Mr. Kent i want to welcome you to cooperstown. I am the director here, david kent. We are very fortunate tonight to have an esteemed historian and writer who is not only an historian. He is very into baseball. That is a good combination. Right now, it is the 100th anniversary of one of the most infamous scandals in baseball history, the black sox scandal, 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. So the title of tonights talk is called field of myths, 100 years after the black sox scandal, so it should be a fascinating talk. I am excited to welcome david. David we 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 river city, shall we say. 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 louisville in 1877, four 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 played the reds, but there was a scandal with a first baseman named hal chase. His manager, christy mathewson, he thought 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 about to 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 chick, arnold chick gandil. 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 slide 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. And then, you had a utility infielder who seemed to be a friend of his, a guy named fred mcmullin, and in terms of the world series, he only gets two atbats. A shortstop named swede, charles swede risberg, a guy you do not want to cross. He is a decent fielder, not that much of a hitter, and at third base is one of the more problematic members of this in terms of guilt and culpability. His name 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 home runs in 1919, and it is the end of the lively ball era. The babe ruth era will start up but is not quite there in 1919, and then you have pitchers. And they have as part of the conspiracy the two best pitchers on the Chicago White sox, Eddie Cicotte is a shine ball pitcher. He might rub something on his pants to make it scoot this way or that way. He is a 29gamewinner that year, and then the other pitcher 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 ma 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 bestofseven 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 you over to france, so baseball does not know if it is going to continue in 1919 until the armistice comes around in november of 1918. Season. Up until 1961, it was 156 games a season. So there is fewer games, fewer attendees. There is much less revenue that year, and with that work or 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, byrd lynn, 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 Comiskey, 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 slackers, as draft dodgers, as 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. Comiskey is also opposed to this ninegame series, world series. Comiskey is portrayed as a great money grubber, money grabber. And we will deal with that more later on. But he is opposed to the ninegame series. Why . Is he just a traditionalist or conservative . Maybe. Remember what i said about Eddie Cicotte 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, because 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 cicotteand williams and after that, it was a guy named dickie kerr, 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. 5man 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 . So if you get to these guys, if 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 risberg at shortstop, he makes four errors. Dickie kerr, the third man, is a rookie. He is like 57 or so, but even 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 way in the more popular movie, 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 eliot azinof. The gist of this is 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. They were not even called the black sox the first year because they were crooked, but it was because comiskey would not even clean their uniforms. He was an allround 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 scrooge of baseball, the fellow who should bear as much blame as 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. Five of them were on the white 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 in the 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. They were not they could not 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 this would have been in 1906 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 says, 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 pitch me to win the 30th game, 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. He got 15 games and 20 games, 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 1917, when he won 28 games, he 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 fix, and he 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 . And why do we 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 140game 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, aint bad at all. Their secondhalf season is amaz