"Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose; there's no certainty, no given. You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time, the worst team's gonna win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games: that middle third. So it's a game that you can't like if winning's everything. And democracy's that way too."
— George Will
"Baseball transformed the language: A success was now a 'home run', crazy ideas came out of 'left field', and inappropriate behavior was 'off base'. The game was still fast and furious; speed and strategy took precedence over power. Ty Cobb and John McGraw still set the pace. When the decade began baseball had never been more popular. By its end fans everywhere would feel betrayed as some of the finest players in the game sought to sell out the national pastime." — KB
Bottom of the dead ball era:
"If you look at pictures of, say, the 1915 Pirates you're gonna see a very different kind of face than you see today. Hard men. Baseball at that point was a way out of the mines. This was a way for immigrant Americans to make a career, and they were tough men; hungry young men coming after the established older men. Baseball was played with a ferocity — of kind of life and death, which in a sense it was for these kind of players."
— George Will
That's the way it is in baseball. It's a tough racket. There's always someone sitting on the bench just itching to get in there in your place. Thinks he can do better. Wants your job in the worst way. Back to the coal mines for you, pal! The pressure never lets up. It doesn't matter what you did yesterday — that's history. It's tomorrow that counts. So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lords, baseball's a worrying thing.
— Stanley Coveleski
They have work to do, and they should be sleeping or eating, but they would rather do without sleep, or without a square meal deliberately eaten, than miss a minute of a ball game, even if they go on their night turn in the mill or factory, minus the rest that should be theirs.
— Pittsburgh journalist
"Baseball has been a passion of immigrants because it is a way into the United States; it's a kind of citizenship perhaps more authentic than anything which can be on a piece of paper. Sometimes it was the youngster's rebellion against his father — becoming less Polish, more American by taking up baseball — but it became an enormously important part of the American identity."
— Donald Hall
"Companies of every kind promoted baseball for their workers. Management believed it encouraged teamwork, provided a healthy way to fill spare time that might otherwise be devoted to labor agitation, and taught immigrant workers how to be real Americans. Nearly every industry had a league: railroads, steel, electricity, coal and iron, textiles, meatpacking, automobiles. And thousands of workers came out for factory games on the weekends. [...] At progressive Sing Sing prison on the Hudson River convicts played and beat visiting teams made up of electrical workers, insurance salesmen and stock exchange clerks. I want to go back to Sing Sing, one ex-con remembered, Down here I'm just a bum. But up there I was on the ball team." — KB
Opening Day, 1910; William Howard Taft becomes the first President ever to attend opening day, throw out the ceremonial first pitch.
1910; Connie Mack, manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for fifty years (1901-1950), leads the Athletics in what would be the first of his five world championship seasons. "They were a remarkable team, sparked by the fine clutch pitching of Albert Bender — who was a Chippewa Indian, and therefore known as Chief — and the so-called $100,000 infield of Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, Black Jack Barry and Frank Baker, who led the league with 12 home runs. But it was their manager who deserved most of the credit."
I will not tolerate profanity, obscene language or personal insults from my bench. I will always insist as long as I am manager of the club that my boys be gentlemen. There is room for gentlemen at any profession.1910 Batting title race;
— Connie Mack
He could be as tough as rawhide and as gentle as a mother, reasonable and obstinate beyond reason, and courtly and benevolent and fierce. He was kindhearted and hardfisted, drove a close bargain and was suckered in a hundred deals. He was generous and thoughtful, and autocratic and shy, and independent and altogether completely lovable.
— Red Smith, New York Herald Tribune
"Connie Mack — in the words of Wilfrid Sheed, like a tree from the Garden of Eden — came into baseball in the 1880s. He began as a not-very-good player and like so many other not-very-good players he took instead his passion for the game and, in his case, his brains and became a mogul; a great manager who would build terrific teams and then as soon as they had reached their pinnacle he would sell the players for as much money as he could possibly get."
— Daniel Okrent
It is more profitable for me to have a team that is in contention for most of the season but finishes about fourth. A team like that will draw well enough for the first part of the season to show a profit for the year. And you don't have to give the players raises when they don't win.
— Connie Mack
"Ty Cobb was locked in a fierce battle with Napoléon Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians for the batting championship of the American League. The hugely popular Lajoie had led the league in batting twice before, and was considered the greatest second baseman in the game. The Chalmers Motor Company had offered a new car to the man who won the title. Cobb wanted that car. But he was so detested by those who played against him that when he and Lajoie were neck and neck for the title at the very end of the season the manager of the St. Louis Browns, just to spite Cobb, ordered his third baseman to play so deep that Lajoie got six bunt singles in a row. The manager was found out and fired. Cobb ended up winning the title by a single percentage point. Years later it was discovered that, in fact, Lajoie should have won: Cobb's average had been inflated by counting one game twice. But both men got cars." — KB1911; Beloved Cleveland pitcher Addie Joss, after a secret battle with meningitis, collapses before an exhibition game and dies eleven days later, age 31.
"Afraid that their owner would refuse to give them the day off to attend the funeral, his grieving teammates simply skipped town. [...] They staged a benefit game to aid his widow. All the great stars came: Walter Johnson, Smoky Joe Wood, Napoléon Lajoie and Ty Cobb. The game was a great success; they managed to raise $12,931. But it only increased the players' anxieties. With no pensions of their own, or job security or grievance procedure with the owners, they felt powerless. Walter Johnson complained in an article he wrote for Baseball Magazine called Baseball Slavery: The Great American Principle of Dog Eat Dog:
The employer tries to starve out the laborer, and the laborer tries to ruin the employer's business. They quarrel over a bone and rend each other like coyotes. And we are free born Americans with a Constitution and public schools! Our business philosophy is that of the wolf pack.1911; Grover Cleveland Alexander debuts with the Philadelphia Phillies.
— Walter Johnson
He never complained, never alibied. He was never known to criticize a teammate or call an opposing ballplayer lucky. He accepted his great success modestly, and the many vicissitudes of his life in silence. He was easy to like, and hard to know.1911; Cy Young retires, age 44.
— New York World Telegram
"If Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson had a challenger for the title of best pitcher in baseball, it was a troubled young righthander named Grover Cleveland Alexander. A Nebraska farmboy, the son and grandson of alcoholics, and one of thirteen children, he had honed his startling accuracy by hurling rocks to kill birds to help feed his family. He was a minor league star at 22 when a shortstop's throw to first hit him squarely between the eyes. He was unconscious for two days, then stricken with double vision. He kept throwing anyway. He was afraid, he remembered, that if he did not he would go to pieces. And after months of relentless work his vision suddenly and mysteriously cleared, though he remained subject to epileptic seizures for the rest of his life. Alexander stormed into the majors in 1911, striking out 227 men for the Philadelphia Phillies in his very first season. He would win 30 or more games three seasons in a row. He pitched four one-hitters in 1915, and 90 shutouts during his long career. He was utterly businesslike on the mound, throwing an arsenal of pitches with pinpoint accuracy. Game after game he'd pitch in an hour and a half, a teammate recalled, no fussing around, no stalling, no wasted motion. Even the men he struck out so consistently liked him. Between games he was modest, good humored, and kept mostly to himself. But then he began to drink." — KB
1912; Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, a players' union, is formed. "It had two goals: to rid baseball of the hated Reserve Clause, and to gain a larger share of the profits for the men who made those profits possible. At first they got nowhere; the owners simply ignored them."
1912; Casey Stengel debuts as an outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Throughout his career he would play for or manage all four New York teams: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees and Mets.
1912; Fenway Park opens.
"Great stretches of Canadian forest have been destroyed to print the paper on which people have written paeans to Fenway Park. There's something in its intimacy, there's something in that incredible greenness, there's something in the peculiarity of the way that the outfield wall follows its meandering path from right to left, there's something about the way that it fits so tightly and neatly into the city, not surrounded by endless acres of ballparks, and there's something about the fact that it has been the site of so much baseball, um — tragedy might be an overstatement, but so much baseball sorrow has gone down there that you can compare it to a Civil War battlefield. It is a vale of tears."1912 Players' Strike; "On May 15, 1912, at hilltop park in Manhattan, Ty Cobb endured the taunts of a New York fan, Claude Lueker, until after the third inning, when Lueker shouted that Cobb was a half nigger. Cobb vaulted the railing, knocked down the heckler and began stomping him with his spikes. When the crowd shouted that the man was helpless because he had no hands, Cobb replied I don't care if he doesn't have any feet, and kept kicking him until a park policeman pulled him away. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, suspended Cobb from organized baseball indefinitely."
— Daniel Okrent
Everybody took it as a joke. I was only kidding that fella and I frightened him to death. But I would not take from the United States Army what that man said to me, and the fans in New York cheered me to the echo when I left the field. I don't look for applause but for the first time in my life I was glad that the fans were with me.1912 World Series; John McGraw's New York Giants, still smarting from the Merkle Boner in the 1908 pennant race, duke it out over eight games with the Boston Red Sox; nearly every game is close. Christy Mathewson faces "dazzling" fastball pitcher Smoky Joe Wood and the bat of the Red Sox' "regal center fielder, Tris Speaker — the Grey Eagle — a former rodeo cowboy who transformed outfield play."
— Ty Cobb
"Although his teammates despised Cobb, they thought he'd been justified. Being called a half nigger was considered an insult too great for any white man to bear. They refused to play until he was reinstated. It was the first players' strike in major league history. [...] Ban Johnson now warned that he would suspend every Tiger from the game unless they all agreed to return to the field. Cobb urged his teammates to give in, and when they did they were each fined $100. After Cobb paid only a $50 fine for the savage beating, Johnson lifted his suspension." — KB
"The more his fires burned the more that provoked him on the field and I suppose one could say that the happy byproduct was the extraordinary baseball that he gave the fans at the time, but...uh, there's a moment when you have to say it's not worth it. I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball."
— Daniel Okrent
No individual whether player, manager, owner, critic or spectator, who went through the 1912 World Series will ever forget it. There never was another like it. From the lofty perch of the bleacherite it was a series crammed with thrills and gulps, cheers and gasps, dejection and wild exultation, recrimination and adoration, excuse and condemnation.1913; Ebbets Field, built upon a garbage dump in Flatbush called Pigtown, opens with an exhibition game against the Highlanders (who would officially change their name that spring to the New York Yankees).
— Spalding Guide
Game 2: "Mayor John F. 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald, grandfather of John F. Kennedy was there to throw out the first ball. He was a loyal member of the Royal Rooters, a hard-drinking band of one thousand fanatical fans who'd been cheering on the Red Sox since the turn of the century. Game 2 was enlivened by a fistfight between Tris Speaker and the Giant third baseman, Buck Herzog. The score was tied 6 to 6 in the 11th inning when the contest was inexplicably called because of impending darkness. After heated discussion officials declared that Game 2 would not count. If necessary the series would go to eight games."
Game 7: "Just before the game began the Royal Rooters filed onto the field on their way to their accustomed seats just beyond the left field foul line, but when they got there they found that their seats had already been sold. The Rooters refused to leave until they got them back. Mounted policemen had to be called in to drive them behind the bleachers. The near riot in the stands kept Smoky Joe from warming up. It was a rout: Giants win 11 to 4."
When he walked to the pitching mound this afternoon Wood wore a halo, but before three hours had gone fickle fandom was looking about for someone else to put on his pedestal. Wood lasted but one inning, and during that he pitched only 13 balls. They were more than enough, for they produced no less than 7 safe hits and 6 runs.
— New York Times
Game 8: Giant outfielder Fred Snodgrass drops an easy fly ball to blow the series. Red Sox win.
Write in the pages of World Series baseball history the name of Snodgrass. Write it large and black — not as a hero, truly not. Put him rather with Merkle, who was in such a hurry that he gave away a National League championship. Snodgrass was in such a hurry that he gave away a world championship.
— New York Times
"It's a game where during the course of it the emphasis is put on a single individual. Fred Snodgrass, who was one of the great players for the Giants back in the old days — I think it was in 1912 he missed a fly ball that lost the Giants the World Series. When he died, this enormously successful man, at the age of 83 or something like that, a banker in California or whatever, the headline read: Fred Snodgrass Dies — Muffed Fly Ball in 1912. Despite his success, despite his joys or grandchildren and so forth it was this one stigma that was attached to him for the rest of his life."
— George Plimpton
There is no greater optimist in baseball than president Charles Hercules Ebbets of the Brooklyn club. For thirty years he's been in baseball, and all that time he has had confidence in the Brooklyn fan. Through many seasons of losses and disappointments he has carried the Trolley Dodgers, losing money year after year, when those about him lost faith in the game as a paying proposition. But the confidence of Mr Ebbets has never been shaken. He believed years ago, as he does today, that Brooklyn is a major league city and that it would support a good team.1913; Branch Rickey becomes manager of the St. Louis Browns, one of the poorest teams in the majors. "Ricky was a genius at making do with less. He approached his job scientifically, introducing unusual calisthenics, batting cages and sliding pits. He barred profanity and poker-playing and liquor, offered evening lectures on baseball theory called skull sessions, and, keeping a promise to his mother, managed just six days a week, leaving an assistant to take over for him on Sundays." As general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 he would sign Jackie Robinson.
— New York Times
"The story of the Brooklyn Dodgers is the story of one of the five boroughs in New York. Brooklyn was an independent city to itself until 1898. It was one of the great cities; it was a city with a population bigger than Chicago. But because of the subway, because of the bridges, because of the water and electric facilities the state forced Brooklyn into the City of New York in 1898. And Brooklyn didn't want to be in the City of New York. New York had the tall buildings and this, that and the other, and the railroad stations and Broadway — Brooklyn was just, ah, well they called it the bedroom of New York. But the one thing that they had in Brooklyn was a baseball club called the Dodgers, and the whole borough of Brooklyn centered its love and attention on the Dodgers and used the Dodgers against the tall buildings of Manhattan."
— Red Barber
I've made more money than I ever expected to, but I'm putting all of it, and more too, into the new plant for the Brooklyn fans. Of course it's one thing to have a fine ball club and win a pennant, but to my mind there's something more important than that about a ball club. I believe the fans should be taken care of. A club should provide a suitable home for its patrons. This home should be in a location that's healthy, it should be safe and it should be convenient.
— Charles Hercules Ebbets
"He was Leonardo in baseball; he did everything. He was artist and scientist and genius of a million kinds: He invented the farms systems, he devised ways of playing the game and of training players that had never before been considered."1914; The Federal League is formed out of an "outlaw" minor league and declares itself a major league. Its financiers "began offering big money to big stars willing to sign up with their teams. They even gave the players the right to become free agents. Eighty-one players were lured to the new league, including Three Finger Brown, Joe Tinker and Chief Bender. [...] But the upstart league was a direct challenge to Ban Johnson, who resented the interlopers just as National League owners had resented him when he launched the American League in 1901. Johnson denounced the competition as pirates and threatened to blacklist any players who jumped to the new league. But to stem the flood of deserting players, he and his owners also raised the salaries of remaining stars and pledged to do better even by average players in the future."
— Daniel Okrent
Hitting alone will not win ball games. I want speed on my team, and I also want every man on the squad to know how to slide. I intend to have my players taught how to run. I don't say we will win any pennants, but I do think that my systematic training will be laying the foundation of a pennant winner. If this is theory, it is blamed good practical theory.
— Branch Rickey
No ballplayer can learn to steal bases by practicing sliding in the sand pits. I wouldn't ask a veteran to slide into a pit. I don't think much of this theory stuff.
— Miller Huggins, crosstown manager of St. Louis Cardinals
1914; Weeghman Park opens to host the Federal League's Chicago club. Renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.
1914; Eddie Collins, who played second base in Connie Mack's celebrated $100,000 infield, is traded to the Chicago White Sox when Mack sells off his championship team. "Collins hit over .340 for ten seasons and played with such cheerful confidence in his own skills that opponents and teammates alike called him Cocky Collins."
1915; Federal League owners sue organized baseball in federal court in Chicago, charging that the American and National Leagues constitute a monopoly. "The presiding judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was said to be death on trusts, but he was also a baseball fan." Landis permits the case to drag out while the Federal League collapses under financial strain. Ban Johnson rescinds his promises of better pay. (A decision would not be reached until 1922, when the Supreme Court ruled that, as primarily entertainment and not interstate commerce, MLB is exempt from antitrust laws.)
Do you realize that a decision in this case may tear down the very foundations of this game, so loved by thousands? Any blows at the thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution.1916; Jimmy Claxton pitches his first game for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Six days later he is fired (a friend let slip that Claxton had black as well as Indian ancestry). "Claxton was the first black man to play organized white baseball in the twentieth century, and the last for thirty years."
— Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis
Dear Sir — I don't give a damn to be in the big leagues unless I get something for my work. I see you want to give me a good fucking, but I'll pick shit with the chickens before I play for any less.
— Fred Toney, returning an unsigned contract, 1916
1916 World Series;
October 8, 1916 — The withered stalk of the baseball season burst with a crash into radiant bloom at Braves Field today with the opening of the World's Series. The Superbas, pride of Brooklyn and of the National League, and the carmine-hosed Boston Warriors scrambled for the petals of the first blossom, and the entrants from New York started their scrambling a little late. They emerged from the struggle on the short end of a 6 - 5 score.1917; Honus Wagner retires, age 43.
October 10, 1916 — Under lowering gray skies that finally yielded splashing tears of sympathy for a team mighty even in defeat, the Brooklyn Superbas went down today before the Boston Red Sox in the second encounter of the World's Series. Fourteen innings were needed to establish a final score of 2 to 1, and they were fourteen innings of such baseball as shuttles the heart of the genuine fan back and forth between his mouth and his heels, and every inning was a gem, clear cut and flashing, its colors now blue, now rosy.
October 13, 1916 — The Red Sox celebrated Columbus Day in their hometown by wresting the World's Championship banner free from the trembling, nerveless fingers of the Superbas and throwing it wide to the wind that swept Braves Field, theirs for another year.
— New York Times
The Great War:
1917-1918; "America's entry into World War I was very near in the spring of 1917. Millions had died in battlefields in Europe and Americans could no longer stand by. Baseball was eager to show that it was ready to do its part. Ban Johnson ordered teams to learn close order drill, and the Washington Senators showed off their marching skill lead by the athletic young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But baseball had become one of the biggest entertainment industries in the country, and when war actually came in April the owners saw no reason to stop playing. They argued that baseball should be declared an essential wartime industry so that players would be exempt from the draft. It didn't work."
With an astonishing disregard for the new proprieties and new decencies, the so-called magnates of baseball have proclaimed in both leagues their unswerving adherence to the wretched fallacy of "business as usual". That policy is not calculated to make us proud of baseball as an American institution.1918 World Series;
— New York Times
July 21, 1918 — Baseball received a knockout wallop yesterday when Secretary Baker ruled: Players in the draft age must obtain employment calculated to aid in the successful prosecution of the war or shoulder guns and fight.
— Washington Star
"Fresh recruits drilled on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Brooklyn and Manhattan teams had developed the game of baseball seventy years before. Some ballplayers found jobs in defense industries, where they were paid handsomely to play on company teams. Critics denounced them as slackers. But 247 major leaguers did serve, and 3 were killed in action. Soldiers played ball in camps and on battleships, on fields in Flanders, and in hastily constructed ballparks throughout France.
"Grover Cleveland Alexander served in the trenches with an artillery unit and emerged from the fighting shellshocked, his hearing damaged, drinking more heavily than ever to forget the horrors he had seen.
"Though Branch Rickey was 36 and had four children, he went to war too, became a major, and commanded a unit that included Captains Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Cobb and Mathewson did not get to France until after the shooting stopped, but during a drill Mathewson was exposed to poison gas that fatally seared his lungs. He would live for seven more years, but his great career was over." — KB
September 6, 1918 — Far different from any incident that has ever occurred in the history of baseball was the great moment of the first World Series game between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox, which came at Comiskey Park this afternoon during the seventh inning stretch. As the crowd of 19,274 spectators stood up to take the afternoon yawn the band broke forth with the strains of the Star Spangled Banner. The yawn was checked as the ballplayers turned quickly about and faced the music. First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of today's enthusiasm.1919; Branch Rickey moves across town to manage the St. Louis Cardinals, stays for 23 years.
— New York Times
"The wartime crowd sang so enthusiastically that the performance was repeated at every game of the series. From then on the song was an integral part of the national pastime, though it did not become the official national anthem until 1931.
"The Red Sox won the World Series that year, beating the Chicago Cubs 4 games to 2. One of the series' stars was the young pitcher Babe Ruth, who had won both his starts, including a masterful 1 to nothing shutout. It was Boston's fourth world championship in the decade; they have never won another." — KB
The Black Sox Scandal:
1919 Chicago White Sox; "No team played better and few teams were paid as poorly or got along as badly. Players deliberately crossed each other on the field. During infield practice no one threw the ball to second baseman Eddie Collins, Chicago's highest paid player, all season long. Teammate Chick Gandil had not spoken to Collins since 1915. Owner Charles A. Comiskey, 'The Old Roman', was himself a former player but now among the game's most parsimonious executives."
I thought you couldn't win without teamwork, until I joined the White Sox. Yet somehow we won a hundred games and the pennant that year.
— Eddie Collins
"They were abused horribly by Charles Comiskey, who was a man of a small mind, a tight fist and nasty temperament. The climate was too good for it not to happen."First baseman Chick Gandil, a former hobo and one-time club fighter, now near the end of his career, let it be known that, for the right money, he would be willing to talk some of his teammates into throwing the series. An ex-boxer, Abe Attell, and Sleepy Bill Burns, a one-time White Sox pitcher, connected Gandil to New York's most notorious gambler, Arnold Rothstein.
— Daniel Okrent
"It certainly was a kind of have-and-have-not thing. The baseball players were very expendable; if you got hurt you were gone, there was no pension or anything else like that. And they saw people making money hand over fist. The owners — in Comiskey's case he owned the ballpark. He bottled his own soda in the basement! He was making a nickel on everything that moved in that ballpark, and there they were — they were nicknamed the Black Sox even before they threw the World Series because one year he started charging them for laundering their uniforms, and they went on strike by saying Okay, then we won't launder them, and they got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier until the sportswriters called them the Black Sox. And then in fact Comiskey said Okay, I'll launder your uniforms. And then he took it out of their World Series bonus."
— John Sayles
Who is he, anyhow? An actor? No. A dentist? No. He's a gambler. Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly, He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919. Fixed the World Series, I repeated? The idea staggered me. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. How did he happen to do that? I asked after a minute. He just saw the opportunity. Why isn't he in jail? They can't get him, old sport, he's a smart man.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"Rothstein was basically a guy who never gambled. He's known as a gambler and he never gambled on anything in his life which is why he got very very wealthy. He only put money ostensibly gambling on things that he knew were a sure thing or that he had covered so well that there was no way that he couldn't make a profit. I don't think he really cared about sports."
— John Sayles
The proposition to throw the World Series was first brought to me in New York City in front of the Ansonia Hotel. Chick Gandil came to me and said he wanted a conference. He asked me if anybody had approached me on the 1919 World Series with the purpose of fixing. I told him, Not yet. He asked me if it was fixed would I be willing to get in and go through with it? I told him I would refuse to answer right then.Gandil recruited six teammates: pitcher Claude "Lefty" Williams, outfielder Oscar "Happy" Felsch, third baseman "Buck" Weaver, shortstop "Swede" Risberg, righthanded pitcher Eddie Cicotte, and outfielder Joseph Jefferson Jackson. Reserve infielder Fred McMullin later demanded in on the fix, making eight. The smart ones insisted on their money up front.
— Lefty Williams
The meeting was held about eight o'clock in the evening. I said, there's so much double crossing stuff, if I went in the series I wanted the money put in my hand. I went back to my room at eleven thirty and the 10 grand was under my pillow.Shoeless Joe Jackson, "a South Carolina country boy, had learned to bat from a Confederate veteran who had learned his baseball from Union soldiers in a northern prison camp. He had hoped to be a pitcher until he broke a batter's arm with a wild pitch. Jackson could neither read nor write, but he could hit; .408 in his rookie year, .356 lifetime — the third highest average in history. His home runs were called Saturday Specials because most of the textile workers' games in which he got his start were played on Saturdays, and he hit them with a special 48 ounce bat, Black Betsy, made for him by a local lumberman from the north side of a hickory tree and darkened with coat after coat of Jackson's tobacco juice. As for the nickname: He was said once to have been spotted in the minors playing in his socks when new shoes proved too tight."
— Eddie Cicotte
The greatest natural hitter I ever saw.1919 World Series; The White Sox were heavy favorites to beat the better paid but far weaker Cincinnati Reds. To boost gate receipts the owners decided that that year's Series would be a best of nine.
— Ty Cobb
In two years he had risen from a poor mill boy to the rank of a player in the major leagues. The ignorant mill boy had become the hero of millions. Out on the hot prairies teams of Joe Jacksons battled desperately with the Ty Cobbs. There came a day when a crook spread money before this ignorant idol, and he fell. For a few dollars he sold his honor.
— New York World
"This contest between the Reds and the White Sox is something that is concentrating the nation's attention and its faith; what was unsaid was the horror that existed in so many minds as the baseball establishment watched the Series being thrown. It was visible from the very first pitch, first game, when the signal was put in, when Eddie Cicotte hit the first batter, and that was the signal to the gamblers that the fix had worked. The only thing the gamblers did wrong with that series, from their own perspective, is that they made the mistake of letting the Reds win the first game, because that drove the odds down, and if the White Sox — the Black Sox — had won the first game Rothstein and his cohort would've made a hell of a lot more money.Winter 1919; "In an article for the New York World Hugh Fullerton suggested that the Series had been fixed. The baseball establishment was outraged." American League President Ban Johnson, who hated Charles Comiskey, pursues the case for almost a year.
[...]
"Everybody in the game knew it was happening. Nobody was even pretending that it wasn't happening. No one was admitting it out loud for the public. How could you admit it for the public? What would that mean?
[...]
"Ring Lardner, who was covering the series, he would walk up and down the train singing: I'm forever blowing ball games, pretty ball games in the air. And the players all knew what he was saying and they were seething with rage. [Ailing] Christy Mathewson sat in the press box with Hughie Fullerton, the great Chicago baseball writer, and Fullerton said I want you to point out to me things that aren't kosher, the plays that look like these guys are not trying their hardest, and Mathewson had a string of them throughout the series. It wasn't subtle."
— Daniel Okrent
There is no alibi for Cicotte. He pitched a great game, a determined game, and one that would have won nine times out of ten, but he brought the defeat crashing down upon his own head by trying to do all the defensive work. He made the wild throw that gave the Reds their opening, the only real one they had, and he followed that up by grabbing a ball thrown from the outfield and deflecting it past the catcher. A high fly to left blown by the wind over the head of Jackson, who was playing close in, followed, and Chicago was beaten.
— Hugh Fullerton, on Game 4
After the game was over I went up to my room; I was ill. I was sick all night. Felsch was in the room with me. I believe I discussed the matter with him and said, Happy, it'll never be done again. I don't believe he even answered me.
— Eddie Cicotte
They aren't hitting. I don't know what's the matter. But I do know that something's wrong with my gang. The bunch I had fighting in August for the pennant would've trimmed this Cincinnati bunch without a struggle. The bunch I have now couldn't beat a high school team.
— White Sox manager Kid Gleason
"Game 8 would be held in Chicago and Lefty Williams was scheduled to pitch. Humiliated by his poor play, and angered at not being paid all the money he was owed, he was now determined more than ever to win. But the night before the game, gamblers sent by Arnold Rothstein came to his room and threatened to harm his wife if he did not cooperate."
The Cincinnati Reds are the champions of the world. There'll be a great deal written about the World Series; there'll be a whole lot of inside stuff that never will be printed. The truth will remain that the team that was the hardest working won. The team which had the ability and individuality was beaten. The fact is, the Series was lost in the first game.
— Hugh Fullerton
There's always some scandal of some kind following some big sporting event like the World Series. These yarns are manufactured out of whole cloth and grow out of bitterness due to losing wagers. I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level, and I would be the first to want information to the contrary. I would give $20,000 to anyone unearthing any information to that effect.Sept 1920; Eight players are indicted by a grand jury. Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson give sworn confessions. All are suspended, ending the White Sox' 1920 pennant bid. Rothstein is exonerated of any blame.
— Charles A. Comiskey
October 7, 1920 — Fix these faces in your memory. These are the White Sox players who committed the astounding and contemptible crime of selling out the baseball world. They will be remembered from now on only for the depths of depravity to which they could sink.Nov 1920; The owners dissolve the old national commission that oversaw the game and replace it with a single independent Commissioner, vested with extraordinary powers, and appoint to the post Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge "with a reputation for willful independence equaled only by his flair for self promotion".
— The Sporting News
Professional baseball is in a bad way, not so much because of the Chicago scandal, as because that scandal has provoked it to bringing up all the rumors and suspicions of years past. The general effect is to wrinkle the noses of fans, who will quit going to ball games if they get the impression that this sort of thing has been going on underground for years.
— New York Times
"Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was brought in as an authority figure — certainly looked the part, with his great granite face, shock of white hair; looked like Jupiter in a very bad mood."Mar 1921; Landis places all eight players on the ineligible list for the 1921 season.
— George Will
Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy. It is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more: You have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis
"Will Rogers used to say that, You know, they needed a commissioner and they looked down the first base line and there was this old guy who was always sitting there so they decided to give him the job. The real reason they gave him the job is that he had found exactly what the owners wanted him to find in an antitrust lawsuit when he was a sitting federal judge, with the Federal League. But he surprised them. He ran the game as an absolute autocrat, but in terms of being beyond reach and beyond reproach and doing what he thought was right for the game, he did what one could say could never be done in baseball and hasn't been done since: He could make the owners follow him."
— Daniel Okrent
"Judge Landis is considered the savior of baseball by many people. I think he was what the political people considered him, which was a showboat judge. He's the kind of guy who gets a lot of headlines and then all his decisions are overturned. And he found the perfect place, which was in baseball where they said, There is no overturning your decision, you're the absolute commissioner for life, we can't fire you, you are the final word."
— John Sayles
Aug 1921; All eight players are acquitted of conspiracy charges by a jury after the transcripts of Cicotte's and Jackson's confessions mysteriously vanish from the court file. Commissioner Landis immediately bans the eight men for life.
Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis
"Had he any sense of the consequences there's no way that he would have taken part in that. But I don't think that anyone could guess that a man as basically simple as Jackson could've known, really, what it meant, what he was doing. His livelihood was taken away after the 1920 season and with it really his life. He lived another thirty years but not very happily."
— Daniel Okrent
"Joe Jackson played outlaw baseball in south Georgia for a time, then ran a liquor store in Greenville, South Carolina. Ty Cobb once came in for a fifth of bourbon. Jackson did not seem to recognize his old rival. Cobb finally asked, Don't you know me, Joe? Sure, I know you, Ty, Jackson answered, I just didn't think anyone I used to know up there wanted to recognize me again."
"Arnold Rothstein moved on to bootlegging, drug peddling and labor racketeering, and was eventually shot to death by a rival gambler whom he had accused of fixing a poker game."
A game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics.
— William Howard Taft, 1910
