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October 28: Left-fielders and Grand Jur
NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the Lines
By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
#364 NOVEMBER 13, 2005
IN & OUT OF TIME
Is it really just a few weeks since the World Series was being played? Time seems to stand still here in the shadows of Cooperstown, in that dark side of the calendar between the last out of the Series and Opening Day. But that's an illusion. Stuff happens, all the time. We just need to pay attention.
I probably should re-name this volume The Clean-Up Issue. I have all sorts of items, long and short, littering my desk area. But time has been on my mind. So it got the headline. Not the first time (no pun intended) that it's happened, I've devoted a few past issues of Notes to TIME.
Longtime readers know that I disagree with Tom Boswell about time beginning on Opening Day. I like to say it ends there, the season begins and we step outside of time. There's an old saying (don't know who deserves the credit, sorry) -- "Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter." And something like that happens when we enter baseball, Ray -- throw away your watch, pull the plug on your electric clock, all we need to know now is what inning? As for the "now" -- the magic of the game means we can be there, just by listening on our radio. These things came to mind as I watched the early innings of Game One of the Series on the large screen in Cooperstown, listened to more of the game as I drove home, and completed it in my living room. With the right announcers, radio seems to take you there best.
LEAVING ON HIGH NOTES
My desk calendar continues to teach me. On September 27, 1940, rookie pitcher for the Detroit Tigers Floyd Giebell took the hill and out-dueled Bob Feller, 2-0, clinching the pennant. Detroit finished the season one game up over Cleveland. Floyd Giebell would not win another game in the majors.
On September 29, 1895, Hercules Burnett played his sixth and last game in the majors. He singled, tripled, stole a base, and scored twice, then homered in his last at bat. His Louisville team beat Cleveland, 13-8.
I don't know if Hercules had planned his retirement from MLB, knew he was at the end, and gave his all to go out with that bang. I'm pretty sure it did not occur to Giebell that his huge win in 1940 would be his last. He had pitched one other game that summer, a complete-game victory, two earned runs. But whatever he had, vanished before Opening Day 1941, and he never found it again. We don't know if Giebell ever wished that he left the game after that clinching shutout over Feller.
There must be a lesson in there somewhere.
CORRECTING ROGER ANGELL
Recently there was some discussion on the SABR-L about whether The New Yorker's Roger Angell should be honored in the Cooperstown Hall. It seems like he should, to me, for giving readers of the game so many countless hours outside of time, reading his articles and books and columns. I've corresponded some with Mr Angell (since before Notes!), but my last letter bounced back. He had written, during the recent Series, that Shoeless Joe Jackson was one of "eight members of the 1919 White Sox who accepted bribes from gamblers" and successfully tossed the Series to the Reds.
As I have noted the last couple issues, I just automatically react to this kind of general statement, "bunching together" the eight Sox who were banned. And I hoped that Mr Angell, who seems like a fair person, would accept my reasoning and research on the point. But my envelope was returned, unopened. The cover-up continues, in subtle ways.... (I'll try again.)
MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE TRAIL ...
Just over three years ago (in #273) I wrote all I knew to date about "The Women of the Cover-Up." Not much. Most of the women in the story of the Fix were married to the players. It turns out the only wife that wrote a decent book later was Rothstein's -- and she seemed to be fairly out of the loop. But at least she tried.
Then a couple days ago I was ProQuesting, and found a little gem in the Boston Daily Globe from September 26, 1920 -- just before the lid blew off the cover-up. Jacob (Rube) Benton was teasing the Cook County grand jury, Billy Maharg was spilling his beans to Isaminger in Philly, Eddie Cicotte was getting nervous, or maybe getting courageous.
And a Hall of Famer with guilty knowledge -- no, not Eddie Collins -- Ray Schalk was promising to give up the names of the players he thought had been crooked. But not until he first gave them to the grand jury. "It's up to the players themselves to keep the game clean," Cracker said -- in other words, forget about the magnates, they have too much at stake.
All this is not news. But the Globe learned "that the ramifications of the clique which engineered the deal [the Fix] included the use of blackmail tactics, wine, and women lures."
Finally, someone has leaked that it wasn't just about the money -- there was wine and women, too! Does this at last explain why the players more or less accepted the way history painted them, greedy guys out to make a buck, sold out for the money? Write anything you want, boys, but just don't let my wife hear that we was lured by those young ladies ....
MORE GUILTY KNOWLEDGE
Dickie Kerr came out of the scandal a hero. It seems to me that there were darn few candidates for hero in this mess, and I'm including the reporters, the lawyers and the judges. And I noticed that often Dickie Kerr is given more credit than he might really be due -- in the extreme accounts, he single-handedly shuts down the Reds in two games that October, while everyone else on the field behind him (except the Collins boys) are doing their best to cough up the games.
Taking nothing away from Kerr's performances, but I believe he had everyone on his team trying to win Game Six, and perhaps all or most trying to win Game Three, as well.
In a curious article in the Washinton Post, February 15, 1937, with a dateline of Memphis, Dickie Kerr (he was 43 then) announced that he not only planned to manage the Wausau, WI, club the next spring, but he was going to pitch some, too. And while he had the reporter's attention, he mentioned that four other players on the Sox -- besides the eight who were banned -- knew about the Fix "before the second game."
"Manager Kid Gleason, Ray Schalk, Eddie Collins and I knew about what those fellows planned to do, but we had no proof. We wanted to do something, but couldn't."
Kerr said he found out from a newspaperman (Fullerton?) after Chicago lost Game One. And Gleason, "red in the face," confirmed it, just before Game Two.
Kerr had said on other occasions that Gleason tricked the gamblers by pitching Kerr, instead of Cicotte, in Game Three. There may be something to that -- in the coverage I've re-read recently before Game Three, Gleason never quite rules out starting Cicotte, although everybody seemed to expect Kerr to pitch. Kerr was convinced that Game Three cost some gamblers $125,000-$150,000 ... and he was probably right about that. But the crooked Sox were in revolt, and I think they deserve some credit for that Game Three win, too. Sorry, Dickie.
So how do we assess the four Sox players who, according to Kerr, knew about the Fix before Game Two was played -- and maybe sooner? (Let's be kind here are recall that rumors of a Fix were not that unusual, so just hearing them before Game One was not cause for panic. But hearing about it from someone like Fullerton, after a terrible loss in Game One, must have sent up a few red flags.)
Well, none of us were there, and it's pretty hard to transport ourselves back into 1919, put on their cleats, and know what was possible to do. I think the players took their cue from their manager. And I think Gleason took his cue from Comiskey. And the word that came down from Mount Commy was, "Play ball." It was "the show must go on" with a little "besides, if we stop the show, we will lose a ton of money and our clean image." And if that sounds harsh, remember that these players were not naive innocents. They had been around. They knew about fixers and they knew how baseball owners dealt with them -- they closed their eyes. Bum luck that the Series is tainted, but -- oh, well.
'ROUND THE INTERNET HORN
In the aftermath of the 2005 Sox' appearance in the post-season, there have been a number of posts on the SABR-L, which I receive daily in digest form, as well as in the Yahoo group devoted to the B-Sox, now over a hundred members strong. Much as I'd like to, I just don't have the time to reply to them all, so I pick and choose. Here are a couple of my posts, which will be re-runs for those Notes readers who also receive SABR-L and the Yahoo stuff.
SABR-L October 28: Left-fielders and Grand Jury Leaks
Stew Thornley replied to Greg Spira [Re: Bonds & steroids -- "he has never admitted it (his leaked court testimony, if accurate, clearly does not) and it has never been established in a court of law."], saying,
"Greg is absolutely correct, and it has been discussed on this forum that Bonds, according the the leaked testimony from the San Francisco Chronicle, did not admit to using steroids, knowingly or unknowingly....Yet it has been widely and erroneously reported that Bonds admitted to using steroids. Howard Bryant in Juicing the Game, a book I found flawed in other ways, is among those passing on this misinformation."
With Joe Jackson thrust into the news this October, thanks to the White Sox' run, I can't help but think how that ballplayer was also unfairly (in my view) punished in the media (the press) after he voluntarily testified to a grand jury that he thought was going to go after the gamblers who were strangling baseball. What was leaked from his GJ statement -- that he didn't try very hard in the clutch, poked at the ball, etc. -- turned out to be nowhere in the grand jury statement that later became public.
More amazingly, no one leaked to the press his statements about playing every game to win, at bat & in the field, which raises questions about why he was given $5,000, which he "confessed" that he kept. In a later trial (1924), Charles Comiskey stated that he believed Jackson played to win in every game he ever played in a Sox uniform; in the same trial, the foreman of the 1920 grand jury said Jackson never said that he did anything to toss a game. Henry H. Brigham said Jackson, in his 1920 statement, had denied being in the conspiracy. Jackson said that he gave his best effort, Brigham recalled, and "he didn't admit that he threw the games ... or any game." Q: "Did he [Jackson] testify in substance that he was making his best effort all through the play?" Brigham: "Yes."
But the "confession" from 1920 -- underlined by that infamous "Say it ain't so, Joe" anecdote -- has certainly colored our present perceptions of Jackson, thanks to the grand jury leaks. Nothing Jackson said the rest of his life could offset the way his grand jury testimony was reported.
There are, of course, a lot of differences. Bonds probably had the best legal advice on the planet, while Jackson was advised by Alfred Austrian (Comiskey's lawyer, not Jackson's own) to sign away his immunity, so whatever he said could be used against him. And Jackson was allowed to testify while at least half drunk. (The judge invited him to return the next day; unfortunately, he did not.) Those who leaked the GJ testimony said they were doing BASEBALL a favor -- here's the AP report from the LA Times (9/29/20): "Officials of the court, desirous of giving the national game the benefit of publicity in its purging, lifted the curtain on the grand jury proceedings sufficiently to show that a great hitter, Joe Jackson, declaring that he deliberately just tapped the ball."
So much for confidentiality. Any surprise that just one more player voluntarily came forward (of the eight Sox "bunched together" in the rumors)? And the next day, Lefty Williams stuck closely to a Q & A that was worked out with Austrian; it's not clear if he answered any questions or said anything that was not scripted. That's the problem with leaks, that the media plays down -- they discourage people from coming forward and telling their stories; what they say might end up on the front page.
My research into the cover-up of the fix of the 1919 Series has nothing to do with the steroid controversy. But invariably when I present on it, or just talk about it, someone will make comparisons. So I now pretty much expect them -- including the cases of Joe Jackson & Barry Bonds, and whether they will ever be admitted to that same exclusive club in Cooperstown.
John (No-Nickname) Pastier said here that the Stefan Fatsis Wall Street Journal article shows that I have "come up with an interesting new angle on the Black Sox scandal." To be fair, it has been a team effort, with the majority of that team being SABR members. My book simply is not written without a LOT of help from dozens, maybe over a hundred other people. I drew on SABR research old, new and ongoing. ProQuest and Paper of Record were invaluable. Living in the shadows of that great library in Cooperstown helped, too.
November 3: The Strange Case of Joe Jackson
Mark Wernick wrote: "Jackson's case is simple, not complicated.... All the semantic hair-splitting about whether or not Jackson played to win is unnecessary. Jackson accepted bribe money from gamblers to throw a world series, and complained he didn't have all the money he was promised. What are the revisionist historians trying to prove here? Jackson himself has given us all the information we need."
If we look at ALL the information that Jackson has given us, as Mark suggested, I really don't see how this can be considered a simple case. Jackson said in later interviews that he discussed the Fix with his team (Comiskey) well before the Series. Asinof said he asked to be benched before Game 1 (a Sporting News account has "begged to be benched" -- but both accounts are from the 1960s.) It's not at all clear if he played every inning of every game in October 1919 to win, but HE said he did, Commy agreed, and so did the grand jury foreman who heard him "confess". Did he show the money to his team right after the Series? Did they tell him to keep it? If so, why? It surely was from gamblers, but if he was not in on the fix and played to win, is it still "bribe money"? He always denied that he confessed to tossing games -- and that was from right after the grand jury "leaks," before he had his own lawyer's advice. We know he wrote to Commy and offered to tell his team what he knew that Fall (1919) and that they never followed up. And we know whose side the press was on, when we read those old articles.
What makes Jackson's case even more complicated is that his team was involved in a cover-up (not just them, of course), the league president Ban Johnson was feuding with Comiskey and by some accounts was out to wreck Commy's team (motive to maximize the number of players linked to the Fix -- from five to the popular eight), and once the scandal broke, everyone was into controlling the damage to the game's image, including Judge Landis, who was never accused of being fair and balanced in his dispensing of justice. His banning the eight men "bunched together" in the rumors (it's Commy's phrase) was extremely effective. If it was fair, I doubt we'd still be discussing it 84 years later.
Jackson's case is simple only if we choose to ignore everything he said. Is it revising history to find more facts and statements? I decided a while ago that the case of Joe Jackson, like the questions about which games were fixed, and even the Cicotte bonus, are really red herrings. Eight players (actually, the number is higher) lost their careers as baseball cleaned up its image. Those in power, the folks who knew gambling was strangling the sport (that's whistleblower Hugh Fullerton's phrase) and closed their eyes, were never indicted, punished (fined), or made to share any of the blame heaped on their employees. The Series of 1919 could have been halted early on to investigate what was happening; or, MLB could have at least done a serious investigation right after (when the record take was securely in the bank). Comiskey held up the Series checks of the 8 players eventually banned -- lucky guess? Fullerton quoted Commy the day after the Series, saying seven players would not be returning. The grand jury a year later did not turn up that much new -- new to Comiskey and Johnson, that is.
Maybe it would help Mark if I said Jackson's case is the most complicated of the eight banned Sox. I know not everyone wants to think about "degrees of guilt" (or degrees of innocence), because the story has come down to us over the decades in black & white, like Ruth's Called Shot. Looking at what each player knew and did, was of no interest to MLB and Landis; it obviously is of interest to many people today. We are used to sorting out individual performances in games, we like box scores, so when it comes to explaining that whole 1919 mess with "eight men out" I think we rightly reject that as -- too simple.
November 5: Joe Jackson and the Golden Rule
Several recent posts stated or implied that the Sox players who tossed the 1919 World Series were guilty of breaking baseball's Golden Rule, Thou shalt stay at a distance from gamblers and inform your team if they kidnap you and force you to listen. Or something like that. I think they mean the famous edict by Judge Landis. The problem is that Landis did not make consorting with gamblers (ETC) a crime punishable by banishment, until 1921, not only after the 1919 WS was long over, but also after another whole season played out. The scandal broke in late Sept 1920. Landis took office in January 1921.
The fact is that there was no law against tossing games in Illinois in Oct 1919 -- hence, the Sox went to trial on conspiracy-to-defraud charges. Gamblers and players mixed freely until after Landis' edict, which was very effective. The Sox could not have imagined they were risking their careers, let along their reputations. Hal Chase had been slapped on the wrist earlier in 1919; some folks think this gave a kind of green light for players & gamblers to continue working together. (Ban Johnson believed Joe Gedeon when Joe -- the 9th man out, but not the last -- said banning Chase would have scared him away from his role in the Oct 1919 mess.)
There was also no rule about informing one's team, that's 1921 again. If you think it's just common decency to let the team know that the games were being tampered with, then you have to ask, Well, what if they already knew? Fullerton said Comiskey, Ban Johnson & others (Barney Dreyfuss, eg) knew about the fix before Game 1 started. Many think if Commy knew, Gleason knew, and in fact there is evidence that Gleason knew, too, and confronted his team about it VERY early on. Of course, we have only Jackson's word that he told or tried telling Commy before the Series, but the question is, would he have been telling him anything new? If you say the players should have told ANYWAY, then you run up against the "Thou shalt no sqeal" ethic (see the non-baseball movie "Scent of a Woman" -- if Buck Weaver had Al Pacino as an advocate....)
Here are a couple other responses to recent posts: Cliff Blau wrote that Joe Jackson confessed to the grand jury that he tossed at least one game. That is a matter of interpretation; Jackson statements are maddeningly ambiguous. (Another one is that he said he was offered $20,000, the second time Gandil spoke with him, but it's not clear he did anything except get his hopes up. I like to think he was just good at getting out of meetings -- we all know folks like that -- but you'd think if he was expected to help deliver the WS and collect $20,000, there would be some pressure to put in an appearance, even if just to gab with Bill Burns or Abe Attell.)
Something Hayford Pierce wrote prompts me to remind anyone reading that grand jury statement that it has a context. Jackson went to the grand jury voluntarily to tell what he knew. He was intercepted by Comiskey's lawyer and coached (and advised to sign away his immunity, in case you wonder if he was getting great legal advice), and he was by all acounts at least half drunk when he finally made it to the GJ. (He was invited back the next morning, but no-showed.) True, Jackson said nothing about informing his team, when he spoke to the GJ -- but that would be precisely what Commy's lawyer would have coached him not to go near.
We have to look at what he said in the statement; what was reported (which differs -- this is the "leaked testimony" problem that has him fanning in the clutch and poking at the ball); what others said he said (eg, the GJ foreman said he never confessed to tossing anything); and finally what Jackson himself said later about what he testified. As for what was "leaked" -- Harold Seymour suggested that Jackson may also have been coached to say some things to the press -- not the GJ (which was supposed to be confidential -- right!) -- for the benefit of the fixers. Who might feel like they paid him and got nothing in return, if he stated plainly that he played 100% to win; this was, remember, Chicago with Al Capone & Company kneeling on deck. The Seymours' account in "BB: The Golden Age" is a pretty good account; and Harold Seymour got to talk with Joe Jackson!
David Kaiser said Lefty Williams gave Joe $5,000 (and that, amazingly, in not in dispute). But near as I can tell, he only had $5,000 himself. He apparently was given $10,000 (same as Cicotte). One account has Gandil doing that transfer, and telling Lefty to split it with Jackson. But another version (possibly coached by the lawyer who was on Joe's side) has Lefty giving him the cash because he (Lefty) had used Jackson's name in those meetings (see what happens when you don't come to meetings?), without Jackson's knowledge or permission. Williams and Jackson were close friends, and had been for some years. I believe the only player accused of holding out cash was Gandil, & there's little evidence for that.
Finally, Chris DeRosa & others wrote about what Jackson did in "the games the Sox were trying to win (or lose)" -- as if we KNOW that. We do not. I agree with Chris that the stats from the Series are of no help. There is some evidence that the Fix fizzled early. And that the Sox won game 3 to get even with those fixers who bet big on a Sox sweep (Burns & Maharg, for two ... remember that the grand jury heard evidence suggesting there may have been five syndicates involved ... yes, syndicates.) Burns & Maharg testified (at the 1921 trial) that in the original plan, Cicotte was supposed to win Game 4, even if the fix was still ON, so Game 4 is also a question mark (one I love to discuss). Victor Luhrs' old (1966) book is really fun to read if you like to pick the Series apart, game by game, almost play by play, and I recommend "The Great Baseball Mystery."
OK, one more. Mark Halfon seems to subscribe to the "Comiskey was Scrooge" theory. I'm not sure that stands up, despite "Eight Men Out"'s portrayal. The Sox team was among the best paid. But Commy was a lot like Nixon, maybe, except his role in the cover-up of the Fix never got the publicity that Watergate did. (Cover-up wasn't yet in the national vocabulary.) Ted Williams was bothered that Commy had a plaque (near his own?) in Cooperstown, while Jackson had none. Ted did not make a lot of solid arguments, but thought the lifetime ban ended with Joe's lifetime, but that just seems to be common sense. Then came the Rose ruling about the ineligible list, and I think it was Bill Deane who described this as Jackson being hit by a stray bullet. MLB off the hook about the Cooperstown question, until Jackson is removed from the list. Well, you can see how difficult it would be to explain this issue to the American public! Knowledgeable SABR members can disagree.
November 7: Jackson, Half-Drunk or Half-Sober?
In reply to Bob Timmermann's SABR-L question about the evidence for Jackson being "half drunk" when he went before the grand jury on Sept 28, 1920:
That comes from the statement Jackson made under oath at the 1921 trial. None of the players indicted testified at that trial, under advisement of their "dream team" of lawyers. However, at the outset of the trial, Cicotte, Jackson and Williams all made statements regarding their testimony to the grand jury, ten months earlier. They all repudiated those statements, and they all said that they thought that they had been promised immunity ... I think "that they would be taken care of" by the legal system and their team, in exchange for their cooperation in nailing the gamblers.
So Jackson's statement was made in court, and reported in the NY Times, and reported in much more detail in the Savannah Morning News. That anything was in the paper doesn't make it true. However, the players were followed on the stand in 1921 by Judge McDonald, the grand jury judge, and he did not deny Jackson's claim, as far as I know. McDonald DID deny that he had granted the players immunity or made any kind of deal, although he admitted expressing sympathy for Williams, when he learned how poorly paid he was in 1919 (less than $3,000, even with a small bonus).
According to the press reports -- the 1921 trial was heavily covered -- McDonald had a private conference off the record with Jackson before they went before the grand jury. Jackson's later recollections of his time with Comiskey's lawyer Austrian, assistant state's attorney, Hartley Replogle, and Judge McDonald were "plentifully sprinkled with accounts of 'hooch' parties and stories of how he had been promised everything if he would only talk." (NY Times) Jackson was supposed to meet the following day with Judge McDonald. "But I got on a big party and got drunk. I had the judge's two bailiffs with me." Asked if he left town when he was done at Replogle's office, Jackson said, "No I got teed up again." (Savannah Morning News)
We really do not know for certain if Jackson was provided with whiskey to give him the "courage" to go to the grand jury, or to loosen his tongue, or to discredit whatever he would say. He was assigned two bailiffs for protection, by the way, at his own request, because "Swede was a hard guy" and perhaps he feared retaliation from others in the underworld for his confirmation, following Cicotte's, that the fix indeed was in.
Not sure if I'm repeating myself here -- I get asked about this a lot -- but when we fault Jackson for not stating to the grand jury that he had communicated with his team about the Fix before the Series, as he later claimed, we need to note that he was never asked about that.
My book on the fix, the cover-up of the fix, and its undoing is pretty thoroughly documented, and perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier in this thread of Jackson. My own opinions of some of these issues shifted as I learned more; the more I learned, the less certain everything seemed, at times. Even just reporting what was in different papers seems a disservice to the complexity of the case. For example, who was Judge McDonald? Was he fed this role to enhance his chances of being baseball's first Commissioner (or at least Herrmann's replacement on the Natl Commission) -- by Ban Johnson? Was he in any way influenced by Ban Johnson, who was publicly feuding with Comiskey and by some accounts, out to wreck the White Sox? If I sound like a defense lawyer, that's not a coincidence, all of these factors and motives came up in the 1921 trial.
YAHOO GROUP POST: November 10: Rank-in-Order These Baseball Scandals
*** EMAIL REPLIES FROM NOTES READERS ALSO WELCOME ***
Rod's post today about W-Sox cards & memorabilia contained this statement: "The scandal started out as a few gamblers trying to get rich, but turned into one of the biggest, and easily the darkest, events in baseball history."
Focused as I have been for three years and counting on the events surrounding the Fix of October 1919, I have probably forfeited any perspective on how those events rank in the lineup of "dark events" in the long history of baseball. But I get this question from time to time, and so I'd like to poll others. Is the B-Sox Scandal really the worst thing that ever happened in baseball history?
Minimally, the Series was tampered with and players sat with gamblers, conspiring to determine or "fix" the outcome of the match; maximally, the players took bribes and tossed the Series to the Reds. There is no question that some money was exchanged and that the Sox lost. How does this rank with other scandals? Let's brainstorm a list of 5 to 10, THEN ask folks to rank them. We can ask ANY folks -- friends & neighbors, co-workers ... we could post it on SABR-L, or ask the various committees ... if it's a REAL short list, maybe I can ask John Zogby (he works out of the shadows of Cooperstown, too) to include it on one of his national polls. Could be fun.
One that comes to my mind right away is the "color line" that kept the game segregated for most of its history. Another -- feel free to argue these -- is the Strike of 1994-95 which cancelled a chunk of a terrific season, AND an entire post-season.
The one that comes up a lot today is baseball's apparent tolerance for some years, of illegal drugs and steroids that enhance player performance; are we too close to this one to assess it? Perhaps. But we have seen lives lost and careers ruined, have seen Congress get involved (something they never did in 1920, not before Jackie Robinson, and not in 1994-95). "Guilty knowledge" revisited?
Curt Flood would never forgive us if we omitted the scandal of the Reserve Clause, which kept the wages of players in check until free agency was finally won in 1976.
I can't help but observe that what all of these latter-day scandals seem to have in common, is the determination of MLB, the Lords of the Realm (John Helyar's phrase), to maintain the status quo and to maximize their profits. (To be accurate, in 1994 the players were defending the status quo, while the owners were trying to change it, by crushing the union; but the Lords forced the strike.)
In the B-Sox scandal, the spotlight was kept squarely on the players, as if all of the problems of the game connected with gambling and fixing was confined to October 1919; of course, they weren't.