October 21, 2019
ALL ACCEPTED WISDOM IS WRONG:
The Chicago Black Sox and baseball's rule of law (JOSHUA GREGOR, October 14, 2019, Acton)
John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian, points out in this article that "the scandal was a cataclysmic event in the game's history not because it was the first time anyone had cheated, but because it was the first time the public knew about it." According to Thorn, attempts to fix the Series had already been made in 1903, 1905, 1914, 1917 and 1918 - fully a third of all the World Series played before the Black Sox debacle - in addition to countless such efforts in less important games. Gambling and baseball were anything but strangers to one another. The Chicago fix, though, brought the sport's darker side out into the open and convinced team owners that they needed to do something to restore their credibility with the public. Ultimately their solution was a new office of Commissioner of Baseball, someone who had no financial interest in the game and would provide real enforcement of the rules. In the words of National League president John Heydler, "We want a man as chairman who will rule with an iron hand....Baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever." The "iron hand" they found was that of an Illinois federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
In a recent podcast, david Pietrusza dispelled many of the myths surrounding the scandal. The best bit being his argument that the players were rather well paid but cheated because Wilson's income tax was taking too much of their money!
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 21, 2019 5:20 PM