"The Faith of Fifty Million People"

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.

The character of Meyer Wolfsheim was a none too subtle reference to the real Arthur Rothstein, the New York gangster who played a role in the Black Sox Scandal.

If you can get past the anti-semetic subcontext, the line about playing with the faith of 50 million people is inspired. It was appropriated in addition to me, by Ken Burns as the title to his chapter on the decade of the nineteen teens in his Baseball TV series. 

The quote above is also inaccurate, as it is commonly accepted that no, the 1919 Series wasn't "fixed" by one man, rather that the players themselves came up with the idea.

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 1922, 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. 

In 1920, the Yankees' National League stadium-mates the New York Giants** saw their 1920 attendance increase by over 200,000 from the previous year. More dramatic, over in Brooklyn, the National League Robins (today's LA Dodgers), attendance went from 360 thousand+ in 1919, to a little over 800 thousand in 1920. 

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 one 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 Shoeless Joe 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 had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

...

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 was shocked. That Cub, a hometown boy, was my biggest hero. It was not only an unheroic stunt, but it seemed a rude thing to do in front of people who would cheer for a foul ball. I didn't understand why he had done it. It wasn't at all big league.

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.

Say It Ain't So...

Major League Baseball's Mount Rushmore.

Pictured top row, left to right: Honus Wagner, Gover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napolion Lajoie, George Sissler, Walter Johnson.

Bottom row: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young.

By purely photographic standards, this is not the greatest baseball photograph ever made. That honor in my humble opinion would have to go to Charles Conlon's remarkable picture of Ty Cobb giving all 110 percent of himself sliding into third, sending New York Highlander (Yankee) third baseman Jimmy Austin airborne in his futile attempt to tag out the redoubtable "Georgia Peach", as umpire Silk O'Laughlin gets himself into position in the background to make the call. 

Click here to see the familiar, highly cropped version of the photo. 

But no less remarkable at least as a historical document is this portrait of nine old men at the Major League Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the first such event in Cooperstown, New York on Jun 12, 1939. At the very least, three of those pictured above represent what would have to be considered part of baseball's equivalent of Mount Rushmore. All the rest would be close runners up.

The question of who belongs and who doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame is probably the most frequent topic of debate among baseball people, and even this esteemed group has its detractors, at the very least in the sense of omission.

So who is not in this photo that should be?

First and foremost is a group of perhaps an equal number of players who weren't allowed to play in the major leagues because of the color of their skin. One might consider the following:

• Shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd
• Catcher Louis Santop
• Outfielder Pete Hill
• Pitcher José Méndez
• First Baseman and manager Ben Taylor
• Outfielder Cristóbal Torriente
• Second Baseman Frank Grant
• Infielder/Executive/Historian Sol White
• Pitcher/Manager/Executive Rube Foster

It wouldn't be until 1971 that a player was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame solely based upon his career in what became known collectively as the "Negro Leagues." Fortunately the irony of the original plan to honor these men and one woman of the game in a "separate but equal" room in Cooperstown was not lost on what today would be called the "woke" crowd, who in a much different day and age, were not excoriated for believing that everybody deserves to be treated equally and fairly. 

To date there are 35 Negro League players and two non-player executives enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There should be more.

Nevertheless, the nine players listed above, all eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame for their contributions to the game of baseball, ended their playing careers at least five years before the event pictured at Cooperstown, which would have made them eligible for the "Class of '39". 

One might argue that it is impossible to compare these players to "Major Leaguers" because they didn't get the chance to complete against them. 

But they did, not in officially sanctioned MLB games, but in countless exhibition games which became discouraged by MLB executives because the teams made up of black players usually won. For their part, most big-league stars understood the undeniable fact that Major League Baseball of their time, did not represent the best ballplayers, but only a fraction of them.

Babe Ruth was one of those players who understood.

Ted Williams was another. In his induction speech at the Hall of Fame in 1966, the "Splendid Splinter" said this:

...I've always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape major home run. And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol, the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.

It is said that speech was one of the driving forces behind admitting Negro League players into the Hall. Still, it took five years. On the other hand, we should be thankful for that because given today's animus toward diversity, equity and inclusion, had they waited until our time, it might never have happened.

OK that had to be said, I'm off my soapbox now.

Who else isn't in that photo? Well, the aforementioned Ty Cobb of course, who was part of the group, perhaps the fourth face on baseball's Mount Rushmore along with Cy Young, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth. Personally, I'd put Walter Johnson up there too but that would make five. I'm OK with that.

Ty Cobb isn't in the photo because he showed up late that day.

Anyone else?

Ok now to the intended topic of this post.

Portrait of Joe Jackson by Charles Conlon, 1913

A lot of folks believe that one of the greatest injustices of the game is the fact that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson wasn't there. He still isn't.  

That may not be for long as Major League Baseball has just reinstated Jackson along with seven of his teammates from the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series that year. That means Jackson will be eligible to be voted into the Hall in 2028 by a special group of electors called the "Historical Overview Committee" made up of baseball historians and veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Jackson certainly has to be ranked among the greatest hitters in the game, ending up with a career batting average of .356, placing him in fourth place in that category among MLB and Negro League players. *

No less than Ty Cobb AND Babe Ruth both credited Jackson for inspiring their own approach to hitting. Here's what Cobb allegedly once told Jackson:

Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I'd stop and take a look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.

And here's Babe Ruth on Shoeless Joe:

Babe Ruth and Joe Jackson, 1920

I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.

Were it not for Jackson's decision to accept money from gamblers and not do everything he could to help win the World Series for his team, its fans and its city, Joe Jackson would have certainly been standing with the likes of the Rushmore crowd in that photograph. 

This is an account of his prowess as the most naturally gifted, if not necessarily the smartest player of his time, written in 1916 by F.C. Lane and introduced by the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn.

Here's a little taste of the piece: 

Joe Jackson had simply native gifts, which, in themselves, have never been equaled. It was as natural for him to hit a baseball as it was for his early forebears to hit a squirrel in the eye at a hundred yards.

Gambling had always been a part of the game, there's no argument that gambling is what made baseball, like horse racing and boxing, a popular spectator sport in the first place. And paying off players to not do their best to win had also been around for a good long time. It was fairly well established that members of the 1918 Chicago Cubs were paid to throw that series against Boston, allegedly inspiring the members of their crosstown rivals to do the same the following year. And that Cubs team was not the first accused to having thrown a World Series by a long shot. 

To paraphrase the Chicago author Studs Terkel, while the 1919 White Sox may not have been the most corrupt team in baseball, they were hands down the most theatrically corrupt. 

And like all good theater, the drama of the 1919 World Series that has been handed down to us over the ages, is a mixture of some facts for plausibility's sake, mixed in with whole lot of fiction to keep it interesting.

Studs Terkel had a small role in the John Sayles film Eight Men Out which was based on the 1963 novel of the same name, written by Elliot Asinov. While the novel and subsequent film were one of many popular accounts of the Black Sox Scandal over the years, for some reason the film and especially the book are unfortunately considered by many (including so called "America's historian" Ken Burns) to be the definitive word on the subject. This despite the fact that the book's author made no claim his was a work of serious historical inquiry, and openly admitted having invented key elements of the story. **

Here is a piece published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) highlighting the myths about the scandal which were promoted in the book and movie.

The most enduring myth promoted in the book is laying the weight of the blame on the whole sordid affair not on the players, but at the feet of their boss, owner and founder of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey. 

I won't go into it here as I wrote an entire post on the subject, except to say that this line from the book referring to the 1919 Sox...

No players of comparable talent on other teams were paid as little.

...which was repeated almost verbatim in Ken Burns's epic PBS docudrama titled Baseball, has absolutely no basis in fact. 

Research involving the unearthing of player-salary cards from the era, has discovered that the 1919 White Sox team had one of the highest team payrolls in baseball and most of their players had higher salaries than comparable players on other teams. 

The argument that the players were justified in their actions in order to recoup what was due them because they were vastly underpaid, is simply not true. 

So why did they do it?

This might give you an idea. Joe Jackson admitted that he was offered $20,000 (more than three times his salary***) for his part in the fix. He then complained bitterly AND publicly under oath that he only got $5,000 from the gangsters. 

Of course it was for the money, the players just wanted more of it, a lot more. 

Those in the know had an inkling something was suspicious before the series even started as the odds for the highly favored White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds went down precipitously shortly before the first game. Some uncharacteristically sloppy play in the field and sub-par pitching, convinced the cognoscenti, including the great Christy Matthewson **** who was covering the game from the press box, that the fix was in. 

Nearly a year would pass before the whole thing blew up. As the Sox were heading toward another possible American League pennant, the case of the eight Sox players was brought before a grand jury in Chicago. In the meantime, one of the gamblers involved, Billy Mahrag spilled the beans to reporters in Philadelphia that games 1, 2 and 8 of the best of nine series had been compromised. 

With the cat out of the bag and feeling the heat, four of the eight players including Jackson, confessed their role in the scheme to the grand jury. The following year, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Lefty Williams, Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson found themselves in a courtroom in Chicago as defendants in a criminal case, charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. 

If you're interested and all you know about the trial is based on Eight Men Out, please do yourself a favor and read this.

Despite the confessions of half the defendants (which contrary to the book, were indeed presented to the jury), and other damning evidence against the players, the jury came in with a not-guilty verdict. The evening after the verdict was read, the jurors, twelve men all from Chicago, joined the players in a celebratory dinner at a local restaurant. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

But the celebration was short lived. The next day, the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, (a position created as a response to the Black Sox affair,) Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight players for life from the game. In his ruling, Landis said:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.

Something I just learned is that the Landis ruling didn't extend to Hall of Fame inductions until 1991 when "The Pete Rose Rule" prohibiting players banned from the game from consideration for admission into the hallowed hall was adopted. It turns out that Jackson's name was on the ballot twice, in 1936 and 1940. Obviously, he was not voted in. 

The Landis ruling was intended to be a lifetime ban, but I don't know how much consideration was made about it being a ban for eternity. As all members of the 1919 White Sox are long gone, they continued to be on the ineligible list until this month when the current commissioner Rob Manfred lifted the ban on all deceased players. Claiming that dead players no longer pose a threat to the game (yes he really did say that), this leaves the door open to Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, who seem rightly or wrongly forever joined at the hip in their ignominy, to have the chance to be considered entrance into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Whew, that was a long way to get to what I intended to be the crux of this post which is, drum roll please...

...should they be let in?

I have to admit that, as my friend Rich with whom I discussed this issue before starting writing this piece will testify, I was on the fence.

I no longer am.

This is the simple answer: it all depends what you want the Hall of Fame to be.

Here are the reasons I keep hearing why Joe Jackson should be inducted into the Hall of Fame:

There are lots of players currently in the Hall of Fame who have done worse things than Joe Jackson.

Look I get it, induction into the Hall of Fame is not the equivalent of the canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Bill Veeck:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober. 

The players in the picture at the top of this post, with the possible exceptions of Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, were flawed men. In addition to "Old Pete" Alexander's problems with the sauce,  Tris Speaker allegedly had Klan ties, Babe Ruth was a rake, and Eddie Collins (also a member of the 1919 White Sox) as general manager of the Red Sox, was instrumental in preventing black players from joining the team. And Ty Cobb, part of the group not in the picture had anger issues*****.

So who cares? One could say all that matters is how a player performed on the field. The thing is, we have stats and record books and infinite other reams of information and their extrapolations to tell us the story of how good a player was on the field. One would expect that an institution like the Hall of Fame would have loftier goals than a mere record book or computer printout. In my mind, an institution such as that should exist to honor and celebrate a player's contributions to the game in addition to the numbers he put up.

Conversely, there should be repercussions to a player's compromising the game. Joe Jackson's numbers were staggering, that much is true. On the other hand, intentionally setting out to lose a game, much worse, the World Series for personal profit, goes against the very spirit of the enterprise an athlete dedicates his or her life to. In my mind, there is no more serious betrayal of the game then that. In other words, cheating to win is very bad, but cheating to lose is worse.

I work in the curatorial department of an art museum, and the enterprise I have devoted much of my life to is the care and protection of the objects in our collection. I could very easily take one of those objects, one that would probably not be missed for a long time, and sell it to make up for the amount I consider to be lacking in my compensation. 

You might say that an athlete intentionally trying to lose is not stealing, but it really is. Because the most important thing a team has to offer, is the trust it provides to its fans. Trust that their players and everyone involved with the team will do everything within their power to play well and honorably, even if it results in a loss. Once that trust is broken, it is very hard to restore. 

Which is exactly what the eight players of the 1919 White Sox did. And the cost to the team was staggering, they would not win another pennant or even come close until 1959. 

But Joe Jackson's stats during the 1919 Series show that he didn't slack up a bit, that he was really playing to win. On top of that, he didn't participate in any of the meetings with the gamblers. 

First of all, the second point doesn't matter. By accepting money from the gamblers, which he certainly did, Jackson made it crystal clear to his fellow players that he was a part of the fix, even more so as the team's undisputed star, which further emboldened his teammates to do what they had to do to throw games. 

Second, Joe Jackson's overall stats from the 1919 World Series don't tell the whole story. If you read the F.C.Lane article I posted above, you know that in addition to being an exceptional hitter, Jackson was also an outstanding outfielder with great speed and a cannon for an arm. In games one and two, he allowed two well hit balls to get by him resulting in triples and eventually runs which proved to be the difference in the games. Now triples hit to left field are fairly uncommon in the big leagues as the left fielder has a much easier throw to third base than either a right or center fielder.  Misplays like these don't make it into the box score, as errors are only recorded when a fielder touches the ball. If a fielder doesn't make it to the ball, no error, and no record of an inept play. These aren't exactly smoking guns, but they were enough to make folks in the know like Christy Mathewson suspicious.

Jackson hit well in the series, but much better in the games that were on the up and up. In the games the Sox were supposed to lose, his hits came usually when there was no one on base, or when the game was already out of hand. When there were runners on base and he had the chance to make a difference in the game, crickets. 

Baseball can't just erase Joe Jackson from the game.

Refusing to bestow a player with the highest honor possible in the game hardly constitutes erasing the player from the game, in fact in this case, just the opposite. Joe Jackson's travails have raised him to folk hero status. Heck there's even a library and museum dedicated to him. I'd venture to say that of the nine men in the picture above, with the exception of Babe Ruth and Cy Young (because of the award named after him), the name Shoeless Joe Jackson is more familiar to the general public than all the rest combined PLUS the Negro League stars thrown in for good measure. I think it's unlikely that were it not for his involvement in Black Sox Scandal and his banishment from the game, he'd be remembered today by anyone other than students of the game.

Besides, no one has expunged his stats from the record book, they're there in all their glory for everyone who cares to see.

Jackson and his teammates were acquitted in a court of law but in a dictatorial move, Judge Landis banned them from the game anyway.

That is irrelevant. Even if you were to ignore the vagaries of the verdict, the burden of proof of guilt in a court of law is significantly higher than it is in the workplace. Back to the example of me hypothetically taking a piece of art from our collection, I could stand trial for theft but if the police fail to come up with the object, there's a good chance I'd be acquitted. However, if there's just enough evidence to convince my bosses that I stole the object, they could fire me in a heartbeat with no repercussions.

In the case of the Chicago 8, there was no question of their guilt. 

It's been over one hundred years, can't we just forgive and forget? Hasn't Joe Jackson been punished enough?

Forgive? Certainly, as they say, to err is human, to forgive, divine.

Forget? Certainly not. That would be saying cheating the game and its fans for personal profit is AOK as long as it was long enough ago and the player put up good enough numbers. 

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MY VERDICT (for what it's worth)

I think it is right and just that the ban on Joe Jackson and his fellow deceased players has been lifted as no one deserves to be condemned for eternity. Well, I can think of a few people who need no mention, but they weren't ballplayers. 

And I think it's a good thing that Jackson will now be eligible to be on the ballot for possible induction in the Hall of Fame.

But do I think Joe Jackson belongs there?

I know many people with strong opinions on the subject will no doubt think: "say it ain't so Jim" but...

No, he doesn't.

Neither does Pete Rose.

Sorry.

Notes:

*In 2024, Major League Baseball included Negro League stats in its official tally of baseball records. That long awaited move is reflected in this list of the top five lifetime batting averages:

1) Ty Cobb 367

2) Oscar Charleston 365

3) Rogers Hornsby 359

4) Joe Jackson .356

5) Jud Wilson .350


**Elliot Azinov admitted that he invented the story of White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams being threatened by a hitman working for gangster Arthur Rothstein to either lose game eight (that year it was a best of nine series) in the first inning, or suffer dire consequences both for himself and his family. Asinov revealed that he made up the character of hitman Harry F. and his threat to Williams on the advice of his publisher to guard against copywrite infringement.


***In 1919, Joe Jackson's salary was $6000. That sounds like a paltry amount and it was considering he was the star of the team. But as I pointed out in my Charles Comiskey post, Jackson had a multi-year contract at that figure which Comiskey purchased from Cleveland, and he was under no obligation to increase the amount. There were other extenuating circumstances that made Comiskey especially loathe the idea of increasing Jackson's salary which you can read about here.

Nevertheless, in today's dollars, that $6000 would be equal to about $110,000, peanuts of course to what modern day ballplayers make, but not a bad wage, especially considering it's for only for a little over one half a year's work.

**** New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson, another candidate for baseball's Mount Rushmore status, was one of the original class of inductees into the hall of Fame in 1936. Sadly, "The Big Six" passed away much too early, in 1925.


*****One of the most agonizingly persistent myths of the game of baseball is the notion that in addition to his well-documented anger management issues, Ty Cobb was a racist-sociopath. That erroneous portrayal of him did not exist until well after his death, when an unscrupulous writer named Al Stump, unsatisfied by the response to his biography of the great ballplayer, decided to write a "tell-all" expose of his exploits with Cobb as he was gathering material for his book. The problem is, the writer made most of it up. You can read about it here. 

Old Roman Myths

A few years ago I wrote the following for a baseball website regarding the event known as The Black Sox Scandal, where eight members of the Chicago White Sox took part in a conspiracy with gangsters to throw the 1919 World Series:

One could delve into the motivations of the players to "play ball" with the gangsters, but most likely the biggest was resentment of their parsimonious boss, Charles (The Old Roman) Comiskey.... They say (Comiskey) was so cheap, he made his players clean their own uniforms which led to the rebellion where the team played in dirty uniforms, hence the moniker, "Black Sox." Comiskey paid his players well below market value, knowing full well that baseball's reserve clause prevented them from playing for another team and negotiating a better deal. Legend has it he benched his star pitcher Eddie Cicotte on the eve of winning his 30th game of the 1919 season, and collecting his $10,000 bonus for doing so...

Few would argue with what I wrote as it's generally accepted that much of the blame for the players' actions lay at the feet of Comiskey, the owner and founder of the Chicago White Sox baseball team. Comiskey is popularly regarded as the stingiest of baseball magnates, whose players made a fraction of what players on other major league teams were paid. It's also widely accepted that the"unscrupulous" Comiskey knew the fix was on during the World Series, but did nothing to stop it as he didn't want to risk exposing himself and his investment to shame, scandal, and ruin.

These themes pop up virtually everywhere you look up the story of the 1919 White Sox.

A team that will forever live in infamy, the 1919 Chicago White Sox

But just as the case with Ty Cobb, of whom I wrote a few months ago, it appears that the recorders of history of the past fifty years or so, myself included, have given old Charlie Comiskey a raw deal. Also like Cobb, much of the negativity about him springs from one source. In Comiskey's case, that source is what many believe to be the definitive work on the Black Sox Scandal, the 1963 book Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof. That book would later be made into a popular film with Asinof along with director John Sayles writing the screenplay.

Eight Men Out the book is very detailed in chronicling the events surrounding the scandal, however it must be treated as a historical novel as the narrative weaves between fact and fiction. The book and especially the film depict Comiskey as a real bastard; imagine a pre-redemtion Ebeneezer Scrooge mixed with old man Potter and Simon Legree without the good side, and you get the picture. It's not surprising that Asinof, a dedicated left wing, anti-authoritarian writer/journalist, whose street-cred includes having been blacklisted for a time in the fifties, would include a character like this in one of his novels, all of which center around the struggle of the working class against the injustices of society. Asinof's Comiskey perfectly jibes with the stereotypical turn of the twentieth century robber-baron capitalist pig whose puts his own profit above all else. The character is the perfect foil for working class heroes, (in this case the players), struggling against the Man, (as represented by Comiskey). Eight Men Out doesn't exonerate the players, they clearly are guilty, well most of them according to Asinof, of accepting money in exchange for playing to lose the World Series. But the implication is that their existence under the employ of Charles Comiskey was so desperate, they had no other option. The players' ultimate fate, banishment from the game of baseball, is treated as the ultimate injustice.

It makes for a compelling story and the book and film are well made and entertaining. Unfortunately, the generations of folks who have read the book and seen the movie are unaware that they are works of fiction, especially Asinof's one dimensional depiction of Comiskey. This includes scores of storytellers who have used Asinof's work as the jumping off point for telling their own version of the 1919 team and its boss.

Curiously, the forward of Tim Hornbaker's 2014 biography, Turning the Black Sox White: The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles Comiskey, begins where I began my piece on Ty Cobb, with a quote from Daniel Okrent, as seen in Ken Burns's epic 1994 fantasy titled, Baseball.

Here's what Okrent, who apparently was cast by Burns to be the judge, jury and executioner of people's reputations has to say about Comiskey:

(The White Sox players) were abused horribly by Charles Comiskey, who was a man of small mind, tight fist, and a nasty temperament.

The author of the forward to Hornbaker's book, baseball historian Bob Hoie, goes on to quote other notable writers who have uncharitable things to say about Comiskey. Not surprisingly, all of them promote the idea that it was Comiskey, not the players should have been banned form the game. Hoie then goes on to point out that virtually everything mentioned in these comments comes straight out of the novel, Eight Men Out.

Hoie has done significant research on the scandal, studying documents that have been unearthed since 1963 when Asinof wrote his book. Among the material were thousands of contact cards which contain information on player salaries, bonuses and modifications to player contracts that occurred during each season.

The popular assumption is that, in words taken from the Ken Burns movie:  "no team played better than the Chicago White Sox...and few were paid as poorly." Well it turns out that Comiskey's teams actually carried some of the highest payrolls in the majors for the time, more than 20 percent higher for example than their 1919 World Series opponents, the Cincinnati Reds, the team that Ken Burns erroneously claims was "better paid but far weaker." Eddie Cicotte for example, when you tack on signing and performance bonuses (not including the $10,000 bonus he was allegedly promised by Comiskey) on top of his regular salary, was second only to Walter Johnson in earnings for pitchers in 1919. Catcher Ray Schalk, not one of the conspirators, ended up being the highest paid catcher in the majors and the sixth highest player overall in the majors. In terms of comparison, the Reds' Heinie Groh, arguably a better third baseman the Buck Weaver of the Sox, after all was said and done, was paid ten percent less than Weaver.

Then there was Joe Jackson, one of the greatest hitters in the game who made a paltry salary of $6,000 per year. The reason for that amount is that he was in the middle of a multi year contract in Cleveland when his contract was purchased by Comiskey in 1916 from the Indians. Comiskey was under no obligation to change the terms of that contract, so quite reasonably, he did not. When the US entered World War I late in 1917, the government declared that all men not employed in occupations essential to the war effort were eligible for the draft. This included ball players. Three weeks into the 1918 season Joe Jackson, whose draft status was bumped up to 1A, chose to defect from the White Sox in favor of working, but mostly playing ball for one of these "essential" businesses, the Harlan Shipyards in Wilmington, Delaware, and convinced two other Sox players, pitcher Lefty Williams and backup catcher Byrd Lynn to join him. If there was one thing Comiskey would not tolerate, it was disloyalty. To him, Jackson's act amounted to nothing more than mutiny for the sake of draft dodging, in his words:

I would be willing to give up every player on my squad if they wanted to do their duty by their country, but can't bear to see any of my men going to the ship yards, where they do a little work and draw a lot of money.

Nineteen members of the White Sox organization did end up going to war and one of them, a young prospect by the name of Leo Constantineau, died.

Armistice was signed in November 1918 and by then the fans had forgiven Jackson and Williams of their transgressions. The new Sox manager Kid Gleason talked a still skeptical Comiskey into accepting the two players back onto his team in 1919 for only slightly more money than they were making before they jumped the team.

One of the moore memorable scenes in the movie Eight Men Out was a confrontation between pitcher Eddie Cicotte and Comiskey. Cicotte asked for the $10,000 bonus Comiskey allegedly promised if he won 30 games that year. Cicotte stood at 29 wins but had been benched for several weeks by the team allegedly to "rest his arm" for the World Series. Comiskey coldly told him that "29 wins is not 30" and denied the bonus. This was the final straw for Cicotte who at that very moment decided he would participate in the fix. Incidentally, the book places the incident of the bonus offer two years earlier in 1917.

In either case, Hoie makes a very good case that the story of the bonus is pure fiction. For starters, bonuses that exceeded a player's salary were simply unheard of at the time. Furthermore, checking the records for the two seasons, in 1917, Cicotte did not miss any starts at the end of the season and ended up with 28 wins. In 1919, when he was at the 29 win mark, Cicotte asked for and received time off  from the team to go home to do some work on his farm in Michigan. After two weeks, the Sox requested he re-join the team as they had yet to clinch the pennant. He pitched one game but was removed in the seventh inning as the team was down 5-2. That would be his last game of the regular season. Given his need for money (he was deeply in debt), had Cicotte been one win short of a $10,000 bonus with a few weeks to go in the season, it seems highly unlikely that he would ask to be excused before getting the chance to win his prize.

In a similar vein, Hoie and Hornbaker dispel virtually all the other legends involving Comiskey's penuriousness, including the tale of the origin of the "Black Sox" appellation coming from their dirty uniforms.

Unlike Eight Men Out, Hornbaker's Comiskey biography is a scholarly work, thoroughly foot-noted, and especially different from Asinof's work, somewhat tedious. The author goes through Comiskey's life, season by grueling season, including his playing days in the late 1800s with the old St. Louis Browns (today's Cardinals). The Comiskey portrayed in this biography is anything but nasty, small minded and tight fisted. He was gregarious and well liked, especially early on. The only real character flaw in the man is exposed in his mercurial relationship with Ban Johnson, his partner in the creation of the American League. Originally the two men were as close as you could get, but their friendship was strained eventually to the breaking point by then American League President Johnson's rulings against club owner Comiskey and his team. Hornbaker describes Comiskey as petty, bullheaded and stubborn in his reaction to Johnson's edicts. By 1919, the two men were for all intents and purposes bitter adversaries. Comiskey experienced a good deal of suffering in his life, beginning with the premature deaths of two of his closest brothers and several close friends, all within a small period of time. His own fragile health as well as that of his wife and son were a constant struggle and it must be noted by the mid 'teens, his personality had soured considerably as a result.

It's not mentioned in this biography, but I think it is likely that much of Comiskey's business acumen was developed early on during his time in St. Louis under the owner of the Browns, Chris von der Ahe. Von der Ahe was quite the character, a German-born barkeep who got into the baseball business after discovering that he sold copious amounts of beer after ball games. He bought the Browns and with the help of Comiskey as player/manager, made the team a champion and a huge financial success. Unfortunately for von der Ahe, he became a little too full of himself and his success, (in broken English he famously referred to himself as "der poss bresident of der Prowns"), and lost his fortune almost as quickly as he found it. In his later years he depended upon the charity of Comiskey in the form of a monthly assistance check. One can imagine that Comiskey's most valuable lesson from von der Ahe was learning everything not to do as an owner, especially when it came to holding on to his money.

It's true that Charles Comiskey as a boss was no Old Fezziwig, but he was no Scrooge either. Every spring he spared no expense by sending his players off in style on first class private trains to spring training. Comiskey was especially good to his customers, the fans. Despite taking a tremendous hit to his profit margin, Comiskey refused to raise ticket prices to the levels of his counterparts in the major leagues. He said:

When we came to Chicago we wanted those 25 cent admissions. Those bleacherites made this new plant (Comiskey Park) possible. Baseball has grown but the pocketbooks of some of our friends haven't. Never while I'm living will their space be cut down. The fellow who can pay only twenty-five cents to see a ball game always will be just as welcome in Comiskey Park as the box seat holder.

And never during his thirty year tenure as owner and president of the White Sox did Charles Comiskey raise ticket prices.  In 1910 he built the ballpark on the south side of Chicago that would bear his name for eighty years, but was originally dubbed the "Baseball Palace of the World", so rich in amenities it was, (at least by 1910 standards) even for the twenty five cent fans. As a result, the White Sox constantly outdrew other franchises, including their Chicago rivals the Cubs in the early years of the twentieth century, despite fielding many teams that failed to make it out of the second division.

As someone who actually played the game, Comiskey was intimately aware of the players' concerns, and especially their worth. In contract negotiations, at times he offered players more money than they requested. It's true that more often he rejected demands he considered excessive. When his great star pitcher Ed Walsh demanded more money than Comiskey thought he deserved, Comiskey gave Walsh a flat out no. Walsh held out in the beginning of the season and Comiskey called his bluff. Walsh blinked first and was back within the fold soon enough.

Were the players who took money to throw the 1919 Series dissatisfied with what Charles Comiskey paid them? Probably, after all, how many people do you know who are satisfied with the amount of money they make? But the notion that Charles Comiskey dealt with his players unfairly or differently than of his fellow owners is a myth, as is just about everything else we have been led to believe about him and his relationship to the 1919 scandal.

Charles Comiskey in happier days, 1916

The truth is that Charles Comiskey was one of the pioneers of the game of baseball. As a player he was an innovative first baseman, one of the first if not the first player in that position to play off the bag in order to prevent ground balls from going into the right field for base hits. He continues to be in the record books as one of the all time leaders in stolen bases.(1)  He was a very successful player/manager in St. Louis and along with his on again off again friend Ban Johnson, was one of the fathers of the American League, whose founding ushered in the beginning of the Modern Age of baseball, and a period of unprecedented stability in the game. He created one of the charter organizations of that league, a team with a glorious, if not a winning history. The one dark spot was a season of much promise which was destroyed by the greed of several unscrupulous men. That greed not only destroyed the baseball careers (justifiably in my opinion) of seven ball players (2), but it also came close to destroying Comiskey who could never come to terms with the betrayal of his players. He lived another ten years, essentially a broken man.

Comiskey, a native Chicagoan, loved this city and gave back to it in spades. He offered up his stadium free of charge to any worthwhile cause brought before him. Tickets to games were handed out gratis to servicemen and schoolchildren. Hornbaker quotes Al Monroe of the Chicago Defender as saying:

Half of the churches on the South Side that had risen from store fronts to magnificent buildings had been aided in their climb through gifts from Mr. Comiskey.

Comiskey was also a proud supporter of many progressive causes such as Women's Suffrage and labor unions.

Despite all that, Charles A. Comiskey was demonized as a villain, a man who symbolized everything that was wrong with American capitalism in the early twentieth century.

Having been reduced to a plot device by an author with a clear political agenda, but few facts to back it up, Charles Comiskey's good name and reputation were all but destroyed. Most people today only know the man as the mythical tyrant created by Eliot Asinof.

Just this morning I ran into an old friend who is a life-long White Sox fan. I pulled out my copy of the Hornbaker book with a picture of Comiskey surrounded by one of his early White Sox teams on the cover. My friend took one look at the picture and said: "Oh THAT old prick." I told him about the book and the new revelations about him. Somehow I don't think he bought into it.

Wouldn't you know it, we have such a hard time letting go of our heroes and especially our villains.



(1) In the nineteenth century, stolen bases were recorded differently than today as base runners who took one extra base than the batter, (i.e.: taking two bases on a single or three on a double), were awarded a stolen base.

(2) First baseman Chick Gandil, the supposed leader of the eight players who were part of the conspiracy, retired after the 1919 season, so his banishment from the game did not affect his career, as a player at least.