Notes from the Shadows of Cooperstown
Observations From Outside the Lines |
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NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the Lines
By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)
#352 MAY 19, 2005
TIDBITS
Time is, as they say, fugiting. Even without a local team to support, even though I have kicked my habit of gravitating toward the Little League field (it's next to where I buy groceries), even though I cannot follow my Pirates very closely -- I still find myself pressed for time. And it's not summer yet.
So all this issue contains are a couple tidbits, two nuggets of research I found on a recent road trip (to the SABR Seymour Conference in Cleveland), and just a few quick comments on the recent ESPN program for which I was interviewed in early March.
I need, as the Beatles once put it, eight days a week. But I think these few items are worth sharing, so -- enjoy.
AWFULIZING
About ten years ago, some of the coworkers in my office at the time started using the word "awful" as a verb. Sometimes I object when an adjective or adverb is pressed into active word duty, but I kind of liked "awfulize" and have done my best to keep the word alive in my current office's culture. As a verb, "to awfulize" a situation or an event means to imagine that the worst consequences will follow. After awfulizing, any worrying or punishing that may follow will seem justified. Never mind that things are never as bad as they seem, that clouds have silver linings, that problems are just opportunities in disguise, and that solutions are sometimes found by looking at the bright side of things -- even when there doesn't seem to be a bright side.
Looking back at the press coverage of the Fix of the 1919 World Series, it seems to me that a lot of people were awfulizing, soon after learning (from Eddie Cicotte) that the Fix was indeed In. In reporting the rumors about the Fix -- and this started soon after the Series ended -- there were four or five White Sox players involved, sometimes as many as seven. But eight names ultimately made the dishonor roll -- the same eight names on the checks that were held up in the Fall of 1919. Once those names appeared in the press accounts coming out of the grand jury coverage, they were "bunched together" (Comiskey's phrase) for all time. It was a rare reporter or writer or (eventually) historian or researcher, who suggested that eight might be a number that came from awfulizing. Eight Men Out has cemented the octet of players together even more inseparably than before 1963.
This maximization of guilty parties has had several effects. First, it removed from the public consciousness any other players who might have been involved. Remember, when Hugh Fullerton first wrote freely about the Fix -- when the cat was out of the bag on September 29, 1920 -- he recalled that he quoted Comiskey about seven Sox not returning ... but he also wrote that "a score of men connected with the game -- owners, managers and reporters -- knew or were told all the details of the fixing of the series." Before the first pitch was thrown, "hundreds believed that the thing was fixed."
The second effect of eight men out was to distract attention from "owners, managers, and reporters" -- and the fixers and gamblers who had made huge profits betting on their "guilty knowledge." And not just owners, but the league presidents as well. In other words, from the powers that were, in MLB, who had closed their eyes as the gambling menace grew over the years. The folks who might have set strict rules for players about mixing with gamblers (was Rule 21 only made in 1927?), policed the ballparks better, and called a halt to the 1919 Series before the first pitch was thrown, to investigate those swirling rumors.
A third effect was to convince the public that by putting eight players out of the game, the gambling problem had been put to rest. Eight players had their reputations clobbered for all time (well, at least up until today). But baseball's image was cleansed. "The myth of baseball's single sin" (Voigt) indeed, but also the myth that only these eight ever committed any sin.
The positive effect of eight men out was to send the right message -- finally! -- to the rest of the ballplayers, and to their owners. Careers were at risk, from then on, for players who had lunch with their bookie. And because players had value to the magnates, to the team owners, their "property" was at risk if they failed to better police things at the parks, or if they failed to educate their players about the new reality.
But the awfulizing had another effect, too. Sorting out exactly what happened back in October 1919 became something no one really wanted to do. It almost looks like a deal was struck. The prosecutors would focus on the eight Sox players, and a handful of low-level gamblers. The roles of Joe Gedeon, Hal Chase, Rube Benton, and other players? What did Comiskey and Ban Johnson know, and when did they know it? Rothstein? Said it couldn't be done. Read the accounts from the grand jury press coverage in 1920, and the trial accounts from 1921, and you just shake your head. So many loose ends.
At different times in past issues, I have attempted to give some of the eight men out their own days in court. Not to suggest that all eight were not "bunched together" unfairly, but to try to sort out just what each player knew and did. If Joe Jackson attended no meetings and tried to bench himself before Game One and tried to inform his team before, during and after the Series, played every inning to win, tried showing his team the evidence he had (the $5,000 he took) right after the Series ended -- a lot of IFs -- well, then maybe the lifetime ban is a bit harsh. If Buck Weaver -- OK, you get the idea.
I especially have enjoyed "Defending Knuckles" (in NOTES #340) and Buck (in 345), and my defense of Chick Gandil needs to be organized one of these days. My recent visit to Cleveland turned up a couple of nuggets for Eddie & Buck, though, and that is one reason I'm on this topic.
My views on Eddie Cicotte have come a long way over the years. For most of my life as a fan, Eddie was just another Black Sock. When I started my research, at first I just assumed that he was in the thing up to his eyeballs, and tossed two games before the players decided they were being double-crossed, making Eddie give his best, and finally he won Game Seven. (Well, hey, in the plotting, the crooked Sox were supposed to "win one for Eddie" anyway, right? To help him when he talked contract next time?)
It took a long time before I started to think that maybe Eddie was trying to win Game Four, that the two errors he made to give that game away, were really errors, and not intentional muffs. (I believe that Eddie suffers from being a kind of sidebar to the Joe Jackson Question. Because the costly error Cicotte made in Game Four was to deflect a throw to the plate by Shoeless, a throw that was right on the money. "See? Jackson was playing to win!" And therefore, Eddie wasn't. What kind of logic is that?)
When I found references that suggested Cicotte might have been trying to win Game One, too, the idea seemed far-fetched, laughable. After all, he admitted plunking the leadoff batter on purpose, didn't he? That was the sign that the Fix Was In.
But the theory persisted. Cicotte seemed to have said, on more than one occasion, and he said it under oath, too (remember, I think Cicotte had the keenest conscience and felt the most remorse) -- that after hitting Rath, that conscience kicked in (my phrase, not Eddie's) and he pitched the rest of Game One to win. But he was mentally messed up -- try pitching while looking in the stands for gunmen taking aim.
Without further introduction, here is my nugget from Cleveland, and it appeared in the Cleveland News on 9/29/20:
"I pitched the best ball I knew how after that first ball. But I lost because I was hit, not because I was throwing the game." -- Eddie Cicotte
This was said the same day that Eddie confessed to the grand jury that there had been a conspiracy to throw the Series, that ballplayers had met with gamblers and taken money, bribes. Was he just trying to control the spin? Happy Felsch would do that the next day -- Yes, there was a plot, but I never did anything to help the Reds win, never had the chance. Joe Jackson certainly tried to make that point, and reacted immediately when the press said he had confessed to throwing games. He at once denied that, "I have never confessed to throwing a ball game in my life and never will" he stated November 23 in Greenville, SC, and his denial made headlines in some cities.
(Curiously, Judge McDonald attacked Jackson, saying he did confess to throwing games, but the transcripts we have of what Jackson told the grand jury are clear on the point -- he confessed to taking money, to knowing about the Fix, but he insisted that he played every game to win. Why did McDonald want Jackson packaged in with the players who were doomed? Well, he was awfulizing, and as a friend of Ban Johnson, hoping to be Commish himself, McDonald was doing his best to wreck the Sox and raise the profile of the good deed being done -- cleansing baseball, and no star player was too big to escape justice, McDonald-style. Or later, Landis-style.)
The other nugget I mined in the Cleveland microfilm was from a column by Ed Bang. Bang was a reporter in 1919 and edited sports for Cleveland papers from about 1907 to 1960. Joe Williams, another sportswriter, had suggested that Bang was one of those in the know about the Fix early on. Here's a snippet or two from my book, and the quotations are from Williams:
Ed Bang, sports editor at the Cleveland News, covered the Series and was suspicious after the second game. He could not get his managing editor's permission to write the story of the Fix. "Practically every sports writer in the press box had valid suspicions that there was something markedly wrong ... but it was one of those things that was impossible to prove on the basis of performance."
Bang called Cicotte and Lefty Williams to his office when the White Sox came to Cleveland in the 1920 season.
"You know," said Bang, "this story's going to break any time. I happen to know you two fellows are going to be mentioned. Personally I don't think you had a thing to do with it. (The old oil, we always thought.) And now tell me what you know about it and I'll write a story that will be favorable to you and help clear your names."
[Cicotte] laughed. "Hell, Ed, every place we go that story comes up. There wasn't anything wrong with the series, and if there was I'd tell you honestly."
... Every place the Black Sox went that season, which was 1920, the sports writers tried to break the story. They knew definitely by now that the series was a fake. The gamblers had been double-crossed and they had started to talk -- but not for publication.
What I was curious to see was this -- what did Bang, a writer who "knew" but didn't (like Fullerton) rock the boat -- what did Ed Bang write when he was unleashed, so to speak -- after Eddie Cicotte "spilled the beans" and confirmed that the Fix had been in?
Answer: In his column Just Between You and Me on September 29, Ed Bang wrote that the news of the Fix
did not come as a great surprise to the writer in only one respect and that was that the name of George "Buck" Weaver was included in the list of players who had been indefinitely suspended by Charles Comiskey ... we had heard [the other seven] mentioned in connection with the scandal, but Weaver was always as clean as a hound's tooth in all the reports that had come to our ears.
If that phrase about the spotless canine fang seems familiar, perhaps it is because you had read in the obscure but prophetic Collyer's Eye on November 8, 1919, that reporter Frank O. Klein pronounced Eddie Collins and Ray Schalk "clean as a hound's tooth." Apparently that was synonymous with "above suspicion."
I want to look at more of Bang's columns, post-revelation, to see what else he had to say. And for those readers who enjoy joining in this endless hunt for more clues and puzzle pieces, I recommend going to your local library and sitting down with the microfilm of your local papers (there were most likely more than one in most cities back then), specifically the reels carrying September 28-30, 1920 ... how was "history's first draft" written in your town?
ESPN -- THE "TOP FIVE" SHOW
If you missed the May 16 program on ESPN-2, "The Top Five Reasons Why You Can't Blame the Chicago White Sox for Throwing the 1919 World Series" -- well, it will be on again Monday, May 23, at 8 PM on ESPN-2, and yet again on June 6, 9 PM in the east, on ESPN Classic.
I think I reported here in March that it was fun being interviewed for this program. I'm not sure exactly how many of the 90 minutes of tape they used, maybe five? But I was glad to see that I was not edited badly -- my quotes were not taken out of context or attached as answers to questions not asked.
Of course, I was never asked why the Sox cannot be blamed, and that was good for ESPN, because I think they can be and should be blamed. But not all by themselves -- that's my beef. Somehow, all the blame got funneled onto their shoulders, and diverted away from so many others. Not fair.
The program, by the way, replayed a lot of footage from the 2001 ESPN Classic 60-minute documentary. Which I recommend.
I guess I recommend this latest production, too, although you almost need to take a speed-watching class to keep up with the barrage of talking heads, photos, newspaper headlines, and commentary. It was an ambitious project -- I mean to try to tell even part of this extremely complex story in just a half hour.
Maybe more on the program next time ... also (maybe) a long overdue review of Dan Gutman's Shoeless Joe & Me (if you enjoyed Honus & Me on TV -- that means nothing) ... definitely more on the fabulous resources of the Cleveland Public Library ... and who knows what else?