Free Baseball by George Vecsey Page B

individual games but by wisely trusting the dumpers to perform their task in the longer run. Other gamblers were not so wise, betting the wrong way in games the White Sox won.
    Mathewson, for all the circles on his scorecard and his history with Hal Chase in Cincinnati, never referred to the discrepancies when he filed his newspaper articles from the Series. Fullerton, who had predicted the Sox would win, made not-very-reassuring comments that, despite rumors of a gambling coup, the Reds were winning on the up-and-up. At the same time, Ring Lardner, the authorand columnist with the
Chicago Tribune
, made some sour comments in print and even directed pointed remarks at the White Sox players during the Series. He was said to have sung a parody of “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” that included the lyrics “I'm forever blowing ball games, and the gamblers treat us fair.”
    In the media circus of the twenty-first century, one would like to think that an open cabal by eight players on one team would surely come to the attention, or at least the paranoia, of assorted reporters, announcers, and bloggers—but look how long it took for all of us to pay attention to the steroids plague of the late 1990s. At most, the few public hints prodded Comiskey to release a statement that said, in part, “I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level, as they have always done.” He did, however, withhold the eight players' World Series shares, $3,154.27 each, and announced a reward of $20,000 for any information about a gambling scandal. In mid-November he released the eight checks to the players, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over. It did not.
    After seven of the eight players played for the Sox through 1920, the scandal began to be investigated by a grand jury in Chicago. The players were so uneducated that they allowed Comiskey's staff to furnish them free legal advice, which was to cooperate with the grand jury, on the promise the club would protect them. Jackson, who depended on his wife to read his contracts, spoke openly to the grand jury, without benefit of counsel. The players were found not guilty, and celebrated in public, assuming they could play the following season.
    The owners, however, realized they needed to restore some semblance of faith in baseball. Some had grown tired of the power Ban Johnson had wielded over the years and on November 12, 1920, they hired a commissioner, the very same Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had given them such a favorable decision back in the 1915 Federal League case. (Landis had acquired his name because his father, a Union medic, had been shot in the leg during a Civil War battle at Kennesaw Mountain outside Marietta, Georgia. The dropping of one “n” appears to have been nothing more than a misspelling.)
    With his thick shock of white hair and his rugged profile backingup his cachet as the owners' new hammer, Landis summarily banned all eight players for life. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he said in a press release. “Men associating with gamblers and crooks could expect no leniency.”
    None of the eight Black Sox would ever play organized ball again. Weaver, in particular, seemed shocked at being banished, since by all accounts he had never cooperated with the plot, or taken money, or slacked off during the Series. He had failed to report what he had heard, and that was quite enough for Landis and the suddenly militant owners. The eight players, who ranged from sinister (Gandil) to naive (Weaver), were linked for life, and beyond. Their expulsion from the Garden would stand as the game's Original Sin, haunting the White Sox franchise into the next century.
    While Judge Landis made an example of the eight White Sox, he proved to be more hesitant about lifetime punishment for two great players, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, who had apparently fixed a game in 1919 that affected the final standings. When that incident