The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
from The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The nice thing about writing a blog is that you have the freedom to write whatever you please because you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder. The bad part is you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder reigning in your compulsions and keeping you honest. I know my posts tend to come in on the long side and that's putting it mildly. Even so, I often have more material to cover than even I am willing to include in a single post. When that happens, I usually decide it's time for a break and continue with a part two, sometimes even a part three.
In my last post, the one about Shoeless Joe Jackson possibly getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I came to a natural end point and left it at that.
Yet, long as that post was, there was still more I wanted to cover on the subject, so I'll be doing that in this post.
There are a couple other reasons. First, it gives me the opportunity to cover one of my favorite subjects, baseball history. Some people assume that because I write about it so often, I must be a rabid baseball fan. The truth is I'm not. I would have a hard time coming up with a list of a dozen current Major League ball players off the top of my head, including those on my hometown teams. I leave that to my son. But I do love the history of the game which ties in, in some curious ways, to the history of this country, especially its urban history, which is what this blog is ostensibly about. At least that's what it says on the masthead.
Writing about baseball also helps me contemplate a topic that has little or nothing to do with the current state of the world, especially American politics, which I've written about ad nauseam for the past ten or so years.
After all, how many ways are there to spell shit show?
Ok now that's off my chest...
One of the things that keeps me interested in the story of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox, (eight members of whom including their star left fielder Joe Jackson, conspired to intentionally lose the World Series), is not so much the story itself, but the myths surrounding the story and how willing folks are to buy into them, and to what lengths they will go to defend them, over a century after the fact.
That's pretty much par for the course in the game as until fairly recently, baseball history was not considered a subject worthy of serious study. Its major chroniclers were sports writers, albeit some very good ones. The problem is, these writers may have been good story tellers, but they were lousy historians. Putting it another way, baseball traditionally had a lot of Homers, but few if any Thucydides. Consequently, much of baseball history is built upon a string of myths, (including its own creation myth) with a few facts thrown in for good measure.
Here's a good article written by a real historian, in fact, the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn. In his piece, Thorn cites an article from the Society of the Advancement of Baseball Research, which debunks many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the Black Sox Scandal.
However I do have a bone to pick, ok maybe just a nit, with an issue that Thorn brings up.
It's the idea that Babe Ruth "saved" baseball from the existential threat to the game brought on by the Black Sox Scandal.
I bring that up because when I told my friend Rich about the last post I was about to write, he made the comment: "Babe Ruth saved baseball after the scandal didn't he?" Even though I've gone on record making that claim, I've had my doubts about the subject for a few years now with nothing to really back it up, so I just answered in the affirmative.
My current feeling is not to diminish Babe Ruth's impact on the game of baseball one bit. I agree with John Thorn and countless others that with his free swinging, all-or-nothing approach to hitting the baseball, there is no person who singlehandedly changed the modern game more than the Sultan of Swat. I commented in an earlier post about a list where Thorn ranked in order the 100 most important people in baseball history. As much of a cliché it may seem, you-know-who was number one.
Jackie Robinson came in at number two.
Many people would argue that it should be the other way around and I see their point. But my argument, take it or leave it, is that Jackie Robinson was the Neil Armstrong of baseball, that is to say his groundbreaking role as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball history, was the culmination of the efforts of many people, especially the scores of Negro League players who came before him and upon whose shoulders he stood. There is no doubt that he played the role into which he was cast brilliantly and for that he is well deserving of all the accolades. But if it hadn't been Jackie Robinson, like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, it would have been someone else.
On the other hand, Babe Ruth changed baseball (some would argue not necessarily for the better*), all by himself.
But did his presence in the game on the heels of baseball's "original sin", its "loss of innocence" and all the other dubious, grandiloquent labels we've come to accept that describe the 1919 World Series Scandal, really save the game from ruin?
I would argue no, for there is in fact little evidence that the scandal rocked the game to its core and that consequently, the game wasn't in any need of being saved.
Consider the quote at the top of this post from the novel The Great Gatsby. In it, Nick Carroway, the book's narrator is describing a lunchtime meeting where he joins Gatsby and one of his associates, Meyer Wolfsheim. Carroway describes his first impressions of Wolfsheim this way:
A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.The trio lunch together and Fitzgerald, in Calloway's voice goes into detail contrasting the demeanor of Wolfsheim with that of the two Gentiles, Gatsby and Carroway, in words that would never fly today, At one point Gatsby excuses himself leaving Carroway alone with Wolfsheim who directs Carroway's attention to his own cufflinks which turn out to be made of human molars.
After lunch, Carroway asks Gatsby who this curious character Wolfsheim was, a dentist perhaps?
"Meier Wolfsheim?" replies Gatsby. The narration continues:
"No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”Then comes the line quoted at the top of this post.
But what really interests me about the quote is this line: "I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919." As has been well noted, this year, 2025 marks the centennial of the publication of The Great Gatsby. Which brings to mind that at the time of the book's release, the Black Sox Scandal had only been a few years old. The Great Gatsby actually is set in 2022, only one year after the trial and banishment of the eight players involved in the scandal. Yet Fitzgerald's use of the world "remembered" sounds as if Calloway was recalling an event that had happened in the distant past, perhaps a decade or even a generation before. If the event was grave enough to have challenged the faith of 50 million people (just less than one half the U.S. population at the time), AND had happened only one year before, one would think Fitzgerald might have used the term "I knew of course" rather than "I remembered..."
One might argue that Fitzgerald was living in Paris at the time he was writing Gatsby so he would have been farther removed from the event than had he been stateside. But I have perhaps a more plausible explanation.
Maybe the Black Sox Scandal wasn't as big a deal with baseball fans as we today assume it was. Could it be that Fitzgerald as well as Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Elliot Asinov and other writers who took it on as a subject, used the event as purely a literary device rather than an accurate depiction of history? After all, these authors were first and foremost great story tellers, not historians.
OK that's pure speculation, but there is some empirical evidence that backs up my claim that the 1919 Black Sox Scandal really didn't have an existential impact on the game, attendance at ballparks.
The data comes from the site: BallparksofBaseball.com
Between 1910 and 1916, total yearly attendance for the 16 Major League teams, eight in each league, ranged between 4.5 and 6.5 million fans. On April 17, 1917, the United States entered World War I but despite that, MLB attendance remained within that range at 4.8 million that year.
However, attendance took a drastic hit in 1918 as many players were either drafted and entered the service or as was the case of Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams, two of the banished 1919 White Sox players, chose to leave baseball to work for commercial enterprises with government contracts that were deemed "essential" to the war effort. There they spent most of their time playing exhibition baseball. With a good number of ball players off to war or somewhere else, attendance took a big hit, coming in at 2.8 million.
World War I ended in November of that year and MLB attendance bounded back in 1919, slightly topping the previous record of the decade at 6,532,439.
Word of the fixing of the Series didn't become public until just before the end of the 1920 season and that year saw a dramatic increase in attendance, up to 9,120,875. If you know your baseball history, you know that was the year that much to the chagrin of their fans, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Much of that jump in attendance is a result of New York City alone as attendance for Yankees home games more than doubled from 619,164 in 1919 to a staggering 1,289,422 in 1920.
You may recall that Ruth started out as a pitcher. That all changed when he moved south to New York because, valuable as he was on the mound, his presence everyday in the lineup as a slugging outfielder was even more valuable. As an everyday presence in the lineup, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920. He broke the previous record of 29, set by himself the previous year, on July 19, halfway into the season. By the way, the previous record of 27 homers in one year that Ruth broke in 1919, was set by Ned Williamson in 1884.
Ruth's 54 home run record lasted all of one year. He hit 59 the following year and 60 in 1927, for arguably the best Major League team ever.
That record stood until another Yankee, Roger Maris broke it in 1961.
So yes indeed, Babe Ruth's becoming a Yankee had a profound impact on the popularity of baseball, becoming more profound every subsequent year in the decade of the twenties.
But it must be remembered that as a member of the American League, Babe Ruth only played against American League teams, half of the teams in Major League baseball.
It wasn't just New York, attendance was up for every team in the majors in 1920, American and National League, except for Detroit for some reason, and for both Boston teams, the Red Sox, for obvious reasons, and their crosstown rivals the Braves. Maybe for them it was a matter of guilt by association.
Of course Babe Ruth never played against National League teams during the regular season so it can safely be assumed that he had little impact on the attendance at National League parks, at least until later years when players all over the Majors adopted his style of hitting.
Anyway the 1919 Scandal surfaced and became public at the end of the 1920 season so one would expect that if it had a major impact on the game, it would have been reflected in the attendance at ballgames in 1921 and the subsequent years. Indeed, overall attendance did drop by about five percent in 1921.
Much of that loss can be accounted for by the understandable drop in attendance of 35 percent for White Sox home games alone. Was it out of disgust with the scandal or simply the fact that the team, one of the best in baseball at the time, overnight lost three out of its four starting infielders, two of its three starting outfielders, and two of its starting pitchers? The White Sox wouldn't become competitive again until the 1950s. And the Red Sox in 1921 continued to hemorrhage fans, about 30 percent of them from '20 to '21, clearly out of disgust with their owner Harry Frazee, who allegedly sold Babe Ruth to finance his theatrical ambitions.
As for the rest of the teams in baseball, 1921 was more or less break even, some teams gained fans, while others lost fans. The same was true in subsequent years but with overall attendance increasing gradually year by year.
Maybe you see something in those numbers that I don't, but to me they don't show any clear indication that baseball as a whole was in serious trouble after the Black Sox Scandal.
In fact, in the years after the 1919 affair, every team in baseball except the Red Sox, turned a profit. That includes the Chicago White Sox.
Yes, much of that is due to Babe Ruth who for his part, invented and defined the role of baseball superstar, while the game he represented, gladly went along for the ride.
Because of that, the image of Ruth, the Redeemer in pinstripes, fits in nicely with the narrative of the betrayal of the faith of 50 million people brought on by baseball's "Original Sin".
But that's all likely as much a part of baseball mythology as is so much of the legacy of hands down the game's greatest player with once exception. Babe Ruth really was that.
Yet the loss of innocence part is all hooey. Outside of a parent and child playing catch, baseball at its purest, there never has been anything remotely innocent about the game.
In fact, just like the kid outside the courthouse in Chicago during the trial of the Chicago eight allegedly saying to Jackson: "Say it ain't so Joe",*** one of the most important milestones every American youngster experiences, is having to learn that hard lesson.
In that vein I'll close with a couple excerpts from one of my all time favorite writings on baseball, the article Mike Royko wrote to honor Jackie Robinson, written on the day the great man died.
Royko was as good storyteller as there was, but this is as real as it gets:
All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.
Most of the things they said, I didn't understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?
They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.
I've forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn't get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.
But two things happened I'll never forget. Robinson played first, and early in the game a Cub star hit a grounder and it was a close play.
Just before the Cub reached first, he swerved to his left. And as he got to the bag, he seemed to slam his foot down hard at Robinson's foot.
It was obvious to everyone that he was trying to run into him or spike him. Robinson took the throw and got clear at the last instant.
I didn't know that while the white fans were relatively polite, the Cubs and most other teams kept up a steady stream of racial abuse from the dugout. I thought that all they did down there was talk about how good Wheaties are.****
NOTES:
*They call it the "Deadball Era", when most of the drama of the game took place on the base paths rather than at home plate. It was the style of hitting and baserunning that created this, not the liveliness or lack thereof of the balls. Players could have hit home runs as Ty Cobb proved time and again, but they chose instead to make contact and keep the ball in play to get on base in any way they could, rather than swinging the bat as hard as possible trying to get the ball out of the park, thereby increasing the possibility of striking out, which Babe Ruth did a lot, for his time at least. But to the fans, the home run became the ultimate symbol of success in the game, and the hard-scrabble fight for every base type of play that Cobb and his contemporaries personified, went out of style. Some would say, to a certain degree anyway, it's coming back. I'm all for that.
**For 10 years the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the National League Giants. The original Yankee Stadium, dubbed "The House that Ruth Built" opened in 1923.
***Yet another piece of dubious baseball lore.
****From Jackie's Debut a Unique Day, written by, Mike Royko and published in the Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1972. Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece because its real payoff, the second thing Royko mentions he'd never forget, comes at the very end. You can find it, along with a couple other articles by the great columnist here.
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