Where numbers of the Chicago White sox were accused up during world series to the cincinnati reds. It brought about many changes in baseball, including getting eight players on the white sox banned from baseball for life, but the story of that one is not a simple one. It is very complicated. Tonights talk 100alled field of myths, years after the black sox s candal, so it should be a fascinating talk. I am excited to welcome david. Are gathered here on the eve of this years world series, and 100 years ago, who knew there was going to be another world series . Once that scandal was exposed, and trust in baseball was starting to evaporate very rapidly, and as david said, that is, you know, eight men out. That is the story we know. That was the title of a book, a movie. The legends respond about that. It was not the start of trouble in rivers city. Gambling had been rife in baseball since the beginning of the sport. Think of all of the gambling in america. The riverboat gamblers and card sharks at west. People like that. It has always been there. And so, in baseball, in troy, new york, there were gambling scandals, rumors of fixes in fixes. 1877, fourle in players were banned for life. In 1882, there was the only umpire who has been thrown out. There were rumors of world series fixes almost as much as the modern world series, which really starts at the turn of the 20th century, and in the year before the 1919 world series, in 1918, there is a prospective scandal brewing for the cincinnati reds. The white sox play the reds, but there was a scandal with a first baseman named hal chase. Matthews, he thought that he had the goods on that he had the goods on chase chase was really notorious , but baseball did not do anything about it. That was the story up until about 1919 and 1920 when the rumors would occur. But baseball would turn a blind eye to everything so that when the black sox conspired to throw that 1919, you know, people say, well, why did they do that, why did they do that . Well, it was a high payoff and , it seemed to be a low risk because your employers were not bounce you and really do anything about it, because it was really bad publicity for the business, the business of baseball. Now, who were the eight players who were banned . Lets go around the diamond. The first one is a guy named chip. He is a good fielding first baseman but he is sort of in the middle of the pack of American League or majorly first baseman. I never come with a slide presentation to these talks. But i really wish i had a slight to show you of chick, because this is a guy who looks like a complete criminal. I mean this is one bad looking , dude. Fittingly enough, maybe you can tell a book by its cover. But he was the basic ringleader of the whole fix. Utility, you had a infielder who seemed to be a friend of his a guy named fred mcmullen, and in terms of the world series, he only gets two atbats. Wants in and will be let in. A shortstop named swede, a guy you do not want to cross. Fielder, not that much of a hitter, and at third base is one of the more inblematic members of this terms of guilt and culpability. His name is is buck weaver. And he is actually one of the top Third Basemen in the league. Probably the number two who had been part of the connie mack ones. In center field, a really good fielder, a guy by the name of oscar happy felsch. He has some power. He ties for the team lead in it is thein 1919, and end of the lively ball era. Start upruth era will but is not quite there in 1919, then you have pictures pitchers. And they have as part of the tchersracy the two best pi on the Chicago White sox, eddie seacox is a shine ball pitcher. He might rub something on his pants to make it scoot this way or that way. 29gamewinner that cher, and then the other pit is a 23 gamewinner. His name is claude Lefty Williams. He comes some quite a town in south southern missouri, which, even though it has only got about 2000 or 3000 people even to this day, it includes the mob barker gang, the bank robbers, from the 1930s, and they also shot up a synagogue in oberlin park in kansas city, same town, so i do not know what the chamber of commerce says about that town, but it is going to be a best of nine game world series, so it is different in a lot of ways, and why is that . Baseball had previously had best of seven series, but 1919 follows 1918 and follows world war i. World war i really disrupts baseball, because they issue what is called a work or fight order, and that means that if you are not involved in the war effort either in uniform or some other way, they are going to draft you. They are going to do a selective service, pull your name out of a fishbowl or something and send france, so baseball does not know if it is going to continue in 1919 until the armistice comes around in november of 1918. In 1918, the season is cut down to a 142 game series season. Up until 1961, it was 156 games. So there is fewer games. There is much less revenue that orr, and with that work fight order, there is a way you can get around that, and that involves going to work in a defense plant in a defenserelated industry, and what is one of the Biggest Industries is shipyards. We have got to get all of those guys over to france, so we need boats to put them on, and so there is a big shipyard in delaware, and Shoeless Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams and a reserve catcher for the white sox, birdland, go over and work there, and oscar happy felsch goes to work at a defense plant in milwaukee, so a core, a good core of the black sox or white sox are jumping. This is the way the owner, charles, interprets that, jumping the team to go get these jobs in the defense plans or shipyards. They are highly paid, and a lot of people see these guys as dodgers, as draft unpatriotic, because they are drawing a good salary to stay out of the war and played baseball for these shipyards on the weekends. Comiskey does not even want to let these guys back in. Thiskey is also opposed to ninegame series, world series. Comiskey is portrayed as a great money grubber money grabber. , and we will deal with that more later on. Thehe is opposed to ninegame series. Why . Is he just a traditionalist or conservative . Maybe. Remember what i said about eddie cicott and Lefty Williams. They have got 23 wins respectively, really, in a short series, you can get away with a smaller rotation, but this is a longer series. They are planning no off days, they are not that close really but they will have no off days so you needed a deeper pitching staff. Really, the white sox that year were really stuck behind cicotte and williams and after that, it was a guy named dickie carr, who was a rookie who won 13 games, and then there was a hall of famer, but he was sick. He has had the flu. He has had health problems, physical problems. He only wins 11 games, and he is so sick, he is not even going to pitch one game in the world series, so the white sox basically have a 2. 5 man rotation going into the world series. They have got a problem. Cicotte and williams won 59 of all white sox games that year and if you take out favor, they , won 71 . Guys, if get to these the gamblers get to these guys, things look really good for a fix, and the pitching is really the achilles heel, or really, it is so big, it is the achilles foot of the white sox that year. Now, the white sox are going to lose the series. They are planning to lose in eight games. Two of the worst players, the most suspicious players, Lefty Williams he is going to lose three games, which is not going to happen again for decades and decades in the world series. He has a 6. 61 e. R. A. In that series when the American League average that year is 3. 32. And is berg at shortstop, he hours errors. Ricky carr, the third man, is a rookie. So, but even7 or with the white sox playing or the black sox planning to lose behind him, he will win the third game and the sixth game of that world series, a really impressive performance on his part, but they are going to lose in those games. Eddie cicotte will lose a couple of games and then bang, they are out. Now what are the myths . The myths you have seen in the movie eight men out. Made by director john sayles with an allstar cast made in the late 1980s. About at the same time, in a more romanticized kind of hazard movie,the more popular field of dreams with kevin costner. Shoeless joe jackson and other players will return and get to play baseball again despite the lifetime ban against them in the cornfield in iowa. And the genesis of the story or of the filming went out, and then in the field of dreams is the 1963 book by an author named elliott azinough. The gist of this is why would why the white sox do it, and this is a great myth we are dealing with. The myth is this it is Charles Comiskeys fault. It is that these guys were exploited, working men. They were not, you know, being paid very well. They were among the lowest paid teams in the American League, even though they were the pennant winner that year. Comiskey was cheating them on bonuses, specifically Eddie Cicotte. He was really so bad that he was not even cleaning their uniforms. The were not even called black sox the first year because they were crooked, but it was because comiskey would not even clean their uniforms. He was an all round bad guy and the black sox were just righting a wrong. They were sticking it to the man and getting justice, treating it to justice, by direct action, and the problem with this. Is that it is all wrong. I did two books which dealt with this scandal. One was my biography of the commissioner that came in and fixed this mess and the other was a biography of the gambler, Arnold Rothstein who basically created this mess by bankrolling the world series fix. But since that rothstein book has come out, what we have had is really a massive data dump by Major League Baseball and also the fact that technology has changed. I was talking to some folks beforehand and talking about how research has changed since i started in this game, and now, you can get to the microfilm. You can look stuff up easily. You do not have to rely on some relatives scrapbook. You can find this stuff. But the real key thing to dispelling the myth of Charles Comiskey as the scrouge of baseball, the fellow who should bear as much blame as many of black many of the black sox is this. In 2002, Major League Baseball was cleaning out its attic. The teams would have to send to the legal office what they were paying each guy. If they got someone up from the minors, how much are you paying him . How much are you paying a guy if he came over in a trade from the st. Louis browns . Did you pay him a bonus . And all of this was in the League Office files and Major League Baseball dumped it across the street in cooperstown at the hall of fame and the National Baseball library. Now, they did not have the staff to go through all of this stuff. They just sort of keep it and treasure it and preserve it for the baseball researchers, primarily for the members of the society for american baseball research, and these guys really went to work and they went card by card and they figured out what the black sox were making , and you have got to have context. Ok. So they were making something. Well, the numbers of what any of them were paid in 1919 are pretty pathetic compared to what they are being paid now because the dollar is pretty pathetic now. But what were the black sox playing being paid then . Well, consider this. The white sox finished sixth in 1918. Ok . It was the war. They had lost some guys. Other teams lost guys, too, so maybe it evened out, but they went from world champions in 1917 to sixth place in 1918 and yet, and yet, at the beginning of the season, theyre going to have the thirdhighest payroll in the National League and at the end of that season, they are going to be the highest paid team in the American League. Ok . They are not underpaid at all. Now, another aspect of this that you may read or have heard is they were much better than the cincinnati reds, and the reds were paid more than they were. No. No. The reds were the sixth highestpaid team in the National League and the eighth highestpaid team overall. The whiteem were on sox. Eddie collins the second baseman who was getting 15,000 which was the secondhighest salary in baseball. Ty cobb was getting 20,000, and catcher who was the highestpaid catcher in the league, he was getting 7,083. Three members of the black sox, cicotte, jackson and weaver were among the top 15 players and the next year, of the 17 highestpaid American Leaguers, seven were members of the black sox. So comiskey was not underpaying his players. Well what was comiskey getting , paid . Well, that is easy for you to say, mr. Comiskey, that these guys are paid well. Because of the war in 1918, the previous two years comiskey had been drawing 10,000 a year and he owned the team and he took a cut to 5,000 a year. Also, the revenues really went down that year, so the white sox attendants went down by 70 in 1918, and the team lost 46,000. So consider all of those things and things start to fall away of , these myths of why the white sox did it. The bonuses. One of the stories which i did not mention earlier is that the players were promised a bonus, and all they got you saw this he movie eight men out and all they get is a case of champagne. They open it up and it is like , it is flat. It is stale, and they are incensed about this. Not were not they could have been promised a bonus as a team, ok . We know they were promised champagne, and they got champagne. How bad it was, who knows . But they put forward a rule that you could not promise a bonus to team members if they won the world series. And the reason for this is because some losing teams ended up a higher bonus than the winning teams in the world series, and this was done, and one of the owners who did this and caused the losing team to have more than the winning team 1906is would have been in was the cheapskate, Charles Comiskey. He had paid out a bonus to the losing members of the team and that was what caused that. You could not promise a bonus overall to the team. And then, there is a bonus to Eddie Cicotte. There is a big scene in the movie where cicotte goes in and i was promised a bonus of 10,000, mr. Comiskey, if i won 30 games. And i was held back. You would not let the manager game,e to win the 30th and comiskey goes to his secretary, the general manager, and says, could you look up in the records how many games mr. Cicotte won . 29. 29 is not 30, eddie. So cynical. Except it is absolutely not true again. Bonuses were not promised that way. They would not be promised a 10,000 bonus when his base salary was 5,000. It would be in increments and maybe you would get so much more if you got or won 20 games or 25 games. In fact, this is what happened with Lefty Williams that year. And 20 games,s and he got extra bonuses for that, but really, why it is not true is because Eddie Cicotte did get the chance to win 30 games, and he lost the game. He was not held out. He went home voluntarily to his farm in michigan in the middle of august and was called back by the white sox and given a chance to win and he did not win. So every aspect of this is absolutely false, and also, why would you promise a bonus to someone who would win 30 games that year . 30 games were pretty rare even back then. I think Walter Johnson did it in 1913 but it was really rare even then. And also, Eddie Cicotte has led the American League in losses the year before, so again, none of this makes any sense but cicotte does get a bonus. Even without the performance bonus of 30 games, he did get a bonus because he was promised in 1918 that if he had the same sort of year that he had in 28 games, he won would get a 3,000 bonus, but he stunk in 1918, but comiskey because he was so good in 1919 gave him the bonus he was promised in 1918. So he ends up the secondhighest paid pitcher next to the great Walter Johnson. Again, myth, myth. Myth, myth. Also, so if cicotte did this and he was in on the effects, and he in on the fix and was one of the ringleaders, because he was stiffed on the bonus late, late, late in the season, why do we know by his own confession that he was working on the fix in Early September . Know from buck weavers conversation with a detective hired by Charles Comiskey that cicotte was talking about the fix in june . Ok . Fact, fact, fact. How great were the white sox . We hear over and over again that they were one of the greatest teams in baseball history. Well, they were pretty good. They had won the World Championship in 1917. They won the pennant in 1919, but they win it by 3. 5 games. Even in a 140 game season, that is not all that impressive. That is kind of middling. And, you know, they were supposed to roll over the cincinnati reds. Well, the reds win their pennant by nine games. Nine games. And they had the highest one loss percentage in baseball. The yankees, ate bad at all. Their secondhalf season is amazing with a one loss percentage of 7. 12 in the second half. They are on fire going into the world series and they are deep. Where the white sox were shallow in a pitching staff, the reds are so strong they can start five different guys in the first five games of that 1919 world series. There is another myth which is maybe not as important, but in terms of how difficult was it to garner information, to construct black sox,f the elliott asinov writes that there is a wall of silence involving not only the black sox but also the clean sox, and even those that played against them. For some reason, there was this cone of silence that fell around the world series fix. And that is not true, because we know, now again because you can search all of that microfilm and find things out more easily, that 20 different reds and white sox players gave different interviews afterwards. Some of these are not very true. They are contradictory. They will contradict themselves. But people were willing to talk. They were not many of them, however, were not willing to speak to the fellow whose history of the black sox is the standard history. Elliott asinov. I had the pleasure of meeting elliott later in his life. We were watching a series on espn which was premiering, and he seemed like a very nice fella. He was suffering from lymes disease then. But when i first read eight men out when i wouldve been in high school, it was terrific and it is a brilliant narrative. It is such a wonderfully written book. And you just have the feeling that ok, he has got it all. This is every detail in here, and it would be very hard for me to improve on it. When i was writing my rothstein book, that was the idea i had at the beginning. And then i tried to figure out the narrative, and it just did if make any sense whatsoever you took a lot a look at the chronology of things and how things were supposed to happen. It just sort of fell apart, and i wrote that in rothstein, respectfully. It was like, this does not make sense, and this is how the narrative really went down with Arnold Rothstein. But other people have pointed out, and i should have picked up on this, but i first read the book when i was in high school. So it is like, i am not exactly mr. Convio, experienced author at that point. Ok . But, like, there are like there are interior thoughts expressed. So and so is thinking this or this. Good historians do not put that down. Novelists put that down. Asniov wasugh a novelist and a screenwriter. He is creating this narrative going forward, forward, and forward and providing all of these details which you should pick up on, like how could he have known this . For details. How could he have known this level of detail . Random . He smiled as he saw the 40 fresh 1000 bills that sullivan withdrew from his coat pocket. How would he have this information . How would he have this . So that is why this book has been described as a historical novel. A historical novel. And there are further imaginary characters in it. There are madeup people in the book. One of which is a guy named gambler, who was supposed to have threatened Larry Williams before the series. How do we know he is imaginary . Because elliott told us this. He said i did this on the advice of my publisher to protect my copyright in case someone is going to plagiarize me. You cannot copyrighted individual. You cannot copyright a fact. Ok . This does not make any sense. Character, and other people think a couple of other minor characters in here are completely fictitious as well. And in fact, elliott admitted there was at least one other fictitious character in this. Now, he consulted a couple of other authors, quite famous people, to get an idea of what went down with the white sox. Two guys who had grown up in chicago and whose heroes had been black sox players. Nelson aldrin, if you have ever seen the movie the man with the golden arm, or he wrote the book walk on the wild side, and his hero was swede. And the author of studs lonigan his hero was buck. They were both leftwing authors. So they had this sort of workingman, you know, against novagement ideology, and asi himself basically had the same ideology and was blacklisted. He was blacklisted in the 1950s. He had fronted for blacklisted authors. So he comes at the topic with this sort of bias, which is not bad if you get the facts right, and i think you have understood by now that the facts were not right. And the facts were not right in some ways because he did not hee the material, but then, embellished the material and fit it into this one variance. One of the most perplexing things which i do not think anyone is going to know is how did the fix start . Bodyhere is an increasing of thought that it started with the players prayed that it started with candle and started cicotte. And we know the eight players in one form or another. We are pretty sure of that. But the gamblers are all over the place. And there is about four or five different groups of them in various places. There is a guy named sports sullivan in boston. Big, big gambler, big guy. He had been involved in betting in the 1914 world series. He was handling the bets for george m cohan. Cohan who won a bundle on the underdog braves miracle braves. Kind of got gut team who swept the philadelphia as. There is concern that that series was fixed and maybe that is why connie mack broke up that game afterwards. Arnold rothstein, the fella i wrote the biography of about, the big bank roll, the brain, goto guy, the loan shark, the labor racketeer, the casino owner, the bootlegger, the drug smuggler the guy involved in new york including tammany hall politics and wall street bucket shops. And even loaning money to finance broadway shows and the theaters. Everything. He is the big bankroller. That was the name of a book, a biography about him in 1959, it , is very true. So sports sullivan might be up to doing and fixing the world series, but he does not have the money to make it all work. Thatmaybe you can make work. There is 80,000, 8,000 to 10,000 a guy being made, dangled in front of the white sox. But, then what do you do . You have to lay down bets to make money on the world series. There is no use doing this as some intellectual exercise that we are going to just fix the series and go with that. The point is to put down bets and make a bundle of money, so you have got to have two pots of money that way. Bribe the players. Lay down the bets. Rothstein can supply that. Then there are a bunch of , gamblers from the midwest. There was a fellow named henry kidd becker who had been working on fixing the 1918 world series. He never quite pulled it off. He was thinking about doing the 1919 world series but , unfortunately, he was shot dead in april, 1918 by the husband of one of his girlfriends. But he left behind other gamblers in st. Louis. Carl, harry redman and franklin and other gamblers in des moines. This is interesting. The supposed honest and upright midwest there are a lot of gambling centers. There is a guy name ben and another named lou. Big gamblers. They will be involved in this. And then, a fourth group i dont know if you can call two people a group, and they are sleepy bill barnes burns. Had been a burns picture of no great repute pitcher of no great repute. He had no great energy which is why he was called sleepy bill. He would fall asleep on the bench. He had left baseball and he was speculating in oil in texas. He was a texan. But he would come up and hang around with all of the ballplayers and try to sell them or get them to invest in oil leases, so he is traveling this circuit of majorleague cities and teams and he is on trains with players in 1919, and he hears that the players approach him. They are so crooked that even though they have 80,000 on the table right now promised from the gamblers of sullivan and rothstein, they go to these guys and say, we will throw it to you for 100,000, such a bargain, and burnes does not have any kind of money like this. The other does not have the money. He is working in a locomotive plant in philadelphia, but hart goes back to philadelphia to raise the money, and they tell him in for the adelphia, you know who has got the money . The guy in new york. Arnold rothstein has got the money. Go see him. They do. They try to see him at the racetrack and his office. Them, and those guys. He is very restrained. He invites them to discuss the fix. He knows they are coming to discuss the fix. In the middle of the restaurant at the Biggest Hotel in times square, the hotel astor, in the middle of everything, he has invited these guys not to his office but there to discuss the fix, and they do. Rothstein has at his table a policenew york city detective and reputedly a new york city judge, so he has got witnesses to what will then happen, which is rothstein blowing up and saying, i want no part of your fix. Want nothing to do with it has anotheruse he fix going on. That is why and he is creating an alibi. A very big alibi that he had nothing to do with any sort of fix which is of course, false. He soon comes to thank maybe i can make burns and these hard guys work for me. Yes. I will tell them that i will give them the money and then tell the players there will be i do not even have to advance anymore. If something goes wrong, maybe these guys will take the rap. Rothstein uses a couple of agents of his, a former boxer. Very famous guy. Rachel brown, who was really named nat evans. A lot of people are going by aliases here. Rothstein knows the value of keeping money around so you can invest it in other things, such as loansharking. If you dont pay the white sox players what you promised them right away, you are holding onto another 40,000 or 50,000, you can use it to bet on them. Or to just loan some money to some guy in times square. Hang onto it. Being a slow pay will eventually get him killed in a very highstakes poker game. But his guys are not paying the white sox right away. They feel stiffed so they will start to play to win. Everybody is doublecrossing everyone else. That is why Eddie Cicotte wins the one game he wins in the 19 19 world series. Even though there were threats coming in. An account of one threat coming into williams. In an interview, he says there were calls coming in from gamblers all the time threatening these guys to shape up. When you get eight players involved and then i have named 11 gamblers. You have a minimum of 19 guys and they cannot keep their mouth shut. There are some reasons which are good reasons so you are a crooked player and your relative or your friend wants to bet money on your team and you go no, dont bet. Bet on the other guys, ok . They cannot keep their mouths shut. Rumors of the fix start in august. In saratoga, rothstein tells a gambler from chicago the series is going to be fixed. He tells the former owner of the chicago cubs about it. Eventually, comiskey is going to know about these rumors. He will get very agitated. The managers of the white sox will get very agitated. After the series is over, there is a series of articles coming out about the rumor fix. It is interesting, when they come out, the sporting news, the bible of baseball comes out and there is a famous passage by them which is incredibly antisemitic about a bunch of hook nosed gamblers behind this and just because they do things, do not believe that anyone in our Great American game would ever stoop to this. They certainly stooped to it. Comiskey investigated and hired gamblers in the offseason. How much he covered this up, how much did he really knew . There is knowing and there is proving. He offered a 10,000 reward to anyone who could prove that the series was fixed. Harry redman, one of the st. Louis gamblers comes forward, i want 10,000 and this is what happened. Redman we know that weaver was involved in the meetings to fix the series. Well, this is hearsay, what do you do . Comiskey hires detectives at a cost of 20,000 to interview on the sly to get close to and gain the confidence of weaver and gandil and mcmullen. Each detective comes back and says, we think something happened but the guy who interviews weaver says, i do not think weaver was involved. The same thing happens with mcmullen. What basis does comiskey have to bring action . None. What is going on now with the black sox is there is a National Commission in baseball, ruling baseball, and it is made up of three members. National League President , American League president. The American League president is dan johnson, who was running the icked people t off. The white sox, the Boston Red Sox and the new york yankees are against him and they want to dump him. He is investigating the white sox at the same time. He finds out. They track down bill burns in mexico and a grand jury convened in chicago to investigate a baseball scandal. What is the scandal . The scandal is that maybe a philadelphia phillieschicago cubs game is going to be fixed. What does this have to do with the white sox . Nothing. The story appears to have been planted so the grand jury can investigate crookedness in baseball. The grand jury is being run by a judge, charles mcdonald, who is an ally of johnson. Johnson is plumping mcdonald to be the new commissioner of baseball. They will have a commissioner. For this jobrite is landis. Everybody wants landis. He chased down the iww and the socialist party during the war. It helped save baseball when there was a third league being formed in 19141915. Johnson does not want landis because he is too strong of a guy. He will never be able to control landis. Nobody did. He wants mcdonald. Hoping this grand jury will elevate mcdonald to be the star of the show. He is not the star of the show. He is never going to overshadow landis. What they do is immediately get into investigating the black sox. Three of the players confess to the jury. Williams, weaver, and jackson. A bunch of people are indicted. The players and the gamblers. They are eventually acquitted. They are all acquitted. The acquittal is well, there is a scene in the movie eight men out where it is revealed that the grand jury confessions have been stolen. The prosecution has no basis for prosecution. A misstatement. They were missing but they were immediately reconstructed from stenographers notes so they did not impact the trial at all. What did impact the trial was the judge the presiding judge of the trial said you cannot use these confessions by these three guys, jackson, weaver, and cicotte, against the other players and you must also prove the intent. The intent that they were going to defraud people. How do you prove intent . How do you know what is going on in someones mind . That kills the chances for a conviction. In two hours and 47 minutes, the jury comes back and they say acquitted. All the black sox players are acquitted and they think they are home scotfree. They are not scotfree. What landis does within hours is to issue a statement saying regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who has thrown a game or conspired to throw a game or has sat in on a meeting of crooked players and gamblers and has not so informed his ballclub will ever play baseball for organized baseball again. That takes care of a whole bunch of people. It is very eloquent and very lawyerly, regardless of the verdict of juries. Everyone knew you were not supposed to fix the game but it was not illegal. They were not indicted for fixing a game. There was no law against it. That came later on. You knew not to do that so you knew the guys should not be in the game anymore. Also guys who sat in on a meeting, which would have been people like weaver or who did not inform their club. There will be a couple of scandals in the 1920s and what happens is they are broken up very quickly because the players, the honest players who know about these schemes who have been offered bribes, will immediately rat on their fellow teammates. Nobody wants to be the next buck weaver. Once that barrier of silence is broken, baseball comes a clean game. That is one of the things that you see in the news story about the black sox and baseball in general. It is a clean game. It is a clean game. It is not like boxing or horseracing. If landis had not done that, and if the game had not been cleaned up, it would have gone down the same route as boxing. You would not know which fight or fighter was on the level. All of this is tied up in so many Amazing Stories where, for example, notice that rothstein, where is he at the trial . They disappear. Sullivan just disappears for a while. Rothstein goes before the grand jury and complains about he is being assaulted by the reporters. They put out the story that he was assaulted. Who was controlling the grand jury . It was judge mcdonald. Who was controlling mcdonald . Johnson. Why would johnson want rothstein to be cleared . Because of the power struggle for baseball. Rothstein was partners in a casino in savannah with a guy named charles. He would have been one of the votes to help prop up johnson. That never happens because another doublecross doublecross doublecross. What we have with the black sox and baseball is the remarkable story of human frailty, of people thinking they can get away with something and finding out they cannot and finding out things will not be tolerated anymore. That is why baseball and because of a guy named babe ruth, why baseball survived that series and why we are looking forward to it starting tomorrow night. Thank you. [applause] i will take some questions and i guess i will repeat them so cspan audience can hear them. Any questions . Yes . Did other white sox players, did they know about it . Weaver never took any money. The question is who got what amount of money and cicotte got the most that we know of. He got 10,000. The others all got 5,000. Weaver got nothing because he would not agree to it. But he sat in on two meetings. Gandil says that weaver wanted the money up front. At one point, he was saying, you can take the money and you can doublecross the players and get the winning share of the series, which was about 5,000 as compared to 32,000. I would not trust gandil about anything. The other players dont know but they really suspect and the catcher gets really visibly upset, even on the field and in the clubhouse during the series. They know, but they cannot prove and it is a very what is true about the cinematic accounts of this is it is a factional ballclub. You have guys who really cannot stand the other guys. Gandil says when he was talking about somebody letting somebody into the fix, he says, yeah, we did not love him but we did not hate him as much as the other guys. It was quite the crew. Anything else . Yes . The most famous of the white sox players was Shoeless Joe Jackson what was his culpability in this whole drama . This story is just so damn complex. Two things complicate jackson. He gets. 375 in the series. He gets the only home run of the series. He has no errors. He catches a man home at the plate, ok . But he takes the money. He takes 5,000. Handed to him by Lefty Williams. And he is not at the meetings. He is the one guy who does not attend either there are two meetings, one of all the players to discuss the fix and later with the gamblers and he is at neither one. I think one might say ok, here are some things he said to the press after he gave his confession. He said to the press afterwards, i said i got 5,000 and they promised me 20,000. All i got was the 5,000 that williams handed to me in a dirty envelope. I never got the other 15,000. Boohoo. [laughter] i told that to judge mcdonald and he told me he did not care what i got. I do not think the judge likes me. I never got the 15,000 that was coming to me. Hell of a statement. And then he said, and im going to give you a tip. A lot of these sporting writers that have been roasting me are talking about the third game of the series being square. Let me tell you something, the eight of us did our best to kick it. And those gamblers doublecrossed us because we doublecrossed them. What he may have done consciously is this he may have decided to split hairs and say, i wont do anything to throw the series or be suspicious about my activities and he hit that homerun, for example, when the sox are down 105 in the last game. When he gets the guy out at home, the throw was offline. There is an incredible play to catch it and dive backward. But that he lends his name to the fix. The gamblers might not want to put all of this money in and be sure it is going through without the premier name player attached to it. He says, they used my name. That maybe is his culpability. He is illiterate. That is very famous. There is a difference between uneducated and dumb. He runs several businesses afterwards and does not run them into the ground so he has some native smarts. The thing about there was a petition just recently from the people in South Carolina where he is a hero greenville, South Carolina. There is a museum. I think they are moving his house down the road and putting a bigger museum. There was Just Announced there is a movie about him in development. He continues to be a folk hero of sorts. It reminds me of the circumstances with pete rose. People would ask me when i was doing more baseball stuff, how do you feel about pete rose going into the hall of fame . I said, you know, i dont care that much for pete rose. I dont care that much for what he did. If you really wanted to stick it to pete rose, here is what you do. A few years back, there would be a debate about whether ralph connor belonged in the hall of fame or phil rizzuto or Richie Ashburn or somebody in there havemebody, and they would a lot of talk about it. And then they would get in and nobody ever mentioned them again. If you want to bury a guy publicly, put him in the hall of fame. [laughter] make him the 180th best member of the hall of fame instead of the best guy or most famous guy not in the hall of fame. That would kind of do the same thing for shoeless joe. If he is in and a father is coming in, the father or mother or parent has a little kid and plaqng at the black ue, so what did this guy do and what took him so long . Is this the best baseball has to offer . He took the money and complained about not getting more. One of the things about honor and such, one of the reasons why landis may apply that standard to buck weaver is landis had a nephew in the military academy and the honor code is what is applied to weaver. Yes . How did the sox begin rebuilding the team . Money. Money. They buy a lot of players and they do not turn out all that well. This is the era when you could buy players from the majors, particularly from the Pacific Coast league. In the 30s, ted williams of those guys are purchased from the pcl. Comiskey paid big bucks for them. If comiskey is so involved in the coverup, protect his investment in the team and that is why he does not ban these guys in 1919, what he does do in 1920 is this the grand jury has heard the confessions of the three players. Comiskey asked like acts like the hammer goes down and comiskey suspends the black sox. It is seven because gandil had left to retire and go to california. With about three games left to go and the sox still in the pennant race, comiskey guts his team and gets rid of these guys and sinks their chance for a second consecutive pennant. The owner of the yankees who has just acquired this hotshot babe ruth says this is terrible what has happened to comiskey. I will loan you babe ruth for the rest of the season. The commissioner says, no, we dont do that. A lot of things which happened very interesting in the wake of that. Yes . Going once. Going twice. I will tell you one story. Why didnt abe attell appear at the trial . Eastern gamblers were not at the trial. Rothstein had an attorney who was incredibly inventive. And a great jury fixer as well. He would invent these incredible defenses where the best defense is a good offense. At one point, in the late 1920s when he is accused of fixing a jury, he puts William Randolph hearst on trial by saying the reason they printed these lies is because i know the truth and i have the birth certificates of the twin daughters that William Randolph hearst fathered. It is a complete lie. There were no twins. It was completely made up. He comes up with stuff like this. He makes up the story about rothstein being assaulted by reporters in chicago. Rothstein becomes the victim. Poor Arnold Rothstein. What he remarkably does is rothstein and fallon had sent a attell out of the country to montreal. They think it over and he brings attell back. He is walking through times square one day and a couple of detectives go up to him and arrest him and arraign him for his part in the black sox fix. And then they bring in a witness from chicago and he would have said he bet with me in the series was fixed and i was defrauded. He shows up in court and they say, the featherweight champion of the world, he was a famous guy. He says, no, it was a different abe attell that i bet with. This is complete perjury, a total lie. Money was passed to him at Grand Central terminal when he got into town. Attell walks that way. This is how Chicago Justice and New York Justice was handled. When the trial concludes, one of the most suspicious things that happened, and this looks like it would have been invented by the people within hollywood but it is not. The celebrating players and their attorneys go to an Italian Restaurant in chicago and those guys have figured out where the restaurant was and it was owned by an associate of al capone and the players and the attorneys are in one room and there is a movable partition between another room and the jurors. The jurors are in the next room and the wall comes down and they have a Wonderful Party together. Some of the grand jurors used to visit new york after that and they would be treated to wonderful things by Arnold Rothstein. That is the story of justice, 1919, and hopefully the 2019 series will end up a lot better. Thank you. [applause] youre watching American History tv, covering history cspan style with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures in college classrooms, and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend, every weekend on cspan three. , from publicents affairs. Available now in paperback and ebook. 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