And judge and jury the life and times of the judge Kennesaw Mountain landis. Were very fortunate tonight to have an esteemed historian and awardwinning writer, who is not only an historian but hes very into baseball. So, its a good combination because right now its the 100th an verse of one of the most infamous scandals in baseball history. The black sox scandal where members of the Chicago White sox were accused of throwing the world series to the cincinnati reds. And it brought about many changes in baseball, including getting a commissioner and getting eight players on the white sox banned from baseball for life. So but the story of that is not really a simple one. Its very complicated. So, the title of tonights talk is called field of myths 100 years after baseballs 1919 black sox scandal, finally separating the many myths from the reality. So this should be a fascinating talk. And i am excited to welcome david pietrusza, our speaker tonight. Well, thank you. [ applause ] yeah, were gathered here tonight on the eve of this years world series. And the 100 years ago, well, who knew if there were going to be another world series once that scandal was exposed and whether trust in baseball was starting to evaporate very rapidly. And, as david said, thats, you know, eight men out. Thats the story that we know. That was the title of a book. That was a movie. There were, you know, the legends have spawned about that. And it wasnt it wasnt the start of trouble in river city, shall we say. Gambling had been rife in baseball since the very beginnings of the sport. People you know, think of all the gambling in america. You know, the river boat gamblers and the card sharks out west and people like that. Its always been there. And so, in baseball, in troy, new york, when that was a major league team, there were gambling scandals or rumors of fixes. In louisville in 1877, four players were four players then were banned for life. And an umpire was thrown out, a guy named dick hyam in 1882. Hes the only umpire whos ever been thrown out. There were rumors of world series fixes almost as soon as there was 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, theres a prospective scandal brewing on the cincinnati reds. Now, the white sox play the reds but there was a scandalous goings on in cincinnati with a first baseman named hal chase and his manager, Christy Mathewson thought he had the goods on chase. He was notorious but baseball didnt do anything about it. And that was the story up to about 1919 and 1920, where the rumors would occur, but baseball would turn a blind eye to everything so that when the black sox conspire 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 very bad publicity for the business. The wis of baseball. Now, who are the eight players who are banned . Lets go around the diamond. The first one is a guy named chick gandil. Hes a fair good fielding first baseman, but hes sort of in the middle of the pack of the American League or Major League First basemen. I never come with a slide presentation to these talks, but i really wish i had a slide to show you of chick gandil because heres a guy who looks like a complete criminal. I mean, this this is one bad looking dude. And fittingly enough, you know, 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. In terms of play at the world series, he only gets two atbats but he gets a hit. He wants in and hes going to be let in. At shortstop a guy named swede risberg. Hes a decent fielder. Not that much of a hitter. And at third base is one of the more problematic members of this octet in terms of guilt and culpability. His name is buck weaver. Hes one of actually, one of the top Third Basemen in the American League. Probably number two, the home run baker, who had been part of the Million Dollar infield with connie macks as. Well talk about weaver later on. In center field, a really good fielder, a guy named oscar happy felsch. He has some power. He ties for the team lead in home runs in 1919. Its the end of the dead ball era. The lively ball of babe ruth is really going to start up the next year, but its not quite there in 1919. Then you have pitchers. You need pitchers involved in throwing a world series. And the gamblers and people like gandil have as part of the conspiracy, the two best pitchers on the Chicago White sox. Eddie cicotte who is a trick ball pitcher, a knuckleball pitcher, shine ball pitcher he might rub something on his pants and then on that to make the thing scoot this way or that way. Hes a 29game winner that year. And then the other pitcher is, i think a 23game winner, hes a much younger pitcher. His name is claude Lefty Williams. He comes from quite a town in south southern missouri which even though its only got about 2,000 or 3,000 people in it even to this day, the barker, the ma barker game from the bank robbers from the 1930s came from this same small town and also a guy who shot up a synagogue in Overland Park in kansas city. This same town. I dont know what the chamber of commerce says about that town. But its going to be a best of nine game world series so its different in a lot of ways. And why is that . Baseball had previously had best of seven series. But 1919 follows 1918, follows world war i. World war i really disrupts baseball because they issue what is called a work or fight order. That means if youre not involved in the war effort, either in uniform or some other way, theyre going to draft you. Theyre going to do selective service, pull your name out of a fish bowl or something and send you over to france. So, baseball doesnt know if its going to continue in 1919 until the armistice comes around in 1918. In 1918, the season is cut down to 142game series season. Recall that up until 1961 with expansion in the American League, its 156game series. So, theres fewer games, theres fewer attendance, theres much less revenue that year. And with that work or fight order, theres a way you can get around that. And that involves going to work in a defense plan. In a defenserelated industry. And whats one of the biggest industries, is shipyards. We have to get all those guys over to france, so we neat boats we have to put them on. So, theres a big shipyard in delaware. And Shoeless Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams and a reserve catcher for the white sox, a pal of theirs named bird lynn, go over and work there. And oscar happy felsch works for a shipyard or defense plan in milwaukee. So, the core, a good core of the black sox of the white sox are jumping and this is the way the owner of the white sox, Charles Comiskey, interprets that, jumping the team to go get these jobs in the defense plants or shipyards. Theyre highly paid. A lot of people see these guys as slackers, as draft dodgers, as unpatriotic because theyre drawing a good salary to stay out of the war. And play baseball for these shipyards on the weekends. C comiskey doesnt even want to let them back in. Comiskey is also on posed pposee ninegame world series. And comiskey is portrayed as a moneygrabber. Well deal with that more later on. Hes opposed to the ninegame series. Why . Is he just a traditionalist . A conservative . Well, maybe. But remember what i said about Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, the two pitchers. They have 29 wins, and 23 games wins respectively, but really, you know, in the short series you can get away with a smaller rotation. But this is a longer series. They are planning no off days because cincinnati and chicago are so close. Well, really theyre not that close. But they were going to have no off days so you needed a deeper pitching staff. And really the white sox that year were really stuck behind cicotte and williams. And after that, it was a guy named dickey carr, who was a rookie who won 13 games and red faber, whos a hall of famer but hes sick. Hes had the flu. Hes had health problems. Hes had physical problems. Hes only won 11 games. Hes so sick, hes not even going to pitch one game in the world series. So, the white sox basically have a 2 1 2man rotation going into the going into the world series. They got a problem. T cicotte and williams won 95 of all white sox games that year. If you take out faber they won 71 . If they get these guys, if the gamblers get to these guys things look really good for a pitch. And the pitching is really the achilles really, its so big its the achilles foot of the white sox that year. The white sox are going to lose that series. Theyre playing to lose in eight games. Two of the worst players, the most suspicious players is Lefty Williams. Hes going to lose three games, which is not going to happen again for decades and decades in a 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, a really good fielding shortstop, makes four errors. So, he comes under suspicion. Dickey kerr, the third man on the staff, is a rookie. Hes really a small guy. Hes like 57 or so, but even with the white sox playing or the black sox playing behind him, hes going to win the third game and the sixth game of that world series. So really impressive performance on his part, but they are going to lose in those games. Eddie cicotte is going to lose a couple of games and, bang, theyre out. Now, what are the myths . The myths youve seen in the movie eight men out, which was made by director john sales. Really an allstar cast. It was made in the late 80s. At about the same time in a more romanticized, kind of haphazard way, the more popular movie field of dreams with Kevin Costner where Shoeless Joe Jackson and the black sox are going to come back and be rehabilitated and get to play again, get to play baseball again, despite the lifetime ban against them in this cornfield in iowa. And the genesis of the story of the film eight men out and then again in field of dreams is a 1963 book by an author named elliott azenoff. The gist is why the white sox do it. This is the great myth were dealing with here. And the myth that the is this its Charles Comiskeys fault. Its 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, you know, the pennant winner that year. Comiskey was cheating them on bonuses. Specifically on Eddie Cicotte. He was really so bad that he wasnt even cleaning their uniforms. They werent even called the black sox originally because they were crooked. They were called that because comiskey wouldnt even clean their uniforms. So, he was an allaround bad guy, and the black sox just were righting a wrong. They were sticking it to the man. And, you know, getting justice, retributive justice by direct action. And the problem with this theory is that its all wrong. I did two books, which dealt with the this scandal. One was my biography of Kennesaw Mountain landis, the commissioner who came in and fixed this mess and the other was biographer of gambler arnold rothstein, who committed this mess by bank rolling the fix. Since that rothstein book has come out, what we have this is a massive data dump, really, by Major League Baseball, and also just the fact that technology has changed. I was talking to some of the folks beforehand and talking about how research has changed since i started in this game. And now you can get to the microfilm, look stuff up easily. You dont have to rely on some relatives scrapbook and you can find stuff. But the real key thing to dispelling the myths of Charles Comiskey as the scrooge of baseball, the fellow who should bear as much blame as any of the black sox, is this. Around 2002 Major League Baseball, i guess, was cleaning out its attic and they had the teams would have to send to the League Offices what they were paying each guy. If they got someone up from the minors, okay, how much are you paying him . How much are you paying some guy if he came over in a trade from the st. Louis browns . What did he sign for at the beginning of the year . Did you pay him a bonus . All of this was in the League Office files. And Major League Baseball dumped it across the street here in cooperstown at the hall of fame and the National Baseball library. Now, they didnt have the staff to go through all this stuff. They just sort of keep it and treasure it and preserve it for the baseball researchers. Primarily, for members of the society for american baseball research. And these guys really went to work. And they went card by card by card and they figured out what the black sox were making. And youve got to have context. So, they were making something. Well, the numbers of what any of them was paid in 1919 were are pretty pathetic compared to what theyre being paid now because the dollar is pretty pathetic now. But what were the black sox being paid then . Well, consider this, the white sox finished sixth in 1918, okay . It was the war. They had lost some guys. Other teams had lost guys, too, so it probably all evened out. They went from world champions in 1917 to sixth place in 1918. And yet, and yet at the beginning of that season theyre going to have the third highest payroll in the American League. And at the end of that season theyre going to be the highest paid team in the American League. Okay. They are not underpaid at all. Now, another aspect of this that you may read or have heard, well, they were much better than the cincinnati reds. And the reds were paid more than they were. No, no. The reds were the sixth highest paid team in the National League and the eighth highest paid team in the major leagues. Of the 15 highest paid players in the American League, five of them were on the white sox. Two of them, who were honest players on that team, ed eddy collins, second baseman, who was getting 15,000, which was the second highest salary in baseball, ty cobb was getting 20,000. And ray schalk, who was the highest paid catcher in the American League. He was getting 7,083. Three members of the black sox, cicotte, jackson and weaver, were also among the top 15 players. And the next year of the 17 highest paid American Leaguers, seven were members of the black sox. So, comiskey was not underpaying his players. What was comiskey getting paid . Well, thats easy for you to say, mr. Comiskey, 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 white sox attendance went down by 70 in 1918 and the team lost 46,000. So, consider all those things and things start to fall away of these myths of why the white sox did it. The bonuses. One of the stories i didnt mention earlier is the players were promised a bonus and all they got youve seen this in the movie eight men out and all they get is a case of champagne. They open it up and its like its flat. Its stale. Theyre incensed about this. Well, it they were they were not they could not have been promised a bonus as a team, okay. We know they were promised cham sxan they got champagne. How bad it was, who knows. But it was 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 getting 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, again, the cheapskate charles comiss s comiskey. He paid out a bonus to the losing team and thats what caused that. So you couldnt promise a bonus overall to the team. And then theres a bonus to Eddie Cicotte. Theres 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 didnt you know, i was held back. You didnt wouldnt let the manager pitch me to win that 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. Its not 30, eddie. Just so cynical and all that. Except thats not 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. It would also be in maybe you would get so much more if you got won 20 games or if you won 25 games. In fact, this is what happened with Lefty Williams that year. He got to 15 games and 20 games and he got extra bonuses for that. But really why its not true is because Eddie Cicotte did get that clahance to win 30 games a he lost the game. He was not held out. He went home voluntarily to his farm in michigan at the end in the middle of august and was called back by the white sox, given a chance to win and he didnt win. So, every aspect of this is absolutely false. 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 had done it in 1913, but it was really, really ra