Infamous America - BLACK SOX Ep. 6 | "Eight Men Out"

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

The scandal crashes down on the White Sox players and gamblers. The criminal trial is a fiasco, though it ends well for the defendants. But the new commissioner of baseball is not beholden to the courts and he levies the ultimate punishment against the players. After the appeals fail, the players make new lives for themselves. Most play with outlaw teams across the country. And the story ends with a memorable reunion of the two of the greatest hitters of all time. 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

With three games left in the 1920 season, an odd party took place at a Chicago restaurant. Several players from the Chicago White Sox gathered for a celebration, which obviously doesn't seem odd on the surface. But they weren't celebrating an achievement on the field. They hadn't won anything yet. With three games left in the year, they were in second place, one game behind the Cleveland Indians. If they won their last three games and Cleveland's somehow went on a losing streak, The socks could still win the American League pennant. But none of that had happened yet, and some of the players were celebrating anyway.

The thing that made it odd was that they were celebrating the loss of most of their starting lineup. Eight of their teammates had just been suspended indefinitely, and the players in the restaurant that evening were cheering. Their season was about to collapse, and they were still jubilant. When they finished at the restaurant, they continued the party at the house, of second baseman Eddie Collins. The players at the party were the clean socks,

as people would call them later. They had not been involved in the conspiracy, and now the charade was finally done. The truth had just come out, and all the participants were about to be exposed. Celebrating the loss of teammates might have seemed odd on the surface, but nothing about this story was normal,

as the roller coaster ride of the legal process was about to begin. From Black Barrel 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 one of the most infamous events in Major League Baseball history, the Black Sox scandal. Previously, a group of Chicago White Sox players went through with a conspiracy to lose the 1919 World Series. And now, after investigations and grand jury appearances, it all comes down to this. the trial and the banishment of the eight players. But this isn't the last episode of the series.

Next week, you'll hear from Jacob Palmrenki, the chairman of the Sabre Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. He's been the guiding force behind this series. And finally, we'll finish the season with an interview with Mike Nola, who runs BlackBetsey.com, a website dedicated to Shoeless Joe Jackson. Few people know more about Shoeless Joe than Mike, and you'll definitely want to hear his stories. So let's get to it. Here's chapter six,

eight men out. 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. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy time advanced gummies, from mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN. So you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress,

and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy. The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code infamous. 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. Eddie Seacott and Joe Jackson confessed to a gambling conspiracy in front of a grand jury in Chicago on September 28, 1920. The next day, Lefty Williams admitted his role in the same scheme to lose the 1919 World Series. Lefty named eight players who participated in or had knowledge of the fix.

White Sox owner Charlie Kamisky immediately suspended all eight players indefinitely. The three players testified while the team was on a short break before the last three games of the year. At that point, Chicago was just one game behind Cleveland in the race for the AL pennant. After the suspensions, the socks lost two of three to the St. Louis Browns, and that was the end of their season. Cleveland represented the American League in the 1920 World Series and beat the Brooklyn Robbins, also known as the Brooklyn Dodgers, five games to two. As exciting as the World Series was, the real drama that fall played out in the courtrooms of the Chicago Criminal Justice System. Lefty Williams named eight players and five gamblers to the Cook County. County Grand Jury, and the grand jury had indicted eight players and five gamblers. But now the maze

of inconsistencies began, and fair warning here, it's going to get messy. But if you want all the goods, here they are. Lefty named Sport Sullivan, Abe Attell, and Bill Burns as three of the gamblers, and those three were indicted by the grand jury. Lefty also named two mystery men whom he knew only as Bennett and Brown. The grand jury did nothing with Bennett and then indicted the wrong Brown. An indictment was issued for Rachel Brown, which is

probably a misspelling of an alias used by a small-time crook in New York whose real name was Abraham Bronstein. Bronstein was connected to gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, so it's not a crazy stretch that he got mixed up in this.

But nothing came of the indictment because Bronstein, alias Brown, wasn't involved. Interestingly, Arnold Rothstein, who most definitely was involved, was not indicted. He testified before the grand jury and proclaimed his innocence, and that was the end of his involvement in the legal proceedings. The true identity of Mr. Bennett remained unknown for the moment, so the grand jury indicted former Major League First Baseman Hal Chase instead, as the middleman between Bill Burns and Abe Attell. The indictments came down at the end of October 1920,

but a few days later, the criminal justice system in Chicago experienced complete upheaval. A political election swept out the old regime and swept in a new one. Everyone in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office who had worked on the Black Sox case was gone. The new team made frightening discoveries. The indictments were incomplete, evidence was missing, and the transcripts of the grand jury testimonies of Eddie, Lefty, and Joe had disappeared. Worse yet, the three players were now fighting the case. They were united with the other five players in a stand against the prosecution, and they wanted

their grand jury confessions suppressed. The new prosecutors scrambled to rebuild the case and plan their strategy, and while they did, A baseball civil war erupted inside the major leagues. For the third off-season in a row, a group of owners tried to abolish the three-man National Commission that governed baseball. Two years ago, the commission had been made up of American League President Ban Johnson, National League President John Hedler, and chairman, Gary Herman. Last off-season, Herman resigned, and his position had not been filled, so that left just Johnson and Hedler.

Even though Herman had been the chairman, Bann Johnson had usurped power long ago and ruled the commission himself and therefore ruled baseball. But as more owners became dissatisfied with his rulings, they joined the core group of three or four rebels who wanted Johnson out and the commission dissolved. By the offseason between 1920 and 1921, the insurrectionists had 11 owners on their side. three from the American League, which included Johnson's former friend Charlie Kamiski, and all eight from the National League. That meant just five AL owners stayed loyal to ban Johnson. Before the Black Sox scandal broke at the end of September, plans were already in the works to change the foundational framework of Major League Baseball.

As meetings continued through October, those plans coalesced around a central idea. There should be one commissioner of baseball. On November 8th, the 11 allied owners met in Chicago and selected federal judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis as their choice for commissioner. And now, with 11 owners sitting in one room and five owners sitting in another, Major League Baseball collapsed.

The Yankees, White Sox, and Red Sox, resigned from the American League. The National League dissolved itself. The 11 owners formed a new National League and reserved a spot for a 12th team, hoping one of the remaining loyalists would jump over to their side. Baseball had just experienced a seismic shift, but luckily few people knew about it. It was not too late to put the pieces back together. A few days later, the healing process began.

All 16 owners unanimously agreed on selecting Judge Landis to be the first commission of baseball. A month after that, they wrote a new national agreement that gave the commissioner the power to investigate anything detrimental to baseball and to take unilateral action based on the results. And now the basic framework of modern baseball was set. The owners kept their teams and their respective leagues, and they positioned a single commissioner at the top of the pyramid with nearly unlimited power. The presidents of the two leagues also remained in place for the next 80 years, until they were eliminated after the 1999 season. As the teams opened spring training in 1921, catastrophe had been avoided within baseball,

and a new man was in power, but there was one major issue that still had to be dealt with from the previous era. In the spring of 1921, prosecutors in the Black Sox case begged a judge to give them more time to prepare. He said no. Jury selection would begin in six weeks. Then the indicted White Sox players received a shock. All charges against them had been dropped, but if they celebrated, it would have been brief and premature. By the end of March, the state's attorney had filed new charges and received new indictments from a grand jury. The eight players and the five original gamblers were indicted for a second time, and now they had more company. The grand jury indicted five more gamblers. Carl Zork from St. Louis, Benjamin Franklin from Omaha, Ben and Lou

Levi from Indianapolis, and the man who tied them all together, David Zelser from Des Moines, who was previously known as Bennett. The dismissal of the charges and then the re-indictment of the players was a strategic legal move by the new attorneys based on the evidence at their disposal after they took office. They had to move fast. The judge, wanted to push the case through the system without delay. The prosecutor's office must have been a madhouse between March and June of 1921. The state was now pursuing cases against 18 defendants, 10 gamblers and 8 players. Combined, the defendants had 11 lawyers.

The clock was ticking for the prosecution. Eddie, Lefty, and Joe had confessed their involvement to the grand jury, but the prosecution had very little evidence. against the other five players, and they were having a hell of a time getting the gamblers into court. Former first baseman Hal Chase stayed out in California and fought extradition. Benjamin Franklin stayed in Omaha. He was excused from trial because of illness. The mysterious Rachel Brown, who was probably Rothstein's business partner, Nat Evans, was a ghost. And the three gamblers who knew the most about the fix were all in different situations.

Sleepy Bill Burns was laying low. No one had seen him since the 1919 World Series. Abe Attell was in New York, but he was fighting extradition to Chicago just like Hal Chase. And Sports Sullivan's case was the most puzzling. Some reports said he fled to Canada. Others said Mexico. Still others said he stayed right in his hometown of Boston. Five months ago, when his grand jury indictment had become,

public, he boasted that he would go to Chicago within two days and tell the whole inside story of the conspiracy. But that never happened. For some reason, he was never pursued, never arrested, and never appeared before a grand jury or at trial. The prosecution was in a bind, until Ban Johnson came to the rescue. He paid the expenses for Billy Mahargue to travel to the area around Del Rio, Texas to retrieve Sleepy Bill Burns. Billy convinced his partner in the fix to become a witness for the prosecution. Together, they would provide the most damaging testimony in the trial that was set to begin, July 18, 1921.

The courtroom was packed. The midsummer heat was stifling. The players and the gamblers and their horde of lawyers were crowded around the defense table. But people paying close attention would have noticed that the group was one player short, Shortstop, Fred McMullen was not there. He was struggling financially, and he sent word that he was not able to pay his own way from his home in Los Angeles to Chicago for trial. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but no one followed up on it. He was not taken into custody and was not transported to Chicago to stand trial with his teammates.

So, there were only seven players at the trial, not eight. In the courtroom, a gaggle of prosecutors sent him. sat opposite the defense teams. Spectators filled the benches of the gallery. Twelve men sat in wooden chairs in the jury box. And Judge Hugo Friend presided over baseball's trial of the century. The prosecution opened with a big witness, Chicago White Sox owner Charlie Kamiski.

He walked the jury through his history with the game of baseball and then discussed some of the events surrounding the 1919 World Series. prosecutors tried to push the narrative that the players were trying to hurt Kamisky's business by engaging in the conspiracy. The defense quickly countered that Kamisky had made more money in 1920 than he had in 1919, so the alleged conspiracy had not hurt his business. This theme of profits would come back at the end of the trial and give rise to the greatest myth in the Black Sox scandal.

But before that happened, the stars of the show took the stand. Sleepy Bill Burns was the chief witness for the prosecution. For three days he sat on the stand and recounted details of the conspiracy from start to finish. The defense tried to rattle him, but Burns was unfazed by sneering comments and questions. He listed seven players who were in meetings about the fix. Everyone except Shulis Joe.

He said he thought Abe Battell and his business partner Bennett, whom he identified as David Zelser, had financed the fix with the help of Arnold Rothstein, and he asserted the fix had begun with the players, not the gamblers. The defense pushed back on that claim, but Burns was unshakable. At the end of three long days of testimony, the press thought Burns had been fantastic. The prosecutors were elated. And now the court had to deal with the missing grand jury confessions of Eddie Seacott, Lefty Williams and Joe Jackson.

It was true that the original transcripts were gone, but the stenographers who wrote those transcripts still had their detailed notes of the confessions. So they simply recreated the transcripts. The new versions were nearly identical to the old versions, which had been printed almost word for word in the newspapers. But the real problem was the defense claimed Eddie, Lefty, and Joe had been offered immunity by the prosecutors in exchange

for their testimony to the grand jury. If that was true, the confessions would not have been voluntary, and therefore they could not be used at trial. So now the trial came to a halt as the judge was forced to hold hearings into the matter. After numerous witnesses testified to both sides of the argument, the judge made his ruling. Portions of the recreated transcripts would be read out loud in court,

but all references to anyone other than the person who gave the confession had to be deleted. The confessions could only be used to incriminate the men who made them. They could not be used against the five other players or the gamblers. So now the jury had to endure the tedious process of listening to page

after page of testimony given by Eddie, lefty, and Joe nine months earlier. The exercise was mind-numbing, and the prosecutors now worried they might be hurting their case. They changed their strategy. Instead of calling the rest of their long list of witnesses, they move straight to their closer, Billy Mahark.

Billy was almost as good as Bill Burns. He verified many of the things Burns said, and when he was finished, the prosecutors felt good again. They rested their case. Now the defense peppered the judge with a series of motions. So little evidence had been presented against the Levi brothers that the judge dismissed the charges against them. They were free to go. The judge then made a strange move by signaling to the jury that the cases were so thin against Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, and Carl Zork, the gambler from St. Louis, that he would probably overturn the verdicts if they were found guilty. In essence, the judge had just said the two players and the gambler were not guilty before they had even presented their defenses.

And now they were about to present their defenses. It looked like it would be a long process. but to everyone's surprise, it wasn't. Four different teams of lawyers represented the eight players, and more teams of lawyers represented the gamblers. They were all going to present their cases one by one, which would take forever. The lawyers for gamblers David Zelser and Carl Zork went first.

When they finished, Chick-Gandall's lawyer began his defense of the first baseman. The case seemed to move according to plan. the lawyer tried to tear apart the testimony of Sleepy Bill Burns, and then he wanted to put Chick-Gandle on the stand. But right before that happened, the lawyer cut his plan short. He rested his case. Chick-Gandle never testified.

And then all the defense lawyers rested their cases as well. None of the players testified at trial. This move shocked the prosecutors. They had tons of rebuttal witnesses lined up to refute everything the players were going to say. and then the players didn't say anything. So the rebuttal witnesses were pointless. After that, the trial moved straight into closing arguments, and this is where the theme of profits came back into play.

One of the lawyers stated that the real bad guy in this whole thing was Arnold Rothstein. The lawyer wondered aloud, why wasn't Rothstein charged with a crime? Why wasn't he on trial? Why were these underpaid players and low-level gamut? taking the blame when the real culprits were still out there. The lawyers reinforced the idea that owner Charlie Kamisky was a wealthy fat cat who underpaid his players while filling his own pockets with money. They portrayed Ban Johnson as the evil puppet master who pulled the strings behind the scenes.

And they stood up the players as simple, working-class fellas, just like the men of the jury. And it worked perfectly. For almost 100 years, that was the story everyone believed. And now we know it wasn't true. In 2002, Major League Baseball donated a pile of contract cards to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Among them were the contract cards for the 1919 Chicago White Sox. We now know exactly how much they were paid. Eddie Seacott's base salary was $5,000, which was tied for seventh amongst pitchers in the American

League. If you count the $3,000 bonus, Kamiski paid him after the 1919 season, Eddie was second behind Walter Johnson. Chick Gandal was fifth amongst first baseman. Swede Risberg was sixth among shortstops. Buck Weaver was second for third baseman. Happyfelsch was fifth for center fielder's. And Joe Jackson was second for left fielders behind only Babe Ruth, who had moved to the outfield for his final season in Boston. And for the players who were not involved in the scandal, second basement Eddie Collins was the highest paid player at his position in the American League. In fact, he was second in the entire American league behind only Thai comp. Ray Shulk was the highest paid catcher in the league,

and there was a pretty big gap between he and the guy in second place. The eight players involved in the conspiracy had their reasons for participating in the fix, but one of them was not that they were being cheated by a stingy, miserly owner. They were paid on par with everyone else. Now, if you wanted to argue that all the players in Major League Baseball were underpaid based on the profits made by owners, you could certainly do it, but that's a different debate. For now, closing arguments in the Black Sox trial were finished. The judge gave the men of the jury their instructions and sent them away to deliberate. They weren't gone long. Less than three hours later, everyone filed back into the courtroom to hear the verdict. The jury announced the decision, not guilty for all

defendants on all charges. Thunderous cheers filled the room. The judge smiled. The jurors shook hands and congratulated the players they had just acquitted. Everybody went outside for a big group photo. The jurors and the defendants went down the street for a party in an Italian restaurant. They celebrated together late into the night, but the reverie lasted just a few hours. The next day, the new commissioner of baseball dropped the hammer. Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis issued his first major ruling as the commissioner of baseball using these words. Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game. No player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game. No player that sits in

conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it will ever play professional baseball. On August 3rd, 1921, Commissioner Landis banned eight members of the Chicago White Sox from professional baseball for life. It had been more than one year since seven of the eight players on trial had set foot on a Major League baseball field, and now they never would again. The exception to that statement was Chick Gandal, because he hadn't played in two years. Thanks to a contract dispute with Charlie Kamski, Gandal hadn't played since the 1919 World Series. He had effectively retired from professional baseball, so the banishment didn't

hit him as hard as it did the other players. In the wake of the commissioner's ruling, Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, and Swede Risberg filed civil suits against the White Sox. They claimed a variety of grievances, defamation, breach of contract, and restraint of their professional livelihoods. Of the four, Joe's breach of contract suit was the only one that went to trial, which happened in 1924. He had signed a three-year deal before the 1920 season, and the club had voided the contract when it released him a year after the second. grand jury indictment. He claimed he was owed money for the 1921 and 1922 seasons per his contract. He made that assertion because he now said he had no involvement in the fix whatsoever.

His new sworn statements greatly contradicted his grand jury testimony from 1920. He now claimed he had no idea a conspiracy was in place until after the series. When Joe's civil trial began in early 1924, he took the stand and faced a barrage of questions about his conflicting statements. He didn't try to explain the differences. All he said was, he didn't make the statements contained in the grand jury transcripts, and he said that denial over and over again. More than 100 times, he maintained that he simply didn't say the things that were in the grand jury transcripts that had been read at the criminal trial in 1921. The judge in the civil suit was outraged. He cited Joe for perjury and threw him in jail for a night.

He thought at least one of Joe's statements made under oath had to be a lie. But the jury saw it differently. They awarded Joe more than $16,000 in another strange twist in the legal saga. The jurors didn't give Joe the money because they believed his new story. They gave it to him because they thought the White Sox ownership genuinely owed it to him. him. The jury believed that Charlie Kamisky knew of the fix and Joe's role in it at the time Joe signed a new deal in 1920. The jurors thought Kamisky condoned Joe's behavior by offering him the new deal. Therefore, Kamisky couldn't go back on it once the public found out

something he knew all along. But the judge wasn't having it. He vacated the award and Joe got nothing, at least at the time. Eventually, all four civil suits were settled out of court for small amounts. And that was the end of the major legal proceedings in the case of the 1919 World Series scandal. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox who had knowledge of or participated in the conspiracy never played professional baseball again.

And the gamblers went about their lives as they always had. They had been acquitted, and some of them had never seen the inside of a courtroom during the Black Sox scandal. After the trial, Sleepy Bill Burns returned to his home in Del Rio, Texas. In the 1940s, he worked highway construction along the Mexican border in California. He died in 1953 and is buried in San Diego. And for those who have waited all this time for the story of how Bill got his nickname, here it is.

In 1908, he was pitching for the Washington Senators. In early June, his team was in Chicago, playing against, of all times. teams, the White Sox. In the eighth inning of one of the games, he fell asleep on the bench. His teammates had to wake him up so he could go back. Apparently, he had no trouble falling asleep whenever or wherever he wanted. Three years later, he was with the Cincinnati Reds, and he infuriated his manager by sleeping on the clubhouse bench during a game. The manager wanted to put Bill in as a relief pitcher, but Bill was asleep. And that's how he earned the moniker, Sleepy Bill Burns. Sleepy Bill's partner, Billy Maharg, drifted out of the spotlight, for the most part, following the Black Sox trial.

He was deposed in the civil suits filed by the four players after their banishment, and he told the same story every time. He spent much of the rest of his life working as an auto mechanic for the Ford Motor Company in Pennsylvania. He died of a heart attack in 1953, the same year as Sleepy Bill Burns. He never married, had no children, and had no other immediate family. A short death notice appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer before Billy was buried in an unmarked grave. Joseph's Sport Sullivan faded from view after the 1919 World Series. He had threatened to tell the grand jury the whole inside story of the fix, but he never did. Some people said he fled the country.

Others said he stayed in his hometown of Boston. But after the scandal, his days as one of the biggest bookmakers in the country were done. He was banned from so many ballparks that it was hard to keep his gambling enterprise afloat. One of the last public sightings of Sport Sullivan came in 1926 at the World Series. American League President Ban Johnson noticed him at Yankee Stadium and had him thrown out of the building. People who knew him said he had gone from a gambling king to a tired old man who stood. struggled to make a buck. He passed away in 1949. Most researchers view Sport Sullivan as the great missing link in the Black Sox scandal. He never testified before a grand jury, never testified

at a trial, and never told his story to a reporter. Nat Evans was a business partner of Arnold Rothstein on several projects, and most experts believe he was the mysterious Mr. Brown who worked with Sports Sullivan on the fix. In April, 1921, three months before the Black Sox trial, he was arrested in a St. Louis hotel room with three other gamblers. In the room was a telegram from 1919 that included a warning. Beware of Dickie Kerr. It looked like pretty good proof of the conspiracy. But Evans was never charged, never taken to Chicago, and he never testified or stood trial for his involvement. He spent his remaining years supervising gambling operations in the horse racing industry.

until he passed away in 1935. Arnold Rothstein publicly denied involvement in the fix for the rest of his life, which proved to be short. He had built a criminal empire in New York, and he was the for for robsters like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, and all the others who would ring in a new era of organized crime. And like many of these men, Rothstein's reign ended abruptly.

He was shot during a card game in 19. He lingered for 12 hours before he died, and in all that time, he refused to name his killer. David Zelser, the Des Moines gambler whom the players knew as Bennett, returned to Iowa after the trial and spent the rest of his life in his hometown. He faded into relative obscurity and passed away in Des Moines in 1945. A. Battell did not fade into obscurity after the scandal. In 1960, he became the primary source of information. about the gambler's side of the fix for author Elliot Asanoff. Attell had never testified before a grand jury or at trial,

but he told his story to Ashenoff for the book that became Eight Men Out. As you could probably guess, Abe Attel was not the most reliable source. But between his discussions with Asanoff and the trial testimonies of Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, researchers have been able to gain a pretty good understanding of the gambler's side of the conspiracy. A. Battell passed away in New York in 1970 at the age of 86.

The eight Chicago White Sox players who had been banned from the major leagues continued their baseball careers as best they could. They played for semi-pro teams or outlawed teams while their former teammates finished their careers in professional baseball. Let's first talk about the men who were not involved in the fix. Catcher Ray Shalk made it into the Hall of Fame in 1955. Pitcher Ray Shalk made it into the Hall of Fame in 1955. Pitcher Ray Shalk.

Fred Faber, who was from Cascade, Iowa, it should be noted, was inducted in 1964. Their young teammate, the rookie in 1919, Dickie Kerr, had an interesting career. He got into a contract dispute with the Sox after the 1921 season, and Charlie Comiskey suspended him indefinitely. After that, Commissioner Landis banned him from professional baseball for violating the reserve clause. He played semi-pro ball for a couple of times. years before reconciling with Landis and Kamisky. He returned to the White Sox for the final

month of the 1925 season, but it turned out to be the end of his Major League career. He had played just parts of four seasons. He spent time in the minors and then went into coaching, and that's where he left his biggest mark. Hall of Fame hitter Stan Musial credited Dickie Kerr with having the greatest influence on his career. Kerr convinced him to change from pitcher to outfitting. fielder and helped him become one of the best batters of all time. Musual named his first son after Dickey and later bought Dickie and his wife a house. When Dickie Kerr passed away in 1963, Stan Musual was at his funeral. Second Basement Eddie Collins had a long and remarkable career in professional baseball. He played 24 years, finally retiring as a player in 1930 at the age of 43.

In his final years, he was mostly a coach, but it was still an incredible run. He played in six World Series and won four, three with the Philadelphia Athletics, and one with the Chicago White Sox. But his two losses were probably more famous than his four wins. He lost the 1914 series to the Miracle Braves and the 191919 series in the Black Sox scandal. In 1933, he joined the Boston. Red Sox as vice president and general manager after Tom Yockey bought the team. Eddie stayed with the club for nearly 20 years. His biggest contribution came in 1937.

On a scouting trip to California, he signed a Los Angeles phenom named Bobby Dorr, who went on to have a Hall of Fame career. During the same visit, he noticed a high school kid from San Diego named Ted Williams and signed him to a contract one year later. Eddie Collins was inducted into the Pro Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, along with several men you've heard about in this story. Cap Anson, who starred for the Chicago White Stockings in the 1870s and 1880s. Al Spalding, the sporting goods king who turned Anson into a star.

William Arthur Cummings, who threw the first curveball in a game. And the White Sox founder and owner, Charlie Kamiski. Also in that class was a pretty good part. player named Lou Gehrig. Eddie was one of 11 surviving inductees who attended the grand opening of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1939. And if you haven't done so already, go watch the film footage of the event online. It's an amazing piece of history. Health problems finally forced Eddie Collins to walk away from baseball in 1950, after nearly 45 years in the game. He passed away in 1951 and is buried in Linwood Cemetery in Weston, Massachusetts.

The eight Chicago White Sox players who were collectively known as the Black Sox after the scandal followed similar trails after their banishment from professional baseball. Eddie Seacott played for outlaw teams for a few years before quitting the game. He stayed in his home state of Michigan and became a game warden, a service station manager, and then an employee of the Ford Motor Company. He retired from Ford in 1944. For the last 25 years of his life, he grew strawberries on a farm near Farmington, Michigan. In an interview in 1965, he said,

I admit I did wrong, but I've paid for it for the past 45 years. Eddie Seacott passed away in 1969 and is buried at Parkview Cemetery in Livonia, Michigan. Oscar Happy Felsch was viewed by many as one of the best sales. center-fielders in the game prior to 1921. He drew comparisons to Hall of Famers, Ty Cobb, and Trist Speaker. He played outlaw ball and semi-pro ball for nearly 20 years after his legal proceedings finally ended. He toured the Upper Midwest and even Montana and Canada. Sometimes he played with his old teammates, Buck Weaver and Swede Risburg. Sometimes he played against them. Later, he played in sand lots in his hometown of Milwaukee.

He tried a variety of careers, including tavern keeper and crane operator. Then in the early 1960s, he gave crucial interviews to Elliot Asanoff for the book Eight Men Out. Happy said, it was a crazy time. I don't know how it happened, but it did all right. Happy passed away in 1964. He's entombed at Wisconsin Memorial Park in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Arnold Chick Gandall played his last inning of Major League. baseball in game eight of the 1919 World Series. Due to a contract dispute with Charlie

Kamisky, he didn't play in 1920, and he was banned in 1921. For the rest of the 20s, he joined outlaw teams like the other Black Sox players. He teamed up with Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, Hal Chase, and several others in the Copper League, which played in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. In the 1930, he and his wife settled in Berkeley, California, where he found work as a plumber. In 1956, he gave an interview about the scandal to a little-known publication that had printed its first issue just two years earlier. That magazine was Sports Illustrated. He passed away in 1970 at the age of 82 and is buried in St. Helena Cemetery in St. Helena, California.

He denied accusations of the fix until the day he died. died. Fred McMullen had an interesting life after baseball. When the legal saga began, he had been at his home in Los Angeles, and he was too poor to travel to Chicago, so he was not at the trial with his teammates. When he was banned from baseball, he never played again. He never complained, never asked for reinstatement, and never said he was innocent. He just walked away from the game. He worked a series of jobs for many years until he became an L.A. County Deputy Marshal in 1941. By 1947, he was a captain and supervised an entire division of marshals. He developed heart problems later in life and died in 1952.

He's buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Charles Swede Risberg, Fred's buddy and fellow shortstop, traveled the Western United States in Canada playing outlaw ball until the mid-1930s. He joined several of his Black Sox teammates on those clubs. When he finally retired, he moved to the small town of Weed, California, near the Oregon border, where he operated a tavern for 20 years.

He died in 1975 on his 81st birthday and is buried in Mount Shasta, California. He was the last of the eight Black Sox players to pass away. Claude Lefty Williams struggled severely after he was banned from professional baseball. He worked odd jobs and began drinking heavily. His good friend Joe Jackson tried to do him a favor by selling him a pool hall in Chicago for $1,

but lefty couldn't make it work. His marriage to his wife, Liria, suffered, and they separated in 1924. He played with outlaw teams in the West through the 1920s, and by the 1930s, he was back in Chicago living in a small basement apartment. But then he appeared to turn his life around. He patched up his marriage, and he and Liria moved to California during the Great Depression.

He worked as a truck driver and a carpenter, and she became a community activist. Toward the end of Lefty's life, they settled in Laguna Beach. On clear days, they could see Catalina Island from their hillside cottage. In 1959, the Chicago White Sox won their first American League pennant since the 1919 season. One month after they lost the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers, Lefty Williams passed away. He's buried at Melrose Abbey Memorial Park in Anaheim, California. George Buck Weaver traveled the same roads as many of his teammates after the ruling by Commissioner Landis. Buck worked tirelessly for decades to clear his name and get reinstated into Major League Baseball.

He sent numerous petitions to Landis, one of which contained 14,000. signatures. He hired lawyers and tried to get the courts to intervene, but none of it worked. In 1927, he personally asked Landis to clear his name, and Landis said no. During these years, Buck barnstormed with semi-pro and outlaw teams like most of his friends. In the 1930s, Buck played for and managed teams around Chicago, and the fans loved him. In 1953, near the end of his life, he sent one final letter requesting reinstatement. The commissioner at the time, Ford Frick, did not respond. That letter is on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum.

Buck Weaver passed away in 1956. He's buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago. And finally, there's Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the best hitters in the history of baseball. It's guaranteed that he would have been in the Hall of Fame if he had not been involved in the scandal, and he would have been one of those players at the grand opening in 1939. He would have been reunited with teammate Eddie Collins and his buddies Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. But he wasn't. During the years of the scandal, Joe's story wavered back and forth between admitting guilt and proclaiming innocence.

In the earliest days, he admitted he took money, but he also asserted he never did anything to lose a game, and his stats during the series support his contention. At one point, he said he went to Charlie Kamisky's office to return the money and apologize for his mistake. According to Joe, he sat outside the office, but Kamisky refused to see him. A couple years later, in an attempt to recover back pay, he completely contradicted his original story and said he knew nothing of the fix.

but it didn't help. He was still banned from pro baseball. He and his wife Katie stayed in their home in Savannah, Georgia, for many years while Joe played with outlaw teams in the South. In 1923, he had a 400 batting average and led his team to a league title. To some extent, he was like a man among boys. He dazzled crowds with his ability to throw and hit. Joe played in Southern leagues until he was 50 years old. By the early 1930s, Joe and Katie moved back to the town where they got their start, Greenville, South Carolina. Joe opened a barbecue restaurant and then a liquor store called Joe Jackson's liquor store, which he operated for the rest of his life. He played for and managed teams in the Greenville area for many years. He taught local youngsters how to play the game he loved.

In September 1951, the Cleveland Indians put Joe Jackson in the their Hall of Fame. The publicity around the event prompted an invitation for Joe to appear on Ed Sullivan's TV show, Toast of the Town. But two weeks before the show, Joe suffered a heart attack and passed away. He was 63 years old, and he's buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park in Greenville, South Carolina. But before we finish, I have one final story for you, and it features three giants of early American sports. The scene is in Joe Jackson's liquor store in April, 1947. Hall of Famer Ty Cobb and legendary sports writer Grantland Rice were returning to North

Carolina from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. While they were driving, Ty remembered that Joe Jackson owned a liquor store in South Carolina. Ty was thirsty, and he wanted to say hi to his old friend Joe, so they headed for Greenville. Joe was always aware of how people viewed him. He had been teased mercilessly by the players up in the big city of Philadelphia after he signed his first pro contract. He couldn't read or write, and they mocked him for being a country bumpkin.

Later in life, he said, All the big sports writers seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be. That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn't have been able to fool if they thought I was smarter. So here in 1947, as he worked behind the counter at his liquor store, one of the greatest players of all time,

and one of the most prominent sportswriters of all time, walked into his store. The initial meeting was awkward because Joe acted like he didn't recognize them. People close to Joe, including a man who arrived at the store shortly thereafter, maintained Joe absolutely recognized his old rival Ty Cobb and the sports. writer Grantland Rice. But Joe was worried that Ty would be embarrassed by associating with a player who was viewed as a crook, especially in front of a well-known reporter.

In Ty Cobb's version of the story, Ty finally approached Joe after several moments and said his famous line, Joe, you don't know me? Joe said something like, sure, Ty, I know you. I just didn't think anyone I knew back then would want to know me now. That exchange seemed to break the awkwardness. Joe called a young man on the local Greenville team and told him to come down to the store to meet the great Ty Cobb. Then Joe took Ty all around town and introduced him to his friends and business associates, and they talked about the good old days. A few days later, Joe's wife Katie typed a letter to Ty Cobb on Joe's behalf.

It began. Mr. Ty Cobb, I sure was surprised to find you visiting me at my store. It was good to get talking about the old playing days. It was good of you not to ask me about the raw deal the crooks gave me. I am sending my best bat to you for thanks. The letter closed with, would like to see you on the other side, like the old playing days. Yours respectfully, Joe Jackson.

At the bottom of the paper, there were four handwritten lines carefully printed in childlike block letters. They said, Two-tie. Best Wishes. Joe Jackson. April 25th, 1947. Thanks for listening to the story of the Black Sox scandal here on the infamous America podcast. But the series isn't over.

Come back next week for an interview with Jacob Pomerinkie, the chairman of the Sabre Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. And then we'll finish the season with an interview with Mike Nola. I promise you won't want to miss that one. He tells all kinds of stories about Shulis Joe Jackson. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave our rating in a 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 about here, go to saber.org for a wealth of articles.

That's SABR.org. And for more details, please visit our website Black Barrel Mears. and check out our social media pages. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.