{"id":18264,"date":"2019-10-16T00:42:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T00:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=18264"},"modified":"2019-10-18T12:44:01","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T12:44:01","slug":"how-gambling-built-baseball-and-then-almost-destroyed-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-gambling-built-baseball-and-then-almost-destroyed-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How gambling built baseball \u2013 and then almost destroyed it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Edwards<\/a>, Rochester Institute of Technology<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Imagine if, after watching the thrilling victory of the Chicago Cubs in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series<\/a> over the Cleveland Indians \u2013 a game in which the Cubs won their first championship in over a century \u2013 you learned that the Indians had collaborated with gamblers to intentionally throw the series.<\/p>\n

Would you trust the game, its umpires and its players, ever again?<\/p>\n

That was the scope of the crisis that enveloped baseball a century ago, when key members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, including pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude \u201cLefty\u201d Williams, conspired to throw the series to their opponents<\/a>, the Cincinnati Reds.<\/p>\n

What became known as the \u201cBlack Sox Scandal\u201d rocked professional baseball. But it wasn\u2019t an aberration in a sport that was otherwise clean.<\/p>\n

Baseball became America\u2019s national pastime because of \u2013 and not in spite of \u2013 gambling.<\/p>\n

Gambling fuels baseball\u2019s rise<\/h2>\n

In his book \u201cBaseball in the Garden of Eden<\/a>,\u201d historian John Thorn explains how gambling was far from an \u201cimpediment to the game\u2019s flowering\u201d; instead, it was \u201cthe vital fertilizer.\u201d<\/p>\n

In baseball\u2019s infancy, the sport was thought of as a boy\u2019s game. But over the course of the 19th century, gambling deepened adult interest and investment in the sport, attracting cohorts of older fans.<\/p>\n

Gambling\u2019s popularity was helped along by the spread of statistics, that particular lifeblood of baseball that still keeps fans hooked today<\/a>. Developed initially to allow the results of a game to be printed onto the page in the form of box scores<\/a>, statistics also created a pool of data that gamblers could use to inform their bets \u2013 many of which were made from the stands, in the middle of games.<\/p>\n

In his history of Fenway Park<\/a>, Glenn Stout describes how, in the ballpark\u2019s early years, \u201cthe best seats were quickly taken over by a rabid contingent of gamblers who bet on absolute everything imaginable, ranging from the eventual winner \u2026 to ball and strike calls\u201d and \u201ceven such arcane issues as whether the wind would change direction.\u201d Fans waving dollar bills and barking out bets resembled \u201cbrokers on the floor of the stock exchange.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kind of gambling was so common in the stands that Ernest Lawrence Thayer\u2019s iconic 1888 poem, \u201cCasey at the Bat<\/a>,\u201d captured such a moment in one of its stanzas:<\/p>\n

\u201cA straggling few got up to go in deep despair.<\/p>\n

The rest clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;<\/p>\n

They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that \u2013<\/p>\n

We\u2019d put up even money now with Casey at the bat.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Playing to lose<\/h2>\n

Some players also sought to get in on the action.<\/p>\n

In 1919, the highest-paid player<\/a> was Detroit Tigers outfielder Ty Cobb, who earned US$20,000 \u2013 which equates to roughly $300,000 today, or less than Major League Baseball\u2019s current minimum salary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most of Cobb\u2019s peers earned far less than the future Hall of Famer. Working with gamblers was an attractive way to supplement their incomes \u2013 and many of them did.<\/p>\n

One of the most notorious was first baseman Hal Chase. Dubbed the \u201cBlack Prince of Baseball<\/a>\u201d by baseball historians Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella, Chase made a veritable career out of throwing games. Playing mostly with the New York Highlanders, Chase, as Charles Fountain noted<\/a>, \u201cthrew games for money, he threw games for spite, he threw games as a favor for friends, he threw games apparently for no reason at all other than to stay in practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this wasn\u2019t the kind of gambling that brought baseball to the brink of disaster in 1919. That scandal saw the players themselves \u2013 working in tandem with professional gamblers and gangsters \u2013 fix the World Series.<\/p>\n

The 1919 World Series was the best-attended Series<\/a> at that point in the game\u2019s history, but the play of the White Sox turned the games into elaborate theatrical performances.<\/p>\n

Those in on it had to play to lose, and the statistics are telling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shortstop Swede Risberg hit .080 \u2013 not a typo \u2013 while committing four fielding errors. Outfielder Happy Felsch didn\u2019t do much better, hitting .192, with just five hits in 26 at-bats. He also committed two errors. Pitcher Claude \u201cLefty\u201d Williams surrendered 12 runs in 16.1 innings of work.<\/p>\n

While the players tried to pull off authentic performances for fans, they weren\u2019t always successful. Felsch was chided by his fellow cheaters<\/a> for his blunders in center, which they deemed too obvious.<\/p>\n

Fundamentally, however, the games lacked the core drama and appeal of sports: the uncertainty of the outcome.<\/p>\n

Sportswriters took notice. Rumors were already flying in the press box before the World Series\u2019 conclusion that something was wrong. Sports journalist Hugh Fullerton had heard these rumors when he arrived to cover the series, though he tried to convince himself \u2013 and his readers \u2013 that the story couldn\u2019t be true. Still, once the series ended, Fullerton wrote worriedly<\/a> in the Chicago Herald and Examiner that \u201cYesterday\u2019s, in all probability, is the last game that will be played in any World Series.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fullerton kept pursuing the story and became the first sportswriter to break the details to the public in December 1919, with an article in the New York World entitled, \u201cIs Big League Baseball Being Run for Gamblers, with Players In on the Deal?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

As more details emerged, the scandal overwhelmed the sport and threatened to destroy it. If the World Series itself, baseball\u2019s premier event, could not be trusted, how would the sport survive?<\/p>\n

\"\"
Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The new baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis<\/a>, acted decisively and independently of the courts. Even after the players were acquitted in a trial that ended on Aug. 2, 1921, Landis \u2013 a former federal judge \u2013 had already made his decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cRegardless of the verdict of juries,\u201d he announced, on the morning of Aug. 3, 1921<\/a>, \u201cno player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference \u2026 where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stunned White Sox players \u2013 including stars like \u201cShoeless\u201d Joe Jackson, who had hit .375 in the series but was nonetheless aware of what his teammates were up to \u2013 were banned from baseball for life.<\/p>\n

The specter of 1919<\/h2>\n

Seventy years later, commissioner Bart Giamatti acted in a similarly swift and punitive manner when he banned all-time hits leader Pete Rose from baseball in 1989.<\/p>\n