Fraudulent Activity In Baseball History

Mike Kirk

Prof Correa

Egl 102, Sect 010

May 9,2007

Research Paper Draft # 1

Fraudulent Activity In Baseball History

Since baseball has been around, many amazing things have happened. From players breaking records to countless highlights, baseball is unquestionably one of America’s favorite pastimes. Although there are so many fond memories that the game of baseball has to offer us, there are also a couple of blemishes on its record. For example, in 1919, the Chicago White Sox fixed the World Series. Eight members of the team participated in the fix. Also on the list is the current issue of steroid use. It is not surprising to hear a story on ESPN news that another baseball player has tested positive for steroids. One all-star, Jose Conseco, admitted to using steroids and even Barry Bonds is in question. Even though the two offenses are quite different in nature, they have both left a lasting impression on the game.

According to the website www.Sportingnews.com, the 1919 World Series was not played by every participant, as was disclosed late in the 1920 season when the confessions were made. Eight members of the team, starting with Eddie Cicotte, Claude Williams, Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin, were convicted of conspiring to fix the outcome of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

The situation started to take shape as soon as the odds started to go haywire. Suddenly the Chicago White Sox were the underdogs, when they were the clear favorite the previous days and weeks before then. For some reason, it soon became forgotten and the fans began to accept the odds. Soon after the World Series was played, questions arose as to how Joe Jackson had bat .375 in the serious, but always struck out in key situations. Players such as Williams and Cicotte had lost three starts and had two errors in the fifth inning of game four respectively. Felsch and Risberg had only bat .192 and .080, and McMillin was only up to the plate twice, both times as a pinch during the series with the Reds (Sportingnews.com pg 2).

In the book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, Eliot Asinof breaks down the events of what unfolded during the scandal. The fix in 1919 came to be known as a “fantastic scandal” (Asinof 4). Soon before the scandal took place, in 1917, the United States entered World War 1. At this time, the United States of America was a country that was tired from war. The nation looked at the World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds as a way to invigorate itself. Instead, the country was hit hard by the scandal. Though rising in popularity, baseball became corrupted with almost incredible rapidity. There was hardly a game in which some wild, disruptive incident didn’t occur to alter the outcome (Asinof pg 16). This quote shows that baseball was becoming more and more out of control, which eventually led to the scandal. A “sash” was the code word for the fixed game. The code was used by players Jim Devlin and George Hall through telegrams they sent back and forth to each other. The game itself was rigged by getting players to make a throw just one second too short or too long. Pretty much, they would do whatever was necessary for the desired team to win the game. Asinof states that the sports writers were paid off to not report the corruption (pg16). Chick Gandil, the man who personally wanted to fix the World Series, wanted to select five or six players that would go along with him (Asinof pg 38).

When the scandal blew up, the Philadelphia North American called it “The most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America” (Asinof pg 178). Within ten years of the event, the fix and the people who were associated with it became dissociated, and the players involved began to promote their names in good nature, rather than being connected with the 1919 World Series. Many magazines and newspapers published nationwide that the accounts, at the time and since, have inevitably been fragmentary. Therefore, the fix of the World Series in 1919 may not be fully known about, and some information may have slipped through the cracks of the courts. The truth is that the nation will probably never know the full truth of events that occurred during the World Series. In other words, the scandal is still somewhat misunderstood because of a lack of primary evidence, the people involved have died, and those who are alive are silent to this day about it (Asinof prologue). If there is a lack of original documentation of the event, deceased parties, or those who are holding out in information, it is nearly impossible to truly get the full picture of the events that unfolded during the World Series.

In the journal entry by Michael J. Pellowski, he reviews the book The Chicago “Black Sox” Baseball Scandal: A Headline Court Case. This book refers to the fixing of the 1919 World Series as “the biggest scandal in baseball history” (Pellowski pg 1). Also, the famous line, “Say it ain’t so Joe” came from this event. Pellowski also goes on to talk about the betting stating “when the betting becomes widely known, the author follows the subsequent legal processes from assistant district attorney to grand jury to civil court to the players banishment from professional baseball, as well of the influence of the media at each of these steps” (Pellowski pg 2). What the author is saying is that while he was reading the book, he felt that the authors jumped around from place to place, making the situation very difficult for the reader to comprehend. If the reader is