THE 1919 BLACK SOX SCANDAL T he Black Sox Scandal has been called “baseball’s darkest hour.” More than a century after eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series, the saga continues to captivate baseball fans. While scholars have shed new light in recent years on the scandal’s mysterious machinations, the story remains a puzzle with plenty of missing pieces. The traditional narrative about the Black Sox Scandal, the one popularized by multiple Hollywood films, is that a group of underpaid, uneducated ballplayers, disgruntled with poor treatment by the team’s management, went along with the idea BY JACOB POMRENKE
to throw the 1919 World Series when they were approached by big-city gamblers who offered them bribes to lose to the Cincinnati Reds. In real life, the White Sox players came up with
the plot themselves, shopped it around to several groups of gamblers, and rarely mentioned their team owner, Charles Comiskey, as part of their motivation to enter the conspiracy. We know now that the 1919 White Sox actually had one of 195. 1919 World Series Game 1 Starters Eddie Cicotte & Dutch Ruether Original Type 1 News Service Photo by International (PSA/DNA) MINIMUM BID: $250
the highest payrolls in baseball and the salaries of the World Series fixers, including Eddie Cicotte and Shoeless Joe Jackson, compared favorably to contemporary stars like Walter Johnson and Babe Ruth. One hundred years later, the Black Sox Scandal contains all the elements of a universal human drama: greed, corruption, betrayal, injustice, redemption. It’s one of the most intriguing stories in baseball history and we’ll likely still be debating the details a century from now.
196. 1920 Billy Maharg Original Type 1 News Service Photo by NEA - Liaison Between Players & Gamblers During 1919 World
Series Fix! (PSA/DNA) MINIMUM BID: $100
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