Infamous America - BLACK SOX Ep. 0 | Prologue

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

It's been 100 years since the most infamous event in baseball history. In 1919, a group of Chicago White Sox players conspired to lose the World's Series. This the story of legendary players like Shoeless Joe Jackson; baseball moguls like Charles Comiskey; and ruthless gamblers like Arnold Rothstein. This is the true story of "Eight Men Out." Special thanks to the SABR Black Sox Research Committee for assistance in this production. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The gold rush was on. In the late 1890s, thousands of miners flocked to the Yukon territory in western Canada, not far from its border with the future American state of Alaska. The miners converged on a sleepy fishing village called Dawson at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. Dawson became the epicenter of the Klondike Gold Rush, one of the last gold rushes in North America.

But the boom was brief. After just two years, the mines were played out, and the miners had largely moved on to strikes in British Columbia and Alaska. About 1,300 hearty souls stayed in Dawson City, and they were literally at the end of the line. The Klondike Highway dead-ended at Dawson City. If you wanted to go past it, you had to blaze your own trail. So in the early 1900s, the people of Dawson had film reels delivered to their small community to keep up with events in the outdoors. outside world. But it was a one-way trip for the films. When they arrived in Dawson, they never left. The townsfolk watched all kinds of things, feature films, comedy shorts, human interest

stories, and newsreels of current events. In those days, the film reels were made with a nitrate base, which meant they were extremely flammable and could decompose easily if they weren't stored in the proper conditions. After the people of Dawson watched their films, They didn't want to just toss them in a pile or throw them in the river, so they buried them. They buried them under an abandoned swimming pool that was being used as an ice rink. More than 50 years passed, and then the town of Dawson decided it wanted to get rid of that old ice rink, so construction workers dug it up. When they did, they discovered a treasure trove of old films that were perfectly preserved in the cold ground under the rink.

It took many years to safely transport the combustible films to elaborate. to have them digitized for modern consumption, and some of them have still never been seen. But in 2014, a Chicago filmmaker named Bill Morrison visited the Library and Archives Canada and saw an old Dawson City film reel with a curious name. It was labeled 1919 World Series. It turned out that tiny Dawson City,

in far northwest Yukon Territory, more than 3,000 miles from Chicago, had the most extensive and well-preserved film footage of the most hotly debated World Series in baseball history. On it, you can see players and managers who have now become legends. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Seacott, Buck Weaver, Chick-Gandle, Swede Risberg, Dickie Kerr, Kid Gleason, and many more. You can see packed crowds at Redland Field,

the home of the Cincinnati Reds. You can see the 1919-19 Chicago White Sox throw and hit and round the bases. You can watch them in action just one year before they became the most infamous team in baseball, the Black Sox. You can watch them lose the World Series. Welcome to a new season of Infamous America. In this series, you'll hear the full story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox,

the team then is commonly known as the Black Sox after several members conspired with gamblers to lose the World Series. This year, 2019, is the 100-year anniversary of that fateful season and that fateful world series. Now it's time to tell the story like you've never heard it before. The Black Sox Scandal Research Committee at the Society for American Baseball Research has spent decades tracking down documents and uncovering new information about this story. This series is produced in association with the generous men and women at Sabre. Just in the last 15 years, documents discovered in museums and archives have changed what we thought we knew about this story. Before now, Elliot Asanoff's 1963 book, Eight Men Out, was considered the Bible for the scandal.

But the newly discovered material shines light on things Asanoff didn't know. Now we know the truth. Most of it anyway. So subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or any other platform of your choice to hear the story as it unfolds week by week leading up to the 2019 World Series. Our story begins August 7th, 2019. We'll see you then.