Free The Original Curse by Sean Deveney Page B

time they finally got to Deming, near the Mexican border, they still had to head about 40 miles north to the copper mine at Santa Rita (a town so small it no longer exists) in cars. The ride took two hours. According to the
Daily News
, “Traveling Secretary John Seys has a few more gray hairs trying to get the club to its destination.” 19 Once in Santa Rita, the Cubs were slated to play the mining company team, headed by former journeyman pitcher “Sleepy” Bill Burns. Because the Cubs arrived late, they could not get back to Deming and spent the night at the mining companies’ dormitories. It wasn’t all bad. Burns was pleased to be among big-league friends. The Cubs “were given an excellent wild turkey dinner, at which Bill Burns … was the host. Burns killed the birds himself.” 20
    Let’s pause to remember exactly who Bill Burns would become—one of the central characters in the World Series scandal that turned the 1919 White Sox into the Black Sox. Burns and his partner, Billy Maharg, helped orchestrate the plot to throw the series and attempted to have the venture backed by gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein. After Rothstein ostensibly turned him down, Burns was approached by Rothstein’s right-hand man, ex-boxer Abe Attell, who promised he’d get Rothstein to finance the fix after all. Burns and the Sox playersproceeded with the scam. When the grand jury began investigating the 1919 World Series, Burns turned state’s evidence.
    But here was Burns, 18 months ahead of the Black Sox plot, hosting dinner for one of the favorites to represent the National League in the 1918 World Series. That’s no crime, of course, but there are Burns-related dots that are interesting to connect. In an interview given to
Eight Men Out
author Eliot Asinof, Abe Attell pointed out that Burns was no stranger to fixes. Before Game 3 of the 1919 World Series, Attell said he was visited by Burns, who warned him about Dickie Kerr, that day’s starting pitcher. Kerr was not part of the Black Sox fix. Here’s what Attell (who, it should be noted, had only a loose association with the truth) said Burns advised when it came to betting against Kerr: “I’m an old-time ballplayer and we’ve been behind pitchers and tried to lose a game and he pitched such a good game, the players couldn’t toss it off.” 21
    Burns himself claimed to have bet heavily against Kerr and lost. Either way, we can assume Burns had been involved in game fixing during his career. And we know he played with several members of the Cubs, including Alexander and Bill Killefer in Philadelphia in 1911. Those two were dubbed “crooked” by Phillies owner William Baker, according to Grabiner’s diary, and were sold because of it. (Maharg, too, had connections here. It appears he was sort of an honorary Phillie. In 1916, at age 35, he played one game for the Phillies and was photographed as the team’s assistant trainer. 22 ) Burns played with Cubs coach Otto Knabe in Philadelphia, too, and according to Grabiner’s diary Knabe was no stranger to baseball gambling either.
    All of this is not to say that the Cubs and Burns sat down to plot a throwing of the 1918 World Series then and there, while chomping on drumsticks and white meat. But it’s a lot of dots. Gamblers were never far from players. If some Cubs got a notion to dabble in game fixing, it would not be hard to find those who could make it profitable.
    After the interlude with Burns’s turkeys, the Cubs continued their crawl back to the Midwest. Opening Day in St. Louis, on April 16, was the ultimate destination. Each stop was punctuated by games played at war camps before crowds of soldiers in drab uniforms—the “Khaki League” tour. They faced Burns’s Santa Rita team at Camp Cody in Deming, and, before the game, the Cubs watched a group of about 20,000 soldiers perform in a review parade. Then it was off to Houston on April 9, to play the Texas League’s Buffaloes for thebenefit of the Camp