause. The Black Sox were made pariahs, and it was not until decades after the fact that anyone even began to question the reasons they might have done it in the first place. Everyone was focused on the integrity of the game, not the reason that integrity had been compromised in the first place. Landis may have ruled the owners with an iron fist, but the players were as much under his fiat as anyone else.

This was very clear when he banned not just the black sox but a total of twenty-three individuals suspected of or guilty of throwing baseball games. None were as well-known as the Black Sox, but there had been some talented players involved. Among them was Heinie Zimmermann, a skilled infielder, and a superb hitter in the deadball era, who won the RBI title three times and the National League Triple Crown in 1912.  A teammate of Hal Chase in 1919, he tried to convince several of his Giant teammates to throw games that season. Along with Chase, he was banned. Many players would argue with Landis to be reinstated, most famously Buck Weaver who didn’t take any money but who knew about the fix. Weaver was guilty by association. (But no one ever cast Ray Liotta to play him)

Landis would restore the integrity of baseball and that very season Babe Ruth would transform the game beyond recognition. The two can both be considered saviors of the game after the Black Sox Scandal. But for all Ruth’s dominance on the field, when he considered breaking the rules in 1921 to barnstorm in order to make extra money, Landis had no problem suspending him for the first six weeks of the 1922 season. “In this office, he’s just another player,” he said before he did.

In the next installment in this series, I will expose one of the biggest lies owners told when it came as to why the reserve clause had to forever be in place – an argument so obviously false you honestly wonder why every other team in the American League was willing to go along with it for so long.