Free Baseball by George Vecsey

baseball, lashed together, eight of them, in a ship that can never return to harbor. Even today, as the eight exiles from the 1919 Chicago White Sox bob outside the boundaries of their sport, they are a living reminder of what can go wrong when leadership fails.
    Christy Mathewson could see it happening, right below him. Weakened from his wartime gassing, he had been unable to resume his job as manager of the Reds, but agreed to write about the 1919 World Series for the
New York World.
He sat in the press box next to his friend Hugh Fullerton of the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, who had been warned of a possible gambling conspiracy.
    The former pitcher and the diligent reporter watched the body language and the positioning, not merely the hits and the errors. They spotted the White Sox' catcher, Ray (Cracker) Schalk, arguing with Lefty Williams, one of the Sox' best pitchers, out near the mound, and detected Kid Gleason, the manager, in a visible fury. The two friends operated on the theory that hitters hated to give up base hits and, if they wanted to hurt their own team, would much prefer to botch a play on defense. Mathewson and Fullerton began circling suspicious defensive plays by some of the most adept fielders on the Sox—not overt fumbles or bad throws but perhaps a slight hesitancy or elliptical route to the ball, turning a single into a double, just enough to affect a game.
    Few fans picked up on these nuances. The nation had been stunned by the whiff of mortality during the war that had affected even a golden man like Mathewson. Once able to pitch every few days, he was now a pale specter hunched over his scorecard. The prevalent mood of the nation—even with Prohibition on the way— was,
Let's have a drink.
    Certainly, the baseball owners were not looking for trouble. The game had bounced back, attendance leaped from 3 million in 1918 to 6.5 million in 1919. Happy days were here again. The owners hadnot developed any centralized leadership, making Ban Johnson the most powerful executive, giving him freedom to feud with renegade owners as well as successive National League presidents. The friendly ruling by Judge Landis in Chicago had enforced the owners' control of the players.
    Like the rest of the country, the owners wanted a respite from the sudden chilling awareness that America was linked to the rest of the world. People were back at work, making money, investing money, spending money. The game was one other way of forgetting. Gambling was another. The managing job had opened up for Mathewson in Cincinnati because the Reds' ownership had been hesitant to choose the more logical candidate, Hal Chase, the stylish first baseman, who had a reputation as a gambler. McGraw had volunteered his surrogate son, Mathewson, as an alternative to the high-living first baseman known as Prince Hal.
    As a novice manager, Mathewson observed Chase occasionally bungle a play by making a slightly inaccurate toss to the pitcher or fail to reach a ground ball, plays he would normally make with ease. Mathewson learned that Chase had handed a young pitcher $50, saying he had bet on the Reds to lose, but the charge was ignored by John Heydler, the weak president of the National League. Mathewson inexplicably shipped Chase to his friend McGraw, who, by 1918, banished Chase from the Giants. The long tolerance of Chase had built up a climate of gambling in baseball. Now there were volunteers for a bigger scandal.
    —
    In 1919, gamblers found disillusioned players on the South Side of Chicago, toiling for the White Sox of Charles Comiskey. Once an artist at first base and a key member of an early players association, Comiskey now showed nothing but disdain for the current players, who were bound to him by the reserve clause. He had accumulated a superlative squad, but paid most players far below the norm. Eddie Collins, from Columbia University, made sure his $14,500 salary was guaranteed when he came over from Connie Mack's Athletics,