It is a good company should because, right now, it is the 100th anniversary 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. It brought about many changes in baseball, including getting a commissioner and eight players on the white sox banned from baseball for life, but the story of that is not really a simple one. It is very complicated. So the title of tonights talk is called field of myths 100 years after baseballs 1919 black sox scandal, so it should be a fascinating talk. I am excited to welcome david pietrusza, our speaker tonight. David we are gathered here on the eve of this years world series, and 100 years ago, who knew if there were 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. Legends have spawned 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 out west and 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. An umpire was thrown out in 1882. He is the only umpire who has been thrown out. There were rumors of world series fixes almost as much 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, there is a prospective scandal brewing on the cincinnati reds. The white sox played the reds, but there was a scandalous goingson in cincinnati with a first baseman named hal chase. His manager, christy mathewson, 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 to 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 very 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 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 a chick gandil, because here 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 of play in the world series, he only gets two atbats. But wants in and will be let in. Named swede, a guy risberg, described by Shoeless Joe Jackson as 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. Later on. 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 with eight or nine, and it is the end of the lively ball era. The babe ruth era will start up the next year but is not quite there in 1919, and then you have pitchers. You need pitchers involved in throwing it world series. The gamblers have as part of the conspiracy the two best pitchers on the Chicago White sox, Eddie Cicotte, 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. R. Is a younger pitche 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 also a guy who 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. In 1918, the season is cut down to a 142 game series season. Recall that, up until 1961, it 156 game series. 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 a good core of the black sox, the white sox, are jumping and this is what the owner, Charles Comiskey, interprets. Jumping the team to get these jobs in defense plants or shipyards and they are highly paid. A lot of guys see these people unpatriotic, because they are drawing a good salary to stay out of the war and played baseball for these shipyards on the weekends. Not want to let these guys back in. He is also opposed to the ninegame world series idea. A money is portrayed as grubber and we will deal more with that later on, but he is opposed to the ninegame series. Why . Is he a traditionalist . Maybe, but remember what i said wiliams. Ie and lefty wins in 23 games, but in a short series you can get away with a shorter rotation. This is a longer series. They are planning no off days because cincinnati and chicago are so close. Well, they are not that close, but they were going to have no off days so you needed a deeper pitching staff. Werehite sox that year really stuck behind se williams. After that it was dickey kerr and red faber. He had health problems, physical problems and only wins 11 games. He is so sick he is not going to pitch one game and the world series. The white sox basically have a 2. 5 man rotation going into the world series. They have got a problem. Won 59 of the games and if you take out faber, they won 71 . These guys look good for a fix and the pitching is the achilles heel it is so big it is the achilles foot of the white sox that year. They are going to lose that series. They are playing to lose in eight games. Players isworst lefty wiliams. He is going to lose three games which is not going to happen again for decades and decades in a world series. 6. 61 e. R. A. That year. The shortstop only makes four errors. Dickey kerr, the third man of the staff, is a rookie. He is a really small guy. Even with the white sox playing or the black sox plane to lose he is going to win the third game and sixth game of the world series. A impressive performance on his part but they are going to lose out. And bang, they are seen in theu have ie of goat eight men out out was madeen way and in therd more popular movie field of dreams where the black sox are going to come back and be rehabilitated and get to play baseball again despite a lifetime ban. The genesis of the story eight men out and field of dreams is a book. This is why the white sox do this. This is the myth we are dealing with. This Charles Comiskeys fault. That these guys were exploited working men. Paid verynot being well. They were among the lowest paid team and the American League. Comiskey was cheating them on bonuses, specifically Eddie Cicotte. Bad he was not even cleaning their uniforms. They were not called the black sox originally because they were crooked. They were called that because comiskey would not clean the uniforms. He was a allaround bad guy and the black sox were writing a wrong. They were sticking it to the man by directg justice action. The problem with this theory is that it is all wrong. I did two books which dealt with this scandal. One was a biography of kenesaw mountain landis, the commissioner who fix this mess, and the man who created this mess by bankrolling the world series. Since that Arnold Rothstein book has come out what we have had is a massive data dump by Major League Baseball and the fact that technology is changed. Howtalking to folks about research has changed since i started in this game and now you can get to the microfilm, you can look stuff up, you do not have to rely on a scrapbook. The real key thing to dispelling of Charles Comiskey as the scrooge of baseball and should bear as much blame as the black sox is this. Around 2002 Major League Baseball was cleaning out the attic and the teams would have to send to the legal offices what they were paying each guy. Paying some guy if he came from a trade . What did he sign at the beginning of the year . Did you pay him a bonus . All of this was in the League Office file and majorleague baseball dumped it across the street in cooperstown. They did not have the staff to go through all of this. They just wanted to keep it, treasurer, preserve it for researchers. Of thely for Members Society of american baseball research. These guys went to work and that card by card and figured out the black sox were making and you have got to have context. They were making something. The numbers of what any of them were paid in 1919 are pretty pathetic to what they are being paid now because the dollars pretty pathetic now. A black sox being paid then . Consider this, the white sox finished sixth in 1918. It was the war, they lost guys, other teams had lost guys, but they went from world champions in 1917 to sixth in 1918. Yet, at the beginning of that season they are going to have the thirdhighest payroll in the American League. Theye end of that season are going to be the highest paid team in the American League. They are not underpaid at all. Aspect of this you may read or have heard is they were much better than the cincinnati reds. The reds were paid more than they were. No. They were the sixth highest paid team and the eight highest in the major leagues. Paid playershest in the American League five of them were on the white sox. Honest players. Eddie collins was getting 15,000 which was the second highest salary in baseball. Ray shaw, the catcher, he was the highestpaid catcher. 7083. Getting weaver, jackson, and were also among the top players and of the 17 highest paid , many of them were the highestpaid. What was comiskey getting paid . Because of the war in 1918 the previous two years comiskey had been drawing 10,000 a year and he owned the team. To 5,000 a year. The revenue really went down that year so white sox attendance went down 70 in 1918 and they lost 46,000. Consider all those things and things start to fall away of the myths of whether white sox did it. The bonuses. One of the stories which i did not mention earlier the players were promised a bonus is a case ofgot champagne. Is flat, it and it stale, and they are incensed about this. They could not have been promised a bonus as a team. Ok . We know they were promised champagne and they got it. How bad it was who knows . They put forward that you could not promise a bonus to team members that they won the world series. The reason is because some losing teams ended up getting a higher bonus than the winning teams. One of the owners who did this and caused the losing team to have more than the winning team was the cheapskate Charles Comiskey. He paid to the losing members of the team and that is what caused that. You could not promise a bonus overall to the team. Then there is a bonus to Eddie Cicotte. Theres a big scene in the movie where he goes in and says, i was promised a bonus of 10,000, mr. Comiskey, if i won 30 games. I was held back. You would not let the manager pitch me. Secretary,es to his the general manager and says, can you look up in the records how many games mr. Cicotte wo . N . 29 games. 29 games is not 30, eddie. That is not true. 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 also you would get so much more wonou got maybe if you 20 games or 25 games. This is what happened with lefty wiliams. He got extra bonuses for the 20 ises, but why it is not true because Eddie Cicotte lost the game. Voluntarily to his farm in michigan in the middle of august and was called back by the white sox and he did not win. 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 rare even back then. Also, Eddie Cicotte led the American League in losses the year before. Again, none of this makes any sense. Cicotte does get a bonus. Without this performance bonus of 30 games does get a bonus because he was promised in 1918 that if he had the same sort of year that he had in 1917, he would get a 3000 bonus. 1918, butp the lot in comiskey, because he is good the next year, gives them the bonus he was promised. Again, myth, myth, myth. Also, if cicotte was in on the fix and was one of the wasleaders, because he stiffed on the bonus which would have occurred late in the season, why do we know by his own confession he was working on the fix in Early September . Why do we know from buck weavers conversation with the detective hired by comiskey that cicotte was talking about the fix in june . Fact. Fact, how great were the white sox . Again theyr and over were one of the greatest teams in baseball history. They were pretty good. In 1917, they won the pennant in 1919, but they win this by 3. 5 games. That is not all that impressive. That is kind of middling. They were supposed to rollover the cincinnati reds. Win the pennant by nine games. One loss the highest percentage in baseball, were not exceeded, until the 1927 game. That is not bad at all. The second half season is amazing. They have a one loss percentage of 712. They are on fire going into the world series and they are deep. Shallowwhite sox were eds cantching staff the r start five different guys in the first five games of the 1919 world series. , which isnother myth maybe not as important, but in terms of how difficult was it to garner information to construct history of the black sox . That there was a wall of silence involving not only the black sox but the clean players, andst there was a cone of silence that fell down around the world series fix. That is not true because we know you can search the microfilm and find things that were equally that 20 different gaveand white sox players 85 different interviews afterwards. Some of these are not true. They are contradictory, people will contradict themselves, but people were willing to talk. Were not willing to talk to the fellow whose history of the black sox is the standard. Istory, elliott as a i met him late in his life. We were watching a series on espn which was premiering and he seemed like a nice fellow. He was suffering from lyme disease than, but when i first read eight men out when i was in high school it was terrific. Brilliant narrative. It is such a wonderfully written book you have the feeling he has got it all. This is every detail 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. I tried to figure out the narrative and it did not make any sense whatsoever. If you took a look at the chronology of things and how they were supposed to happen, it just sort of fell apart. I wrote that in rothstein respectfully, but this does not make sense and heres how the narrative really went down with Arnold Rothstein. Other people have pointed out that i shouldve picked up on this. I read the book in high school so i am not exactly an experienced author, but there thoughts expressed. So and so was thinking this or that. Good historians do not put that down. Novelists put that down. Eliot asinof was a author and screenwriter. He is creating a narrative going forward, forward, forward and providing these details which you should pick up on. How could he have known this . Or details. How could he have known this level of detail from what happened . I just pick this at random as i was preparing this in a day or so. Smiled as he saw the 100,000 bills that sullivan withdrew from his coat pocket. How would he have this information . This is why this book has been described as a historical novel. There are further imaginary characters in it, made up people in the book. Gamblerhich is harry, a who is supposed to have threatened lefty wiliams on the eve of the eighth game. How do we know he is imaginary . This and said, i did this on the advice of my publisher to protect my copyright in case someone is going to plagiarize me. You cannot copyright an individual. You cannot copyright a fact. This does not make any sense. He has this character and other people think a couple of other mino