Notes #425 — More Puzzle Pieces Found!

                             NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
                                           Observations from Outside the Lines
                                     By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
 

#425                                                                                                           NOVEMBER 19, 2007
                                                MORE PUZZLE PIECES FOUND!
 

            I hardly ever use an exclamation point in my titles of NOTES , but this one deserves it. Within the past week, a reporter on the Chicago Tribune , James Janega, contacted the Cooperstown library. It seems that someone in Chicago is putting up for auction, a collection of documents. Many of them appear to be related to the “Black Sox,” and Janega was looking for some help identifying them. It’s not as if the documents were written in Sanskrit or hieroglyphics, requiring a translator. But the more I learned about them, first via e-mail and then in a conversation with Mr Janega, the more it seemed that they did need to be read by someone who had a working knowledge of “the B-Sox puzzle.”
 

            The puzzle image is one that has always seemed to fit best. For decades, the pieces were scattered, ignored, forgotten or maybe intentionally buried, as Baseball tried putting its worst nightmare out of mind. Eliot Asinof, four decades later, brought together as many as he could locate, and gave us a rough sketch of the big picture with Eight Men Out . There is now the same distance between the present and 8MO , as between 8MO and the 1919 Series — 44 years. But only in the last five years, I think, have more puzzle pieces started turning up, mostly because more people are looking in the right places.
 

            And now, out of Chicago, come a starling new find. It is too soon to say whether any of the pieces in the collection will cause us to change our minds about anything. But we can hope, and perhaps we will not need to wait too long. The collection will be sold (the current owner is fittingly anonymous), in December; but keep your fingers crossed, there seems to be a good chance that copies of all the material will be forwarded to the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, AKA my backyard. If this happens, it will be proof that there is a God in B-Sox heaven.
 

            Meanwhile, I have been privileged to get a sneak preview, of selected, random items. I’m going to run through them below, with just a brief commentary. Maybe I’ll have more in the next issue or two of Notes , but if the full collection really is coming soon to a library near me, then I’ll hold off, and do the thorough job of reading and thinking and researching and collaborating, that this find deserves.
 

            There is more to this issue, I’m just putting the highlight up front where it’s easy to find. But if you keep on reading, you will find an essay or two (or three), a little more on Grantland Rice, another (short) review of Burying , and a hint of a review of Montville’s The Big Bam . I think all those pieces fit together nicely, by the way, and with Barry Bonds bringing the word “indictment” into our Hot Stove talk, it seems that we are again back in the days of Shoeless Joe. How great it would be to Fast Forward about 44 years, to see how the Eliot Asinof of 2051 has written the book on “the steroid era.”  One thing is certain, it will not be the first book. Nightmares sell these days. Yet it seems like the same old story. Anyway, exciting times!
 

                                       An Informal, Partial List of the Documents
                                           To Be Auctioned Off Soon in Chicago
                                                            Starting Bid: $5,000
 

            September 4, 1919.Comiskey, Frazee and Ruppert call a special meeting of the AL Board of Directors to consider the statements by Ban Johnson, that suggest gambling exists to the menace of baseball , and a good purging is needed. Wow!
 

            November 14, 1919. Report of detective Hunter from Milwaukee, where he is looking for information about Happy Felsch — to Alfred Austrian. He is also looking for Happy, who is off hunting. The letter is empty — but look at the date. And he reports to Austrian , not Comiskey, who is telling the public he has confidence in his players.
 

            September 28, 1920. Synopsis of Eddie Cicotte’s grand jury statement. This meshes with the statements read to Cicotte when he was deposed in January 1924 for the Milwaukee trial. Other statements from Eddie are in the collection, in what looks like Austrian’s typed notes. Nothing too startling, but in one list of comments, Cicotte says that when he returned to Chicago after Game Two, he went to his sister’s at 3909 Grand Boulevard. “Her name is Henrietta D. Kelly” — the mystery woman . Has anyone ever seen Mrs Kelly identified anywhere as Cicotte’s sister? I thought she was his landlady. I also have a couple pages of handwritten notes — Austrian’s? — from Cicotte’s meeting with Austrian, it looks like. “Pitched first game / tried to walk Rath — hit him / Risberg stumbled / Pitched 2nd game / Would have won anyway if he could [the line is struck out] / Couldn’t sleep / Felsch in room / Conf? at Sinton / Risberg Felsch & Cicotte.”  The jottings line up with the statement Cicotte gave to the grand jury.
 

            September 29, 1920. Lefty Williams STATEMENT . My take is that Williams was questioned by Austrian, signed the statement (it is in Q & A form), then went with it and probably read it to the grand jury. The eight pages I have contain familiar information. Like Jackson, Lefty said he was promised $20,000 but had to settle for $5,000; he says he delivered $5,000 to Jackson, after the fourth game — the last time he spoke with Gandil. He didn’t know if Game Three was fixed or not but Gandil told him after Game Four that the gamblers had called it off. Lefty appears almost a fuzzy about things as Jackson, even though he was at meetings, while Jackson was not. “You took care of him [Jackson], is that the idea?” Lefty was asked. His reply: “He made the remark whatever he done would be agreeable with him.” 
 

            October 25, 1920.Letter from Albert Lasker — remember the Lasker Plan? — to Cubs’ president William Veeck. There are quite a few more documents related to the transition from the National Commission, to the one-man-rule of the Commissioner.
 

            October 26, 1920. Harry G. Redman before the Cook County Grand Jury. Asinof, and hence most sources, have it Redmon , but this legal document has it man . It’s definitely the same fellow, and the three pages of this document raises the hope that not all of the grand jury material that went missing in the deep Chicago winter of 1919-20 was forever buried or shredded. The snippet I have has Redman fingering Pesch, the Levy brothers, Abe Attell, and Nick the Greek. Harry is asked about Game Two: “What Jews were in on that bet?” Redman says he lost $3,500.
 

            Joe Jacksonon the witness stand, 1921 Trial . I’ve seen pages 561-564, but these are the first transcript pages I’ve ever seen from the 1921 trial. In Bleeding Between the Lines , where Asinof describes his search for any trace of the trial, forty years after it happened, he was “laughed at by the clerk” in the courthouse and told that the transcript no longer existed. Eight Men Out drew on accounts that appeared in the newspapers; some, like the NY Times , filled their pages with long columns of Q’s and A’s. But to think that material from that trial may exist has seemed impossible. Yet I have now read part of Joe Jackson’s version of his fateful session with Alfred Austrian, before he went to the grand jury. As he sat with Austrian and Gleason, he was asked if he knew that he was indicted, or was about to be. “I said, No, I didn’t know it, though I knew there were some scandal.” Gleason then takes an envelope from his pocket, gives it to Jackson and says “I am going to get out of here,” and leaves. The envelope contains — Austrian reads it to him — his suspension from the Sox and his final paycheck. Austrian tells Jackson that he needs a lawyer “damn bad” and Jackson starts to leave, to find himself a lawyer. But Austrian says, “‘Just sit down there a minute,’ and he walked between me and the door.” Then he calls McDonald. Jackson has nothing to tell him. He wants a lawyer, he wants Austrian to find him one, he says he would pay for a lawyer. Austrian seems to want Jackson to stay put, until he knows what Jackson will say, what he has to say. Jackson (and it seems he refers to Austrian, nit McDonald): “Well, I told him I would tell him what little I had heard about it.”  The pages I have run out there — cliffhanger!
 

            July 5, 1922. Letter from detective J.R. Hunter to Alfred Austrian, four pages, describing a meeting with Eddie Cicotte in Detroit. Comiskey’s legal team is recruiting Cicotte for the battle with Ray Cannon, the lawyer trying to win back pay and damages for Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, and Joe Jackson. Cicotte seems agreeable to give a statement that will be helpful, but he asks that his own lawyer and friend, Daniel Cassidy, be brought in. Cicotte is so strikingly contrite and cooperative, that you would think he owed Comiskey a $10,000 bonus that went unpaid. I will definitely return to this letter, although in the end it is Hunter’s words, not Eddie’s, and I sense that Hunter may be telling Austrian what he wants to hear — I base that on the statements Cicotte actually gave, when he was deposed (twice).
 

            April 9, 1923. Notes on Kate Jackson’s deposition . I’m guessing at the date, I got that from the deposition. The document I have is just a page or two of notes, handwritten, and I’m starting to recognize it as the hand of Austrian, but that is not certain. My best guess at the content is below — the writing is sloppy and shorthand. Nothing new from Kate in the notes.
 

            But a second page, to the left — more notes — is very interesting. It’s not clear who is answering the questions — Kate? Joe? And who are they talking about? Harry Grabiner? Tell me if this is not intriguing:  Q: “And did mention Jackson’s name?” A: “And he mentioned Jackson’s name.” Q: What did he say about it, if anything?” A: “Well, he told me that he knew that Gandil got money, and he knew Cicotte got money, and he knew that Williams got money, and he knew that Williams gave Jackson money .” (The italics were underlined.) “And I told him that was something new to me, I never knew nothing about it — and I told him right then and there that I wasn’t absolutely in anything to throw a game.” Again, that’s my best guess at the content. This begs for the pages before and after. But the not ends there, except for one more fragment, under a drawn line: “no letter to or from Club.” 
 

            Agonizingly — that’s all, folks. All I’ve seen so far. In a perfect world, I would be whisked away to Chicago, to join other B-Sox addicts or scholars (take your pick), like Bob Hoie. We would be chained to tables until we have deciphered all we can, then forced to write about it. Suddenly, the opening asking price for the collection is $5,000,000 instead of $5,000, and we are forced to accept a small stipend for our work. Shucks, OK , I say in my best Joe Jackson drawl. JUST KIDDING!  Anyway, there you have it for now. Enjoy your thanksgiving !
 

 

WHERE THE MONEY IS  
 

            Asked why he robbed banks, so the story goes, Willie Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”  The saying might become a baseball cliche someday, too, if it isn’t one already, one that players can use when they ask why they want to play in New York.
 

            Can we blame Babe Ruth?  Apparently the Babe at first resisted the move to New York, when Boston told him he had been traded. He had grown up in Baltimore, was familiar with Boston and New England. Ruth was getting paid a cool ten thousand a year at the time, but knew he was worth a lot more than that. Boston couldn’t, or wouldn’t pay him more. New York could, and would, and his salary kept rising in pace with the Yankees’ gate receipts. Ruth made the Yankees not just the team to beat for the AL pennant, on a regular basis, but the team to watch. The team became the setting for baseball’s prize jewel, whose face became more recognizable than the president’s. Thanks to New York, with its eighteen newspapers, some read all over the country. Movies and radio would help, too, but it seems that the making of Babe Ruth, the national icon and superstar, was done more by print.
 

            Can we blame a later George, Mr Steinbrenner?  His picture must rest beside the beds of every agent and every player ready to become a free agent. Let the Statue of Liberty say Send us your poor , the Yankees would say Send us your talent and we will make them wealthy . Catfish, Reggie, and so on, down to the Rocket and A-Rod. And now, A-Rod again. It’s still the same old story, New York is where the BIG money is . Luxury tax be damned, the Yankee payroll is borderline obscene, unquestionably insane.
 

            Don’t misunderstand — I support free agency, and am not at all arguing that the Reserve Clause was a great idea. When the age of free agency first dawned on baseball, many people believed that it was nothing but trouble for teams with lower incomes, due to being in smaller markets, with far less income than the teams in New York, Chicago and L.A., the cities that supported two or more teams, once upon a time. That was before the megabucks from cable TV, of course. Since then, the Haves and Have-less teams are, I believe, separated by an even greater difference in income.
 

            That baseball’s economics are out of whack is not news. I think discussion of that problem peaked here in Notes a long time ago, during the Selig Strike of 1994-95, and its aftermath. I really try to avoid the subject. Give me something brighter — like the Black Sox!
 

            Any discussion of this should begin, I think, by comparing the salaries in MLB to those of our teachers, asking the question along the way, Who is more important to our kids, our future?   If anyone answers, “The ballplayers” — they need more education.
 

            What prompts this binge of what seems like aimless criticism, is the annual discussion of where this year’s crop of free agents will end up. As a Pirate fan, I can afford to drop out of this conversation altogether, and usually do. But this year, the A-Rod headlines, the Barry Bonds (before the indictment) headlines, got my attention. And all I want to say is this: When the best players in the game can only play for a few teams, because only a few can afford them — that’s a problem . I started off talking about Ruth, to show it’s not exactly a new problem, but everyone today makes lots more than Ruth did, even adjusted for inflation.
 

            When the draft come around each year — and that’s an institution I do not like at all (it survives because it benefits both the teams, and the prospects, inflating their first salaries in MLB) — it’s the same thing: When the best players can only be drafted by a few teams, who can afford to pay them what they can demand, that’s a problem .
 

            When the top players from Japan — and eventually, from Australia, Cuba, and other countries — insist on playing for only the few teams who are paying top dollar — that’s a problem .
 

            By the way, I’m a Joe Torre fan, but choked a little when I learned he left the Yankees because they insulted him with an offer of only five million a year, with more in incentives. Hey, I can do that job for HALF of that!   And how obscene it is when the Yankees squeeze him out of a job after he only gets them into the playoffs, but not the Series? If he took the Pirates that far last year, he’d be Mayor of Pittsburgh. Are the Yankees just not aware of the starving children in Asia — I mean, the starving fans in Pittsburgh? The next time my team hits the .500 mark there will be dancing in the streets.
 

            And that’s a problem, too.
 

            If I was asked, as the new Commish, which would be the thing to do, to most improve baseball: (a) Start the World Series games earlier, so the whole country can watch them end; or (b) change the revenue sharing in baseball so the teams split the proceeds of each game, 50/50 — including cable money?  That would be a tough choice. Much as I want the WS games to start earlier — it is more important, I think, to get the budgets of every team to better resemble each other. So every team can afford to bid for the top free agents, to sign the top draft choices, and so the best foreign players really have to shop around, when they come to America, the Land of Opportunity, but not Equal Opportunity, not in baseball.
 

            If it looks like I’m picking on baseball — well, that’s just because it’s all I write about. I know other sports are out of whack, too. So is entertainment, I think — look at what you pay for Broadway plays or concert tickets. I think theater and music should be in the price range of everyone. Again, not much new here. But my sense is that things are getting worse .
 

 

ANOTHER REVIEW  
 

This one is from RICHARD MILLER, in Sports Collector’s Digest :
 

Most baseball fans know about the Black Sox Scandal ‑ when gamblers and Chicago White Sox players conspired to “fix” the 1919 World Series. But it was almost another year before any charges were brought against the players. Gene Carney has long been fascinated by what happened during the post‑scandal year, and now he shares his search for answers in Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover‑Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. 
 

Carney’s research uncovered documents not known when previous books on the subject were written. He explored how Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, and fellow owners tried to bury the incident and control the damage ‑ and why they failed in their cover‑up. The result is a significantly better understanding of the “fix” and its aftermath.
 

            I’m not so sure I agree with that lead sentence. There is a higher percentage within SABR who have “guilty knowledge,” that SOMETHING happened in October 1919. But when I talk with random groups of baseball fans, eg, at historical societies, I find that many are not informed, and have not see or read “Eight Men Out.” Well, public education is hard, and takes a LONG time.
 

 

A LITTLE MORE RICE  
 

            Last issue, I commented on a column written by the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice, soon after the B-Sox scandal broke, in Fall 1920. The mention of Rice drew a number of responses from Notes readers.
 

            First I thank Steve McPherson for passing on more Rice material from the 1993 biography by Charles Fountain, Sportswriter . Fountain devotes about twelve pages to the Black Sox.  He finishes with this:
 

“I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach,” was all he [Rice] could bring himself to say about it in his memoir.  A complimentary insight into just how much it hurt, perhaps, comes from the following thought expressed a month after the scandal broke in 1920, in a reflective interlude after he had spent much of his anger, and before he tried to forget and move on:  “Sometimes we wonder if, after all, is there very much sport that is real sport beyond the amateurs.  The rest may be called competition, or amusement, but just how much of it is sport?”
 
            Steve Klein: “Grantland Rice moved from Nashville to NYC [where the money is] and the NY Evening Mail in 1910 for $50 a week … Rice was to become a sports writing collosus there.” Steve recommends William Harper’s How You Played the Game: The Life of Grantland Rice , and its chapter 11, “Who’ll Cop the Series.”    Harper writes on page 270:
 

Rice knew there were always dark rumors circulating around Big Events, especially where the gambling was heavy. He rarely took such rumors seriously. But this time he almost seemed to forewarn his readers that something odd might happen in this World Series. … In reading Rice’s coverage of the 1919 series today, it is possible in hindsight to read into his reporting a cautious disbelief that this was an honest contest. But nowhere did he explicitly say anything to the effect that the White Sox might be in the tank, nor did he even imply that any of the players intentionally played as badly as they actually did play.
 

            Steve again: The key word there, of course, is “explicitly.” Rice himself wrote: “The plastic dope can only show what they ought to do if they give 100 per cent of what they have.” In the dead ball era, Fullerton believed in that dope, of course; he lived and died by it. Rice was not a dopester. He was a lyricist.
Harper writes:
 

Whatever Rice may have privately believed ‑‑ or not wanted to believe ‑‑ about the series, he publicly held the line that this was a bona fide, explainable sporting upset, the Reds playing above themselves, the Sox below.
 

            According to Steve Klein, the column I cited in Notes last week, which appeared in the Utica Observer on October 14, had first appeared on September 29, 1920, in the NY Tribune . There’s another column in that paper (October 14) in which Rice writes that the owners had “no vision beyond the box office” and that instead of leading the investigation, Comiskey frustrated it.        Harper concludes:
 

Rice did his best to help the American public recover from the aftershocks of the 1919 scandal. The ever‑upbeat sportwriter knew that the sport of baseball was and would continue to be populated by characterless characters, but he also knew that the great majority of players were good and honest people who cared deeply about the game.
 

            Klein: “Bottom line: This was not Rice’s proudest moment. It was a rather typical moment. He was no muckraker, like Fullerton. He was no Fullerton. And as such, he survived the scandal. Fullerton, of course, didn’t. Fullerton was seven years older than Rice (46 to 39 in 1919) and one of the older writers in the pressbox. His time was passing. Doping was no longer viable in the live‑ball era. Fullerton ended up moving on to other things.”
 

            Finally, I thank T. Kent Morgan for pulling out his copy of Rice’s memoirs, The Tumult and the Shouting , where Rice makes just that brief reference to the Black Sox. He writes that he was covering the series with Ring Lardner, Jack Wheeler, Runyon and the rest of the New York crowd. Here is a snippet:
 

“Champ” Pickens, organizer of the Blue anf Gold football game in Montgomery, Alabama, years later, was in our party. The eve of the first game in Cincinnati, “Champ” walked into my room and said, “I’ve just been offered five to four on Cincinnati by a professional gambler.”
 

“How much of it did you take?” I asked.
 

“Take, hell! This Series is fixed,” replied Pickens, tossing his ticket on the bed. “You can have it‑I’m going to the race track.”
 

            Rice goes on to write that he was sitting next to Lardner when he started pounding his typewriter furiously and humming I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles , which he changed to I’m forever blowing ball games .
 

            As I mentioned in Burying the Black Sox , the parody of Bubbles (which has resurfaced this year in a TV commercial) was a group production, with Lardner surely in the middle. He gets the credit for it today thanks to John Sayles’ film of Eight Men Out . But it was a team effort, and also seemed to be sung at different times and places. The parody’s assertion that The gambler treat us fair was, however, off the mark.
 

            The song fits right into the B-Sox story, as “evidence” that the Fix was not a well-kept secret. Lardner, Fullerton, the co-authors of the parody (Tiny Maxwell, Nick Flatley and James Crusinberry), and many other reporters had “guilty knowledge” before Judge Landis made that phrase famous. The word “cover-up” was not in use back then, but Collyer’s Eye liked the word “suppression” for the actions of Baseball and the mainstream press editors. It was a tough time to be a sportswriter with a conscience.
 

            When reporters looked back — whether from the short distance of 1920, after the cover-up ended, or from the end of their writing careers — few were proud of themselves or their employers. Some, like Westbrook Pegler, were harsh in their self-criticism. Baseball — which meant Kenesaw Mountain Landis until his death in 1944 — never did acknowledge that it was part of the problem. Did it? No, it never even investigated the leads turned up by the Cook County grand jury. Baseball hired Landis to clean up its image , and Landis expelled just the minimum number of players to satisfy the public, and his employers, the magnates. Gambling did not go away, and there would be later scandals, but the fatal bullets had been dodged successfully.
 

            Grantland Rice— we started with him — went on from 1919 to make famous the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. The college’s backfield is pictured in Sportswriter , wearing their helmets and winter coats, and perched on real horses. They look uncomfortable to me — the players, that is. Perhaps they are bracing, because who knew what the horses would do when the cameraman flashed? Rice also named Red Grange “The Galloping Ghost,” a nickname he might have used in 1919 for Bill Burns, but he was already “Sleepy Bill.” And Rice gave us “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” — a phrase that Joe Jackson’s lawyer might have found handy. In the last maxim, Rice referred to the One Great Scorer (Jackson had confidence in that Umpire, too). Rice often wrote poetry in his columns — parodies of Casey at the Bat , poems celebrating the athletes who roared in the “Golden Age” of sport, one ( Game Called ) catching the meaning of Babe Ruth when the Bambino died. He was a “Gee whiz” writer and that was OK, he enriched our language and our minds with his images. Rice could never be claimed by baseball, or by any of the other sports he covered. But he’s remembered today by them all.
 

 

NO HEROES THIS TIME, EITHER  
 

            In the Black Sox story, there are no real heroes. You could make a case for Hugh Fullerton, but his loyalty to Charles Comiskey muted his whistle-blowing somewhat, and his loyalty to baseball, made him move on from his singular campaign, as 1919 ended. Loyalty to baseball — the business more than the sport — was no doubt a factor for others who might have been heroes — magnates, players, and the newsmen. Bert Collyer and his Eye staff did their best, but lacked the clout to end the cover-up by themselves. Baseball’s darkest hour, indeed.
 

            In the contemporary dark hour of baseball, a time which has not yet gone down in history, but which seems destined to be called “the steroid era,” it appears that we are short on heroes again. In many ways, the analogies and comparisons between today, and “the gambling era” (the B-Sox event was the tip of a strangling iceberg), all fail. Taking bribes to lose is not taking substances to win. And the substances themselves were not always banned or illegal, not in baseball. Both eras are shrouded in fog and murkiness … we know of a handful of villains, but we suspect that many more have gone undetected. Some may even be enshrined in Cooperstown, or are on their way. Law enforcement personnel and politicians with their own agendas became involved, then and now, clouding the issues further. Shoeless Joe Jackson, thanks to a story that is almost certainly apocryphal — but powerfully symbolic — “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” — came to personify the “Black Sox scandal.” Today, “the steroid era” seems to be personified by Barry Bonds.
 

            The indictment of Bonds, on the other side of his historic achievements, will seem to some to have come too late. Why couldn’t they have done it sooner, to preserve Hank’s 755? To others, that it has come at all, seems like selective persecution of an athlete who presents an easy target. Stack up Barry Bonds’ off-the-field activities with those of Babe Ruth, and any jury on the planet would, I think, conclude that Bonds led a far cleaner life. Well, that’s almost too easy, because probably 99% of all Americans led a cleaner life than Ruth. But America forgave Ruth his excesses, even when they hurt his health, and his team (when he was suspended and out of the lineup). With Bonds, the media of America has been — in my view — exceptionally unforgiving. To repeat, Bonds has made himself an easy target, by failing to deal with the media as they expect or demand. When Ruth was a jerk, he was loveable; when Barry was a jerk, he was more hated.
 

            There may be a race card in play — there certainly was when Hank Aaron was chasing Ruth. (Barry ought to be thankful that Hank caught and passed the Bambino — if it had been Barry, the media might have been even rougher than they were.)  I don’t know if the country is split on Bonds like we were on O.J. Simpson — has anyone seen a poll on that?  Because of Bonds’ acceptance by many white fans, and not just in San Francisco, I’d like to think that race is a minor factor, compared to Bonds’ personality — not his actual personality, of course, but the one served up by the media. (Again, for the record, I know “the media” is an awful word to use, it lumps everyone together, when we know that the cable channels, the radio channels, and the newspapers all run from left to right along a broad spectrum. “Media” is my shorthand for the combined image that all those media produce.)
 

            No heroes today?  What about those gallant SF Chronicle reporters who gave us Game of Shadows ?  They re-surfaced after the indictment, looking like heroes. But they were indicted themselves, weren’t they, for refusing to divulge the sources of their information?  That is noble — but publicizing and amplifying and profiting from leaked grand jury testimony is not. In 1920, when the grand jury material was stolen, and someone tried to sell it to a newspaper, the justice system came down very hard to prevent that. We’ve come a long way since then. But whatever is said to a grand jury is confidential. (I like to point out that what was leaked about Jackson’s testimony to the Cook County grand jury, turned out to be not in there , not in the transcripts we have, anyway. As for Barry’s — who knows?)
 

            The Bonds’ indictment is not, of course, for doing anything illegal, it’s for perjury, and one count of obstructing justice (which could be an action, or just something he said). That is, there are discrepancies between something he said to the grand jury (without his lawyer present, I believe) and something he said elsewhere — or something that others have said. It looks like it comes down to this: Did Bonds know exactly what he was taking, or was he blindly (and foolishly) following the instructions of his trainer and others?  The government — not baseball — says it can prove perjury. We’ll see. Again, I think of Joe Jackson, ambushed at his 1924 trial in Milwaukee, where he was suing the White Sox for back pay. Ambushed by the appearance of his 1920 grand jury statement, a document kept away from Jackson’s lawyer in the years that preceded the trial. A document pulled like a magician’s rabbit out of the briefcase of Comiskey’s lawyer. Guilty of perjury , said Judge Thompson, and that’s all he needed to say … it didn’t matter whether Jackson committed the infraction in 1920 or 1924, his stories didn’t mesh enough to suit the court. Perjury , and then he threw out the jury decision, which had gone 11-1 in Jackson’s favor on every one of the ten items in the special verdict.
 

            The Bonds’ case probably will not hinge on anything Bonds himself said that contradicted his grand jury statement. It will likely be a question of lining up statements from others, against what Barry said. If there is a trial, what will be put on trial is the credibility of Barry Bonds. Did he lie under oath? Will the trial echo the Charence Thomas confirmation hearings? Thomas was a black man, headed for the Supreme Court, ambushed by charges of sexual harassment, when those words were still fairly new to our ears, and not very defined. All appointments to the Supreme Court are politically charged, nothing new there, but all of a sudden, he said, she said, but he said, but she said.
 

            Clarence Thomas was teetering at the beginning of a career in our country’s most important court. Barry Bonds’ career is just about over, although I hope not. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Barry’s case was appealed all the way to the top, and Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote on Barry’s credibility?
 

            Sometimes what is invisible in the media coverage of an event is the most important thing. In 1919 and the years that followed, baseball management — managers, coaches, other team staff, and the magnates themselves — were not punished in any way for their role in the problems baseball suffered from the gambling menace. Eight men out … the Black Sox scandal … the focus was kept squarely on the players, the employees, and on as few as possible … a true housecleaning might have crippled every team, sunk the game … the business. No need to look above the players, to ask who else had guilty knowledge, bet on games, did anything shady to hurt baseball. Eight men out , all you need to know, let’s move on, nothing else to see here.
 

            Are we really being asked to believe today, that “the steroid era” can be summed up in a few players?  Or in just one, Barry Bonds?  How absurd, to imagine that no one else was involved — players, coaches, trainers, doctors, managers, general managers, owners, and maybe even Commissioners. No, of course Bud Selig didn’t inject himself — but didn’t he stand proudly beside Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, as they made fans forget the Strike that Selig could have tried much harder to avoid?  Didn’t all the owners cheer as sluggers — like Bonds — filled their new ballparks with homer-happy fans?  When they all looked the other way, they were not just closing their eyes to the swelled muscles and other telltale signs of chemical assistance; they were staring wide-eyed at the bottom line, at the profits from increased TV ratings and revenue, from swelled attendance and concessions, from the rebound of baseball to new heights.
 

            For Selig and the rest of baseball, down to the managers and all the players who have never tested positive, to distance themselves now from Bonds, and from all who may be indicted in coming months — seems hypocritical to me. Gambling was in bed with baseball, all of baseball. It took decades, really, for baseball to sever the ties and put that safely in the past. “The steroid era” tainted baseball, too — all of baseball. Is it over? We aren’t sure, we know that substances can be designed to beat screenings, that this is an old game, where the designers are usually a step ahead. Game of Shadows taught us that much, taught us that it’s not just baseball , either, it’s all professional sports, and the Olympics, and it’s a battle that has raged for decades. We just didn’t want to know. It was the East German problem, the track and field problem, Lyle Alzado’s problem. Somebody else’s.
 

            Indict Barry Bonds, try to end an era. Good luck. I don’t see any heroes in this story, except maybe the health professionals who have finally been heard about the dangers of ingesting the stuff that really needs to be banned, controlled. The stuff that athletes take to build bodies, and dreams. The stuff of nightmares, too.
 

            Starting to write my next B-Sox book, I drifted onto this topic in the introduction. I’ll end this essay with a snippet:
 

To make things even more interesting, those who revisit 1919 to help us understand the present, run into not just the gambling plague. They also discover Prohibition, a national push to restrict the sale and manufacturing of alcoholic beverages. The country had wrestled with this issue since before the Civil War, finally passing a food-control bill in 1917, and phasing it in over the next several years. The Volstead Act and the 18th Amendment followed in 1919 and 1920 respectively. Perhaps it is more instructive to study the decade that followed, until the repeal of Prohibition, than to look at gambling. The country at war with itself over what can be legally ingested? Say it ain’t so! But it happened, and we can look it up.
 

 

DEAR MR ANDERSON — AGAIN  
 

            When the White Sox reached the World Series in 2005, they stirred up the thick layer of dust that had settled over the 1919 Series, as it had not been stirred since 1959. Burying the Black Sox was a wrap, and I had written a brief Epilog that could be tacked on, if the Sox won. They did, and it was. I spent some time that October talking to reporters, who wanted a crash course on 1919. I also spent some time replying to much misinformation that showed up in places like the Chicago Tribune and the NY Times . You can look up my open letters to Mike Downey and Dave Anderson in Notes #362 .
 

            Anderson was at it again on November 18, his Times piece on Barry Bonds bringing up the “Black Sox” again. He was more accurate this time — maybe my letter from 2005 actually made it all the way to him. If it did, he never replied. Anyway, having just written the essay above on Barry & the B-Sox, I dropped Mr Anderson another letter. Here it is.
 

                                                                        * * * * *
Mr Anderson,
 
In response to your column today on Barry Bonds and the “Black Sox” ‑‑ I’m less sure of what “the truth” is than you seem to be, but I’ve done a lot of research on the events of October 1919 and the aftermath of what went down in history as “the Black Sox scandal.”  If Baseball responds to the steroid issue the way they did to the gambling issue, the truth will not see the light of day, at least not for a long time. Focus will be kept on the players who confess or who are implicated ‑‑ as few as possible will be punished. There will be no punishment for the other players who knew what was happening, or who may have done worse deeds; no punishment for coaches, trainers, managers, GMs, or owners, who knew and looked away. No punishment for the men whose job is simply to keep the sport clean and honest ‑‑ the National Commission in 1919, Bud Selig today.
 
            Maybe the whole event will be summed up in the banishment of a superstar left fielder with Cooperstown credentials. Cue the urchin, tugging at Barry Bonds’ sleeve, “Say it ain’t so.”  What does it matter if it never really happened?  Never mind that what was leaked after Jackson talked to the grand jury, did not match the transcript of what he actually said.  Eight men out , that’s all you need to know.  He said he played to win? Who cares?
 
            The Sox players who were indicted were acquitted of conspiracy. (The missing grand jury statements were recreated from notes and admitted in the 1921 trial.)  The truth was, there was no law prohibiting the tossing of games. Nor was there a rule about mixing with known gamblers ‑‑ Landis’ edict came in 1921. The truth was that the Sox players who plotted to toss the Series in 1919 ‑‑ then were double‑crossed as they double‑crossed others ‑‑ knew that Baseball knew what they were doing, but would not call a halt to investigate, not with record gate receipts on deck. Baseball would also fight to keep the rumors quiet after the Series, and another whole season would pass before a grand jury ‑‑ not Baseball ‑‑ dug out the facts. The truth was that gambling had been strangling baseball a long time.  And the installation of Landis as Commish did not end the bribery attempts, it just made Baseball look better, safer, cleaner. Honest.
 
            Babe Ruth’s heroics had started making fans forget about “the Black Sox” before the scandal even broke.  The media of his day, the newspapers, covered up his off‑the‑field excesses with zeal. How about a column comparing Bonds and Ruth ‑‑ which led a cleaner life?  (Don’t forget the Prohibition factor.)  The truth is, the whole truth never is known.
 

 

THE BAMBINO IN THE SHADOWS  
 

            Babe Ruth has shown up a lot in the issue and the last couple, because I am reading Leigh Montville’s 2006 book, The Big Bam . I contacted Montville as part of that search to identify the picture of Ruth with his first pro catcher, local ballplayer Ben Egan. After a few exchanges, we wound up swapping our books.
 

            To be honest, I had not expected to enjoy The Big Bam as much as I am. When I saw it hit the bookstores, my reaction was Do we need yet another book on Ruth?   But Montville has managed to make you feel like you are reading the best of all the other biographies, while still reading a brand new book. Of course, it has been so long since I read Creamer’s, that I’m sure that it would seem like a brand new book to me.
 

            In any case, I think any biography that moves through 1919 has a certain fascination for me. Tim Gay’s biography Tris Speaker is a good example, and now Bam . And the chapters covering 1914-1920 in Bam were timely, since I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately in the microfilm from those years. Look for a review of Montville’s book in the near future, but I’ll not wait till then to recommend it.