Black Sox and Gambling

One film and one quote come to mind about 1919 White Sox. The 1988 movie Eight Men Out and Hyman Roth’s deadpan line from the Godfather II. “I’ve loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919”.

It’s been almost a hundred years since the infamous ‘Black Sox’ lost to the Reds in the series due to gambling debts they owed to mobs in the country. A lot of people today consider this time in baseball to be a watershed moment, a loss of innocence for a clean sport. And with gambling essentially legalized (or nearly) will we have this problem again. How ‘clean’ was baseball before the Black Sox debacle brought in a commissioner? Did the owners deserve the negative publicity because they didn't pay their players a decent wage?

Baseball might have considered itself a gentlemen's game, but it was too disorganized to keep a tight lid on bad apples. Cubs and Phillies were caught cheating during a regular season game the year after the Sox lost to the Reds. Largely because of that a grand jury convened to investigate the White Sox loss in the Series. If nothing else the owners of the clubs couldn’t have fans thinking the worst about their game.

Professional baseball wasn’t lucrative for the players in the twenties like it is today. Players scrapped for wages the way newsboys hustled to sell dailies on the corner. Until 1918, World Series teams were paid according to ticket sales. After that year they were given a flat rate. They made less money than they would have under the old policy. It’s doubtful that less money for the World Series was the impetus for taking a dive.

I never read Eliot Asinof’s book Eight Men Out but I did see the movie with John Cusack and D.B Sweeny. The White Sox owner Charley Comiskey was widely regarded as very cheap, even requiring players to pay for their own laundry for the uniforms.  

The stuff about ‘commie’ being tight was true, but he wasn’t much different from every other owner. In the movie he is basically ‘scrooge’ with a couple of players doing their best Bob Cratchit.

From NPR:

"Realitydiverges from the Eight Men Out book and movie several times.  Pomrenke [historian] said a story about the Sox owner Charles Comiskey maneuvering to avoid paying pitcher Eddie Cicotte a bonus is false.  And there was a fabricated tale of a hit man approaching pitcher Lefty Williams on the eve of the final game of the series to threaten him."

Cicotte's bonus, from the movie, was supposedly $10,000 for winning 30 games during the regular season. Cicotte won 29 and went to beg Comisky for the bonus anyway. In true miserly fashion commie tells him the deal was 30 and shoos him off.

 The story isn’t true but by most accounts the Sox had a lot of guys who relished the chance to earn a few bucks by fixing the game. A handful of guys in any age will conspire to cheat and think nothing of it, fair wages or not. The rest will avoid it because the risk of getting caught is too high or their standards prevent that kind of behavior. Some will fall in the middle, not wanting to disrupt the cheaters plans but not taking bribes or throwing the game. Buck Weaver (John Cusack) falls into the last category; he continued to try to clear his name years after getting tossed out of the sport he loved. His is the worst position, moral cowardice. The guys who never cheated or new about the scheme have their dignity and can still make money from the sport. The cheats can’t play but probably didn’t have much regard for the game anyway.

The players were found not guilty in court despite three of them (Jackson, Cicotte, Lefty) signing confessions admitting the deed. It seems like no one wanted it to be true.

Betting on sports is now legal in most states after the Supreme Court (last year) essentially made it a states’ right issue. That’s probably the right decision. States are better at controlling gaming, but I'm not crazy about adding another vice for people to get hooked on. One argument in favor of legalized gambling is that it brings all the honest betting to light. It keeps away the underground bookie, in other words. I don’t think that's true. People go to bookies because they can bet without having the money in hand. That doesn't change with legalization.

More betting and more money being thrown around increases the odds (no pun intended) of cheating. Probably not throwing an entire game or series, but shaving points and covering spreads. People bet on everything. You can bet to see how many 3 pointers some college basketball player will take. That’s much easier to fix.  

  

Betting is the game when gamblers are involved. We watch games differently when we have something at stake. I hope we don’t lose our thrill for pure sports. Keep guys like Hyman Roth at an arms length.