Infamous America - BLACK SOX Ep. 1 | "The Glory Days"

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Baseball’s progression from an amateur activity to a professional sport is full of great stories. Hear about the myths and legends of early baseball; the pioneers and the inventors; the moguls and the superstars. And the gamblers. It all leads to the formation of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and sets in motion the elements of one of the most infamous scandals in baseball history. Special thanks to the SABR Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Deaver, Ed Duffy, and William Wansley hold the distinction of being the first three men banned from baseball. They were accused of being associated with gamblers while playing for the New York Mutuals in 1865. But they were all reinstated within a few years. The dubious honor of being the first man banned for life goes to George Bechtel, who conspired with teammates to lose a game for $500. That was in 1876 when he played for $4.00. for the Louisville Grays. One year later, four of his teammates joined him on the list of players banned for life.

The 1877 Louisville Grays scandal was the first major gambling scandal in baseball history, but it was far from the last. Forty years later, arguably the most infamous scandal in American sports history rocked organized baseball. It led to sweeping changes within the framework of the game and ultimately led to the banishment of two of the greatest hitters to ever play the sport, Joe Jackson and Pete Rose. They are still excluded from the Hall of Fame to this day.

This is the true story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and a conspiracy by a group of players to lose the World Series. Those players were banned from the game they loved, and today they're known simply as the Black Sox. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble.

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Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. From BlackBarrel Media, this is season two of the Infamous America podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of the darkest stain on the early years of baseball, the Black Sox scandal. There was no more pivotal time period for baseball than the first 20 years of the 20th century. Baseball had been on the ropes in the late 1800s as it shifted from an amateur game to a professional game. It created a major league and a minor league system, but warring factions within each threatened to tear the game apart.

And then an actual war interrupted the game when America sent troops to Europe in 1917. But it was gambling that did the most damage. Gambling had been a part of the sport nearly as long as the bat and the ball, and owners and officials had taken a lukewarm stance against it for decades. But as the Black Sox scandal unfolded, it became obvious that, hard-of-the-lawful. line action was needed. As baseball moved from the dead ball era to the live ball era, as power hitting replaced dominant pitching, as the game's early heroes gave way to the first transcendent superstar,

and as the world around baseball progressed and changed at an incredible speed, the 1919 Chicago White Sox lost a world series they were virtually guaranteed to win. This is Chapter 1, The Glory Days. the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club decided to write down their rules of baseball in 1845, the game was probably more than a hundred years old. References to the sport date back to the 1740s in Great Britain. After it crossed the Atlantic Ocean to America, the game spread up and down the east coast and slowly drifted westward toward the frontier of Ohio and Tennessee and Kentucky. The guidelines for play were loose and evolved with its migration.

The person who threw the ball toward the hitter was called the feeder, and the throw was underhand. The person who hit the ball was called the striker, and the striker could wait all day for the perfect throw to hit if he or she wanted to. There were no such things as strikes as we think of them today. If a striker hit the ball, the fielder could throw the ball directly at the striker as he ran toward the base. Hitting the runner with the ball was called Soaking the Runner. Eventually, a group of friends in New York City decided to draw up 20 rules of the sport. They weren't the first to do so, but they're the oldest surviving rules we have. Now the person throwing the ball toward the hitter had to pitch it forward in an overhand motion,

and he was called the pitcher instead of the feeder. The winning team was now the first team to accumulate 21 aces or runs. Soaking was outlawed. If you wanted to put a runner out, you had to tag the base with the ball in your hand or touch the runner with the ball. You couldn't throw it at him. And now, if the strikers swung three times

without hitting the ball, it was a hand out. After three hands out, it was the other teams turned to strike. And the strikers had to take their turns in a regular order. Fowl territory was established beyond the first and third base lines and a host of other things.

All of this happened in the fall of 1845. The businessmen who made up the New York Knickerbocker Club had to take a ferry from Manhattan across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey because there wasn't enough space to play in the crowded city. In Hoboken, they set up their game in a grassy area called Elysian Fields. Over the next 10 years, the sports popularity exploded. It raced toward the Pacific Ocean with gold seekers, and 50 clubs sprang up in New York City alone.

By the 1850s, another new set of rules was needed. A collection of teams banded together to form the National Association of Baseball Players. They adopted some of the Knickerbocker rules and changed a few others and added a whole bunch more. Now, a game was played to nine innings instead of 21 aces. There were now nine positions on the field, and therefore nine strikers in the batting order. The four bases were set 90 feet apart in the shape of a diamond, and no one was allowed to catch the ball in his hat anymore. If the striker didn't swing at a good pitch, it was now called a strike. Three such good pitches without the striker swinging would be a handout,

and an umpire was now empowered to call those strikes as well as settle any other dispute. Gambling was strictly prohibited. And, perhaps most importantly, the player, were not to be paid. Baseball was to be an amateur's game. That rule lasted exactly 11 years. Baseball experienced another boom under tragic circumstances. Both armies in the Civil War loved the game. They took it with them everywhere, and when the war ended, they took it home with them. By the mid-1860s, it was played in every field and dusty little town, in every village in the mountains and every city on the coasts. And within four years of the end of the war, two young men had massive impacts on the game

in very different ways. In 1867, William Arthur Cummings threw the first curveball in a game. Batters were dumbfounded. They had never seen anything like it. And baseball purists were shocked. They could not believe a pitcher would have the audacity to intentionally deceive the batter. That was ungentlemanly. Two years later, the gentlemanly aspect was gone for good. A pitcher named Harry Wright created the first openly professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Redstockings. Players had been paid for years, but it had generally been kept quiet.

Now it was out in the open. The highest salary went to Harry's brother, George, and it was $1,400 per year, an astounding sum that was seven times more than that of the average worker. Many assumed it would be the downfall of the game. From that point forward, baseball would be strictly about winning and profits. The Philadelphia newspaper said baseball would die out at once, now that it had become a business. But Harry's team went 57-0 in 1869, and the fans did not leave.

The next year, the Redstocking started the season 27-0 before they ran into the best team in the east, the Brooklyn Atlantics. They played to a 5-5 tie after nine innings, and at that point, the rules said Harry had the choice to accept the tie or go for a win in extra innings. Harry took the risk and kept playing, and it proved to be a disaster. The Redstockings eventually lost a heartbreaker, 8 to 7, but Harry was immensely proud of his club. Then the Aftershock hit.

With the winning streak over, the fans stopped coming to the games. investors pulled their money, and the team was forced to disband. It really did look like business might kill baseball, but it didn't. Not long after the breakup of Harry's team, a group of New Englanders invited him to start a team in Boston. He accepted and brought the core of his Cincinnati team with him, and he brought the team name. He formed the Boston Red Stockings and quickly made it the best team in the country. Baseball, it seemed, would survive its evolution into a business. But it took just five more years for the game's arch nemesis,

gambling, to make its first big attempt to ruin the sport. By 1876, corruption was outwardly hurting baseball. The New York Times said, The aim of baseball is to employ professional players to perspire in public for the benefit of the gamblers. Something had to be done. On February 2nd, 1876, at the Grand Central Hotel in Manhattan, William Holbert, owner of the Chicago Whitestockings,

helped form the first professional baseball league that would survive the test of time. Eight teams joined the new National League and quickly laid down strict rules for their players. No beer, no gambling, and no games on Sundays. The third rule was easy enough to enforce. The first and second were more tricky. By the end of that season, the National League had banned its first player for life. He was George Bechtel of the Louisville Grays. The next year, the Grays were at it again.

They mysteriously lost nine of ten games on a road trip in August and dropped out of the pennant race, thereby handing it to Harry Wright's redstockings. After an investigation, the league concluded that four Louisville players had conspired with gambler, to lose those games on purpose. Jim Devlin, George Hall, Al Nichols, and Bill Craver were banned for life in the first major gambling scandal in baseball. In the next six years, two more momentous things happened in baseball. Albert Goodwill Spalding rose to prominence,

and Pete Browning broke his bat. Spalding was the dominant pitcher in baseball for the first six years of the 1870s when he played for Harry Wright's Boston Redstockings. In 1876, he was lured to the new National League by the owner of the Chicago Whitestockings, William Holbert. But he only played one season for Holbert and retired as a player in 1878 at the ripe old age of 27. Then he went into management. He became the team secretary for Holbert, which is basically the general manager position today.

Four years later, he became president of the Whitestockings when Holbert passed away. Spalding ran the team for a decade and became the most influential owner in the sport. In 1879, the year after he became team secretary, he supported the National League owners in their installation of the most controversial law in baseball, the Reserve Clause. The Reserve Clause essentially tied players to their teams for life. Each team made a list of the players who could not be approached by any other team. The list started out with the top five players as designated. by the team owner. Then it grew to encompass the entire roster. Unless a player's contract was sold,

traded, or terminated, he was with his original club for his entire career. This gave the owners almost total control over the players and allowed the owners to limit player's salaries. The clause ignited a war within baseball that lasted a hundred years. The first major revolt came 10 years after the creation of the Clause, when John Montgomery Ward of the New York Giants helped create the Players League to oppose the National League. But the Players League collapsed after just one season, and it was back to business as usual for the National League. During this time period, the first star of the National League emerged. He was a big, powerful player from Marshalltown, Iowa, who began his career with the Philadelphia Athletics

before jumping to the new National League. William Holbert signed him to the Chicago Whitestockings, and Al Spalding made him a star. He was Adrian Anson, who was forever known as Cap Anson, short for Captain. He set all the records that the players would chase for generations. He had a 300 batting average for 20 years. He tallied more than 2,000 RBIs, and he was the first player to accumulate 3,000 hits. His 3,435 hits are seventh overall in baseball history. His RBI total is fourth all time, behind only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Alex Rodriguez.

But by the end of the 2019 season, he'll likely fall to fifth as Albert Poulthes passes him. And unfortunately, he was also a virulent racist and used his star power to keep black players out of baseball for decades. Cap Anson's refusal to play against teams with black players established an unwritten color barrier in baseball that remained intact for more than 60 years. So we have to take the good with the bad when it comes to Cap Anson. In two days in August 1884, he hit five home runs. The two-day performance was a record at the time

and it's been equaled by 31 other players, but never broken. Another event happened the same year as Cap Anson's record-setting performance, though it was little noted at the time. No one could have guessed the impact it would have on the game. That year, a 17-year-old kid made a new bat for Pete Browning that would become as synonymous with the game as a ball with red stitches. Pete Browning was the most popular player on the Louisville eclipse, at least partly because he was the biggest hitter.

But for a time in 1884, Pete was in a slump. On one fateful day, he broke his bat. during a game. The story goes that a young man named Bud Hilaryk was in the stands that day. He was an apprentice in his father's woodworking shop and he offered to make Pete a new bat right after the game. Pete instructed Bud on the type of bat he wanted and by the end of the day, the star hitter had a new weapon. The next day, Pete went three for three with his new bat. Pete Browning's nickname was the Louisville Slugger and from that day forward it was the name of his bat as well. But Hilarick's dad wasn't interested in making baseball bats, so it took him

10 years to register the patent for the slugger with the U.S. government. 10 years after that, the company changed baseball again by securing the first endorsement deal when the greatest player of the age, Honus Wagner, was paid to put his name on the bat. The same year the Hillericks registered the patent for the Louisville slugger, two of the great forces that would collide in the Black Sox scandal began to move themselves into position. They were Byron Bancroft Johnson and Charles Comiskey. At this point, in 1894, they were good friends. By 1920, they would be bitter enemies. Ban Johnson, as he was called, was the sports editor of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette in 1893 when his good friend Charlie Comiskey recommended him for the job of League

president of the Western League of Baseball. The Western League, which was actually made up of clubs from the Midwest, had struggled financially for years before disbanding in 1892. But a core of owners wanted to start it back up, and they took Comisky's suggestion to hire Banned Johnson as the new president. Johnson immediately proved he was a good choice. He resurrected the league and quickly built it into a profitable enterprise. Meanwhile, his friend Charlie had retired as a player and purchased the Sioux City Cornhuskers and then promptly moved them to Minnesota. Over the next five years, Banned Johnson and Kamisky turned the Western League into such a power that they believed they could challenge the National League. In 1890, Johnson changed the name of

the Western League to the American League. Kamisky moved his team from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago and renamed it the White Sox. Johnson moved a team in Columbus, Ohio to the large. market of Cleveland. Then he shifted teams to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. In 1901, with eight teams in eight major markets, just like the National League, Johnson declared the American League would be a major league. The National League owners balked at the statement, of course, but the American League proved it had staying power. Numerous players jumped from the National League to the new American League, and they brought a quality brand of baseball with them.

After just two years with Johnson as president, it was clear the American League would not collapse as so many other leagues had. By 1903, it was time for the two leagues to sit down at the bargaining table. Eventually, they hammered out a deal that would be known as the National Agreement. Among other things, it said officially that there were two major leagues, and it created a national commission to oversee the leagues. The commission would be made up of three-party. people, the president of the American League, the president of the National League, and a chairman.

And, above all, the leagues agreed to respect the reserve clause. Players couldn't jump from one league to the other anymore. At the end of the 1903 season, the owners of the champions of the American League and the National League agreed to let their teams play each other for the supremacy of baseball. Boston won the first postseason series in Major League history, but it would be two more years before it was called the World Series. There was no championship series in 1904 because John McGrath refused to let his team play. McGraw had been a fiery, rowdy player with the Baltimore Orioles in the late 1800s. But not long after the Orioles joined the American League, he got into a dispute with League President Ban Johnson. Johnson suspended him, so McGraw jumped over

to the New York Giants of the National League. When his playing career finished, he trained transitioned to manager of the Giants, and he lost none of his feisty temperament. He stayed with the Giants for the next 30 years and collected 10 National League penance. The first came in 1904, and McGraw refused to let his Giants play the American League champion from Boston, so there was no championship series that season. But by 1905, the two leagues had officially agreed to stage a postseason series between their champions every year, and it would be called the World Series. With the advantage of hindsight, the 1905 World Series was historic.

The two managers who would win the most games in baseball history squared off against each other for the first time. John McGraw led the Giants to the National League title and eventually won 2,763 games with the club. But that was only good enough for second place. The man he faced in the 1905 series eventually topped his total by almost 1,000. His name was Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy, but everyone struggled to say the long Irish name, so they just called him Connie Mack. Connie Mack started the Philadelphia Athletics

for Ban Johnson's New American League, and he managed the team for an incredible 50 years until he was 87 years old. In that time, he won 3,731 games, a record that will probably never be broken. The 1905 World Series was historically for another reason as well. The giant star pitcher, Christy Matthewson,

performed defeat no player has equaled since. He pitched three shutouts in six days to win the championship. In 27 innings, he allowed 14 hits, one walk, and zero runs, while striking out 18 batters. The 1905 season was his third straight year with 30 or more wins. But before the season was finished, another major force in baseball was introduced to the big leagues. That August, the Detroit Tigers signed a young man from a minor league team in Augusta, Georgia.

The player's mere presence on the team that summer was remarkable because he had suffered an immense tragedy just three weeks before he was called up. His father suspected his mother of having an affair. One evening, the father left the house and returned later that night. He crawled up onto the roof of the porch and began to climb through the bedroom window. He was armed with a pistol and determined to catch his wife in the act. But she wasn't having an affair. She was alone in the room as she thought the man crawling through the window was a burglar, or so she said later. She shot him twice and killed him. But a coroner's

inquest after the death didn't fully believe her story. She was indicted on a charge of manslaughter, though she was eventually acquitted at her trial the next year. Despite the loss of his father and the arrest of his mother, the player hopped a train to Detroit and began his major league career. In 1905, the Detroit Tigers unleashed Ty Cobb on organized baseball. One of Cobb's teammates on that Augusta club joined him on the Tigers that year, though his name would not be as widely known until he played for the Chicago White Sox several years later. He was pitcher Eddie Seacott. He got his first major league victory on September 5th, 1905. Ironically, against the Chicago White Sox.

That year, another piece of history happened. The season ended with the first World Series to feature two teams from the same city, the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox. Charlie Kamisky's White Sox won their first championship, that it would take 11 years to win their second. And two years after that, they would be embroiled in one of the most infamous scandals in baseball history. The White Sox first championship was a quick blip on the radar, but the next year, another hero of the game emerged and he would stay on the radar for the next 20 years.

Walter Johnson debuted for the Washington Senators at 19 years old, and pitching was never the same. He was a tall farm boy from Kansas who was discovered in far off Idaho. He had long arms and a unique sidearm delivery that turned his right arm into a whip. The result was the hardest, fastest fastball anyone had ever seen. It genuinely scared batters and umpires. But he had amazing control over his pitches. As one reporter said, if he didn't, there would be dead bodies all over Idaho.

When Johnson got to the major leagues, Ty Cobb was in his second full season with the Tigers. After his first game against Johnson, he told his manager to find a way to sign the young phenom, even if it took $25,000 to do it. Cobb said, the first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy wind-up. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing hissed with danger.

We couldn't touch him. Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark. Other batters put it more succinctly. You can't hit what you can't see. The legends of baseball piled up quick in the early part of the 20th century. The year after Walter Johnson terrified batters for the first time,

Jack Norworth wrote the words to a song that would become the anthem for baseball. Take me out to the ball game. Ironically, Norworth had never been to a major league game. Neither had Albert von Tilzer who wrote the iconic music. That was in 1908. By that time, a powerful young mill worker had been tearing up the semi-pro leagues in the Carolinas for seven years. In 1908, Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics bought his contract and brought the player up to the majors.

But that was just one of several pivotal events in the young man's life that year. He grew up dirt poor in Greenville, South Carolina. His father worked at a local mill, and at the age of six or seven, he joined his father on the workforce. He never went to school, never learned to read or write, but he did learn to play baseball. Many people thought he had the best natural swing in the game, and those people included Babe Ruth. In 1908, while playing his final season of semi-pro ball, a reporter for his local newspaper, the Greenville News,

noticed that the young left fielder trotted out to his position with no shoes on. The reporter called the player, shoeless Joe Jackson for the first time, and the name stuck with him for the rest of his life. Joe never quite understood the fascination with the name or the incident. He was wearing a new pair of shoes during the game and they weren't broken in. They hurt his feet, so he simply took them off and played in his socks. It was the only time it ever happened, but fans and reporters loved the story, and before long, it took on a life of its own. In 1908, he married his wife, Katie.

She was 15 and he was 19, and they stayed married for 43 years. until the day he died. She wrote all his letters and managed his money and read all his contracts. She was his rock during the early years when the pro players teased him mercilessly about being illiterate, and in the later years when he felt the sting of humiliation after his career was cut short. But those dark days were still ten years down the road. For now, Joe bounced between the majors and the minors until Connie Mack sold his contract to Cleveland. Joe had never been comfortable in a big city like Philadelphia. In the smaller city of Cleveland, he thrived.

Beginning in 1911, he proved himself to be one of the best hitters in baseball. His 408 batting average that year is still a Cleveland record. For the rest of his career, his average never dipped below 300, and he did most of that work with a bat that became famous. It was made for him by a fan in green. named Charlie Ferguson. Joe darkened the wood with layer after layer of tobacco juice and then called the bat, Black Betsy. As Joe began his career in earnest in Cleveland in 1911, one of his former teammates, who would become a teammate again very soon, was in the third season of one of the most

incredible careers in baseball history, though his name is often overlooked by the general public. He was Eddie Collins, one of the best second baseman in the game. He played his first full season in 1908 with Joe Jackson for Connie Max A's, but where Joe was intimidated by the big city, Eddie was not. The two men could not have been more different. Joe grew up poor and illiterate in the South. Eddie grew up wealthy and highly educated in the North.

He was born in Millerton, New York, and attended Irving Prep School and then Columbia University. He spent the first seven years of his career with the A's and helped Connie Mack take the next step as a manager. In 1910, they won their first World Series. The next year, they did it again. That season, Collins was a part of the famous $100,000 infield. It featured Stuffy McGuinness at first base, Collins at second, Jack Barry at shortstop, and Frank Baker at third. Collins played second base hard and rough in a style that John McGraw would have liked. In 1912, Collins and the A's were playing the Washington Senators. The young first baseman for the Senators raced toward second base where Collins was waiting.

Collins jumped into the air to catch a bad throw, and as he came down, the runner slid toward second. The senator's first baseman smashed into Eddie's knee and broke his nose. That young man was Arnold Chick Gandal. He would be Collins' teammate on the Sox in five years and the ringleader of the scandal in seven. But for now, they were opponents. The Boston Red Sox beat out the A's for the right to go to the World Series in 1912, and they went on to win it in their brand-new stadium of Fenway Park.

Eddie Collins, Connie Mack, and the A's won the World Series again in 1913 and went back for a fourth time in five years in 1914. But that year, they were upset by the Miracle Braves, the Boston team that shocked everyone by going from last place in July to first place in October. After the 1914 season, Connie Mack began a tradition he became famous for, one that modern fans would recognize well. He sold off all of his star players before they could demand bigger contracts.

He sent pitcher Herb Pennock to the Boston River. Red Sox, where Pinnock spent seven years before owner Harry Frazee sold his contract to the New York Yankees, just in time to help them form the greatest dynasty in baseball. Collins went to the Chicago White Sox, and then just before the end of the 1915 season, the Sox made another big acquisition. Sox owner Charlie Kamiski sent team secretary Harry Graviner to Cleveland to secure one of the best hitters in baseball. Shoeless Joe Jackson

Kamiski told Graveter go to Cleveland, watch the bidding for Jackson and raise the highest one made by any club until they all drop out. On August 21st, 1915, shoeless Joe Jackson joined the Chicago White Sox. The team now included Jackson, Eddie Seacott, Eddie Collins, Shano Collins, Red Faber,

Nemo Leibold, Ray Shalk, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch. Over the next three years, it would gain Chick-Gandle, Lefty Williams, Fred McMullen, Swede Risberg, and Dickie Kerr. Then the team would be set for the 1919 season. Next week, the White Sox assemble an all-star roster and, together with the Red Sox, begin to dominate baseball. The relationship between American League President Ban Johnson and his old friend Charles Kmischke begins to disintegrate. Another gambling scandal

bubbles to the surface of organized baseball, and the world everywhere seems plunged into chaos. World War I rages in Europe. Influenza kills millions across the globe. Race riots explode in the United States, and Americans fear communism

is coming to destroy their way of life. 1919 was a hell of a year. That's next time, on Infamous America. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. This story is produced with the help of the Sabre Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. If you want to know more about the people and events you've heard here, go to saber.org for a wealth of articles.

That's S-A-B-R.org. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.