Stefan Fatsis of the Wall Street Journal looks at the still-murky history of the infamous 1919 "Black Sox" baseball scandal and finds that the evidence now points to much broader corruption.
The black-and-white version of baseball's biggest scandal needs an update. The real story isn't the players. It's the conspiracy and cover-up of the scandal by the lords of baseball."There was an intense whitewashing by all parties in baseball because of a tradition of hiding these thing as long as you could," says Donald Gropman, author of a biography of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, the team's star player. "That's how they did things."
That behavior is finally getting a full airing. New research shows that the baseball executives at the center of the scandal -- White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and American League president Ban Johnson, two giants of early baseball now enshrined in its Hall of Fame -- had information about the fix before the 1919 World Series between Chicago and the Cincinnati Reds had even started. Other recently discovered documents show that the players involved were publicly named long before an investigation took place a year later.
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"It was not an isolated event," says Richard Lindberg, who has written four books about the White Sox. "It was the culmination of 40 years of warm relations between gambling syndicates and professional athletes."
In fact, the Black Sox scandal was investigated only after a grand jury was convened in 1920 to look into allegations of game-fixing -- allegations involving the crosstown Chicago Cubs. Earlier that year, National League executives had hushed up a hearing on game-fixing at which the scandal was mentioned by players.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Alan at October 26, 2005 06:37 PM