I’m not a White Sox fan, but I admit I was lowkey hoping they’d at least advance to the ALCS, if only so that I could post this without it seeming awkward. But I also know that if I wait until after the end of the season, I run the risk of forgetting about this altogether, so here’s the White Sox fight song performed by Captain Stubby and the Buccaneers.
This song first appeared in 1959 during the White Sox’s run for the AL pennant, which was the team’s first league championship since the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The song re-emerged and regained popularity in 2005, the year that the Sox swept the Astros in four games in the World Series.
On September 28, 1920, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Joe Jackson, and Happy Felsch admitted to a grand jury that they had thrown the 1919 series in return for a bribe. The grand jury would indict eight White Sox players on charges of fixing previous season’s World Series against the Reds. The eight members involved in the Black Sox Scandal would go on to be cleared of the charges, but they would be banned for life from baseball by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner.
On January 13, 1922, Buck Weaver applied for reinstatement to professional baseball. Weaver had been a member of the infamous 1919 Black Sox and one of eight players banned from baseball for his alleged involvement in the throwing of the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. This was one of six attempts by Weaver to get back into baseball, but he would remain banned from the sport for life.
I had watched the Tenth Inning of Ken Burns’s Baseball (before watching the original nine innings) a few years ago and wrote about it here. Having watched it again, this time on the other side of the original series, I’ve decided not to rehash what I wrote previously. Instead, now that I’m finished, I’ve decided to look at the series as a whole.
Overall, the series provides a look at the history of baseball in a way that simultaneously provides a bit of breadth and a bit of depth. Discussing baseball from its earliest days all the way into the twenty-first century is no small feat. Baseball has existed on record for well over 150 years, approaching two hundred years at this point, and that existence is not confined to any one place or in any one form. A myriad of leagues have formed and gone under over the course of the game’s history, and each of these leagues were riddled with superstars, legendary teams, and exciting games and stories.
Baseball focuses primarily on five teams, all of which played a large and central role in baseball’s history: the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Red Sox. That’s not to say that Burns completely ignores the rest of the teams in Major League Baseball, they just don’t get as much attention. If a team was lucky enough to have a Ty Cobb or a Pete Rose, or to get riddled by some kind of scandal, they’d get some coverage. Otherwise, most teams, especially newer teams, barely received more than a passing nod in the documentary. While it would have been nice for Burns to have spread the love a bit more, given the tremendous scope of this project, he can certainly be forgiven for choosing his battles. Had Burns taken on coverage of everything that fans might have liked to have seen, Baseball would have needed to at least quadruple the size of the series — and it already sits at eleven DVDs total.
I do like and appreciate that Burns does not gloss over the not-so-pretty aspects of the game and its history. Rather, the series unwaveringly takes on exploration of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and rampant gambling surrounding the game; it pounds away at the reserve clause and the implications it had on the business side of professional baseball; a spotlight is shone on the “gentleman’s agreement” among owners and the pervading racism throughout Major League Baseball’s history; and issues like the players’ strike and steroid use taking place in more recent history receive a long, thorough look in the Tenth Inning.
As much as I applaud the scope of this documentary, I will admit that same scope does make it rather daunting to take on. If you’ve been following along with my journey through Baseball, you’ll know that I started with the First Inning of the series back in October, before the 2017 MLB season had even fully ended. Now, here we are only days away from the start of 2018 Spring Training, and I have finally reached the end of the documentary. It is a marathon, for sure, though it is a marathon that most true baseball fans will no doubt be willing to push through because it is definitely worth it. Most Americans, even among those who consider themselves fans of the game, remain wholly ignorant of much of baseball’s history. For anyone who decides they genuinely want to learn more about the game, its history, its players, and the forces that have shaped it, this is definitely a great place to start.
If you would like to read my summaries of all the individual innings, you can do so by following the Ken Burns tag here.
The Third Inning of Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns explores the game during the 1910s. This disc opens with a discussion of fan involvement, and how the setup of the field during this time period gave fans a greater amount of influence in the events of the game. Fans often spectated standing in foul territory or directly on the field behind the outfielders, allowing them not only to yell at players more effectively, but also to potentially become physically involved in some plays. And it wasn’t just fans rooting for their teams who sought to influence the outcome of games. Gamblers during this time period were heavily involved in the sport.
Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics dominated the first half of the decade. Meanwhile, the saga of Ty Cobb continues, from his 1910 race for the batting title against Nap Lajoie to Cobb’s suspension from organized baseball for beating the snot out of a fan in 1912.
Buck O’Neil, who has contributed to the commentary of the documentary series in the first two innings, was born in 1911, and now discusses his experience with baseball as a boy. Baseball’s “gentleman’s agreement,” however, continued to exclude black players from the game, though teams at times undermined this agreement with light-skinned minority players.
The 1912 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants became an unusual eight-game Series when the second game was called due to “impending darkness.” Game eight of this Series was the one in which Fred Snodgrass dropped an easy fly ball, which allowed hitter Red Sox Clyde Engle to make it all the way to second. Engle would later score, tying the game at 2-2, and Red Sox went on to first load the bases, then score the winning run. Poor Snodgrass joined the ranks of dubious fame with Fred Merkle as a result.
The clouds of scandal appear early with the figure of Hal Chase. His willingness to throw games was so well-known that even fans took to chanting, “What’s the odds,” whenever Chase took the field. Players throughout baseball expressed their own discontent with the reserve clause and the complete control of owners over their contracts. The formation of the Federal League attempted to address this discontent in promising players the opportunity for free agency. The new league only lasted two seasons, however, and the players found themselves still without a voice.
On this disc, we meet pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, and we see more of the progression of Branch Rickey’s baseball career. The 1916 World Series went to the Boston Red Sox over the Brooklyn Superbas. The 1917 Series went to the Chicago White Sox over the New York Giants, then Boston returned to win the 1918 Series, this time over the Cubs. When World War I broke out, Major League Baseball as a whole seemingly turned a blind eye. Some players did serve during the war, including Grover Alexander, Ty Cobb, and Christy Mathewson, and Branch Rickey joined the effort as well.
The last half hour of the Third Inning went into detail covering the 1919 Black Sox scandal. I particularly found it fascinating that Burns managed to find a Chicago fan who had been fifteen years old at the time of the scandal. This fan recalled his disbelief that the White Sox had managed to lose the Series, being too young to understand the world of gambling at the time. His shock and disappointment no doubt reflected the feeling of baseball fans everywhere at the time. Though as Buck O’Neil describes at the very end of this disc, while the scandal turned a lot of folks away from the game at the time, it wouldn’t be long before a new hero would draw them back — a man named Babe Ruth.
During World War I, the Cincinnati Reds found themselves unable to get in touch with their manager, Christy Mathewson, who was in France serving in the Army. Thus, on January 30, 1919, the Reds hired former Phillies manager Pat Moran to fill the role. Moran led Cincinnati to a World Series Championship that season (albeit, a somewhat dubious one, given the Black Sox scandal).
I finished reading Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out this past week, the latest book assignment in my baseball literature class. It proved itself an eye-opening book. While I possessed a working familiarity with the Black Sox scandal of 1919, Eight Men Out goes into great detail regarding the various individuals involved in the scandal and how the whole thing might have gone down.
Amazon
Charles Comiskey’s Chicago White Sox were already a divided team going into the 1919 season. Half the team was uneducated, from relatively poor backgrounds, while the other half came from more affluent families, with the ability to afford the luxury of an education. Thus the division in the team formed.
As a whole, the White Sox players did not get paid as they felt they should have been paid, as Comiskey was a notorious tightwad. Granted, all baseball owners during this time did not give ballplayers their due, thanks to the reserve clause. But considering that he owned what was arguably the best team in baseball, Comiskey was the worst offender of all. He even went so far as to refuse to pay for the laundering of team uniforms.
According to Asinof, it was Chick Gandil, the White Sox first baseman, who first approached his gambling friend Sport Sullivan with the idea for the fix. Thus the labyrinth of mistrust, ill intentions, and back-stabbing began, and it continued to grow as more players and more gamblers became involved in this get-rich-quick scheme that involved the manipulation of the American pastime’s championship series. Asinof chronicles the games of the Series, describing sketchy plays and performances. He also details what I can only presume are his perceptions on the thoughts of the players and gamblers involved, including the growing uneasiness of Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, as well as the concerns of Eddie Cicotte and Chick Gandil that they would be double-crossed by the gamblers. The White Sox lost the World Series five games to three to the Cincinnati Reds, and the players involved in the fix never received the full amount of money they had been promised.
In spite of the large number of people involved in the fix, and even in spite of an awareness by Kid Gleason (the White Sox manager) and Charles Comiskey himself that something was not quite right about the Series, nothing happened for almost a year. Finally, however, in the wake of a fix between the Cubs and the Phillies, the 1919 World Series came into the national spotlight.
Signed confessions were given by Lefty Williams, Joe Jackson, and Eddie Cicotte. The eight players involved in the fix — Williams, Jackson, Cicotte, Gandil, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Fred McMullin, and Buck Weaver — were put on trial before a Grand Jury. Interestingly, however, none of the gamblers were tried. The players were found not guilty of conspiring to defraud the public. In spite of this, the new Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banished all eight men from baseball for life.
umkc.edu
I thoroughly enjoyed Asinof’s account of the Black Sox scandal. It is rich with detail and eloquently written, making it highly readable by the layman. It reads more like a narrative than a history text — and really, I hesitate to use the word “history” with regards to this particular book.
One thing I learned in our discussions about the book is that not all the details included are necessarily accurate. For example, Asinof describes a threat that was laid on pitcher Lefty Williams and his family if he did not carry out his part in the fix. However, Asinof later admitted that he invented this particular anecdote as a way of being able to tell if anyone was using his material. More importantly, Asinof does not cite his sources in the book. There are no footnotes, no bibliography. As I previously mentioned, his accounts of the thought processes of the players and gamblers appear to be largely speculation, as we cannot determine his sources for these descriptions.
In class, the professor challenged us to think about who is to blame for the 1919 World Series fix. Charles Comiskey? The players? The gamblers? The media? But really, there is no hard and fast answer to this question. While it does seem that Comiskey deserves the largest part of the burden, Asinof’s book clearly shows that there is nothing clear about this scandal. Charles Comiskey was not the only team owner who underpaid his players, the gamblers and the players all knew the immorality of their conspiracy to throw the Series, and the media hesitated to break the story even when they suspected something was going on. At the end of the day, the Black Sox scandal shows us that no one is immune to the temptations that easy money presents. It is a tragedy, no doubt — a devastating blow to the game of baseball and to the American public.
The Dead Ball Era, as the name suggests, was a period in baseball history characterized by low-scoring games and a lack of home runs. This age in baseball began in 1900 and lasted until Babe Ruth came onto the scene as a power hitter in 1919. Prior to Ruth, the game was more strategy-driven, featuring hit-and-run plays and base-stealing over hitting for power. In 1908, the lowest-scoring year, teams averaged only 3.4 runs per game. “Small ball,” as it’s known today, relied more on speed and quickness than on brute strength. Players like “Smoky” Joe Wood, Eddie Collins, and Sam Crawford flourished during this time.
Many baseball fields of the age were much larger than modern ballparks. Chicago’s West Side Grounds, for example, measured 560 feet to the center field fence. Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston measured 635 feet to the center field fence. By comparison, most ballparks today don’t measure much more than the requisite 400 feet to dead center, which makes a huge difference for a player’s ability to swing for the fences.
Huntington Avenue Grounds (Wikimedia Commons)
The state of the baseball throughout the game also contributed to the lack of home runs. The same ball was used throughout the game — unlike today, when even a tiny smudge on a ball calls for a new replacement. As the game would go on, the ball would become dirtier and dirtier, making it more difficult for hitters to see and hit. No doubt the extra dirt also contributed to the dynamics of the baseball’s movement.
Speaking of which, during the Dead Ball Era, pitcher could still legally throw a spitball. “Doctoring” the baseball in this way would alter the physics of the flight of the pitch, causing it to break or move in unexpected ways and making it more difficult to hit. Naturally, pitchers took advantage of this concession. And it wasn’t just the spitball: the emery ball, shine ball, mud ball, so on and so forth. Got any creative ideas for defacing a baseball? Give it a whirl and see what it does! The umpires won’t stop you.
On top of low-scoring contests, during these years, professional baseball also experienced turbulence through the births of baseball organizations outside of the National League. In 1900, the American League, which had been a minor league prior to this year, declared itself a Major League. Refusing to continuing recognition of the terms of the National Agreement, the AL now moved teams into cities already claimed by the NL, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. By 1902, the NL realized it would be better off accepting the American League, rather than fighting against it. A three-man National Commission was created to resolve the disagreements between the two leagues. Major League Baseball prospered and the World Series was born.
The birth of the Federal League in 1913 threatened this new-found prosperity. It launched an anti-trust lawsuit against the AL and the NL, which drained the two leagues of resources. Like the AL before it, the FL moved into already-established Major League territory, seeking to carve out its own place in Major League Baseball. In the end, however, the level of play in the FL did not match that of the other two leagues, and FL teams merged into the other Major Leagues.
The outbreak of World War I also proved detrimental to baseball. Baseball became viewed as a frivolous, non-essential activity, and seasons were shortened due to the wartime atmosphere. Attendance at ballgames dropped and the leagues lost money. The resulting drop in player salaries made them more susceptible to the promises of gambling, and created an environment in which things like the Black Sox scandal could take place.
The end of the Dead Ball Era came with the end of the factors that contributed to its existence in the first place. The elimination of the spitball in 1920 had a profound effect on players’ ability to hit the ball, as pitches became less lively. The death of Ray Chapman in August 1920 changed the rule about the same baseball being used throughout a game, and clean baseballs became a staple in order to ensure the safety of players. Naturally, clean baseballs were also easier to hit.
Additionally, the rise of Babe Ruth as a power hitter resulted in a change of attitudes in baseball. Ruth proved that a man could be successful in baseball by hitting home runs, and that the game was no longer restricted to “small ball” play. From 1900 until Ruth’s emergence, there were 13 seasons in which the league leader in home runs collected fewer than ten dingers. In 1919, Ruth hit 29 home runs — a league record. Other players followed his lead, and baseball scores steadily increased as the years went on.
Frankly, the title “Dead Ball Era” seems a bit unfair to me. In today’s game, fans have come to expect home runs. If a player isn’t at least collecting extra-base hits on a regular basis, he receives little or no recognition. However, it seems that a game driven by strategy would be much more captivating than the slug fests of today’s contests. Bunting, the hit-and-run, and base stealing would have their due as meaningful parts of the artistry of a baseball game. Baseball would be more like a chess match and less of a display of muscle and power. Furthermore, because they were so rare during the Dead Ball Era, home runs, when they did happen, were surround by a greater sense of excitement than they are today.
“Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Eddie Cicotte. Buck Weaver. Claude “Lefty” Williams. Fred McMullin. Arnold “Chick” Gandil. Oscar “Happy” Felsch. Charles “Swede” Risberg.
These are the men known today as the “Black Sox.” Accused of deliberately throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, these men were tried and acquitted of criminal charges. Unfortunately for them, however, acquittal was not enough to save their careers. They were banned from baseball for life.
Black Sox players pictured with their lawyers (Photo source: University of Missouri – Kansas City)
Having acquired outfielder Joe Jackson, second baseman Eddie Collins, and centerfielder Happy Felsch in 1915, the Chicago White Sox had put together one of the most successful teams in baseball. They won the 1917 World Series, and during the 1919 season had the best record in the American League. They won the AL pennant and were the favorite to win the nine-game World Series.
Surrounded by so much success and promise, what could possibly possess these players to even consider throwing away the championship series? It has been suggested that the reason lies with the White Sox founder and then-owner, Charles Comiskey. A lot of professional ballplayers during this period were underpaid (especially according to today’s standards), and this was particularly the case with the White Sox. In spite of his dedication to and success in building a strong baseball team, Comiskey was notoriously stingy.
During this period, players were bound to their teams by the “reserve clause,” which forbade them from switching teams without the owner’s permission. As a result, players had no leverage when it came to negotiating their salaries. Comiskey took full advantage of these circumstances, dishing out as little as possible as far as player salaries and team management. For example, on top of their low wages, Comiskey required players to pay for the laundering of their uniforms. When the team protested by refusing to wash their uniforms, allowing them to grow dirtier and dirtier for several weeks, Comiskey responded by removing the uniforms from their lockers and fining the players.
(Photo source: U-S-History.com)
Then, on 18 September 1919, White Sox first baseman Arnold “Chick” Gandil met with gambler Joseph “Sport” Sullivan, who convinced him that the World Series could be “bought,” and that such a fix could prove to be immensely profitable. It wasn’t long before Gandil was joined in the plot by the other members of what would be known as the “Black Sox.” Those involved in the scandal had salaries of $6,000 or less, which was at the low end for a team that was already underpaid overall. It’s not hard to see how these players could be drawn into such a scheme, in spite of its illegality.
The gamblers are said to have bet nearly half-a-million dollars in favor of the Reds winning the Series while agreeing to pay the eight White Sox players $100,000 to split. Once divided, that meant that each player would take home two to three years’ worth of pay.
Naturally, the players hoped that the arrangement would remain a secret, but a large number of people were involved just to make the plan work, and as folks hinted to their friends about who to bet on, word quickly spread. When the World Series concluded, rumors and complaints ran rampant in protest against the “fixed” World Series. By the end of 1920, the “Black Sox” nickname had become well-known, and the players were indicted. The trial proved to be a bit of a circus, however, as evidence went missing and testimonies blurred the story more than they cleared things up. The players were cleared of criminal charges.
In spite of their acquittal, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was charged with investigating the scandal and became the first Commissioner of Baseball, was not entirely convinced of the Black Sox’s innocence. In a statement, he declared,
“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”
The players were banned for life. Most of the Black Sox confessed to their involvement in the scandal (it is unclear as to how many actually did so), but on behalf of one who did not, controversy sprang up. Joe Jackson’s involvement in throwing the Series continues to be a topic of many debates among baseball fans. Jackson hit .375 during the Series, which certainly goes against the idea that he was intentionally playing below his ability. Some have argued that Jackson’s best games of the Series were the ones that the players were not intentionally trying to lose anyways. According to some reports, Jackson did make an effort to back out of the fix, but still collected $5,000 at some point during the Series.
“Shoeless Joe” Jackson (Photo source: SABR.org)
Without a doubt, the Black Sox scandal had a negative impact on baseball’s image. Landis’s decision to ban the players, followed by a crusade he led against gambling of any kind in baseball, helped to regain the confidence of fans and restore baseball’s place in American culture. Nevertheless, it is an event that has and will continue to live on in the minds and hearts, not just of baseball fans, but of American history in general.
Fleitz, David. “Shoeless Joe Jackson.” SABR Biography Project. Society for American Baseball Research. 2013. Web. Accessed 20 July 2013. http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/7afaa6b2
