Notes #480 — On the Trail Again

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

#480                                                                                                                    MARCH 17, 2009
                                           ON THE TRAIL AGAIN
 

            It’s been a while, but this issue has turned out to be 100% B-Sox. And that’s because I have been doing some serious hiking on the B-Sox trail. I never really leave the trail, but I do stop and rest from time to time. But having access to ProQuest , and spending more time at the Cooperstown library, and the setting-in-motion of the B-Sox Research Committee, have all combined to get me digging again.
 

            If you are not in the mood for the B-Sox right now, but prefer something on Opening Day , then I suggest you visit the Notes Archive : #185 — “Why Time Ends on Opening Day” is my reply to the Boswell title; #126 will help you launch into the new season with a boost from Joe DiMaggio; and if it’s seasonal you want, there’s that classic green issue, #125 , “St Patrick Invented Baseball,” a meditation on the game’s Irish roots.
 

            But here, it’s back to 1919 and the years that followed right after that tainted World Series. How tainted was it?   Well, as I say at the end of this issue — we’ll never know. Eddie Cicotte said it was only a tiny bit tainted, just one hit batsman. His voice got lost in the outrage of the press, and Eight Men Out didn’t help Eddie, either. I’ll revisit that some here, but there are some strangers I just met on the trail, too, and they will be introduced.
 

            Last issue, we bumped into Otto Knabe , who ran a successful bookmaking operation in partnership with Kid Gleason — it looks like that’s all Kid did during 1918, before Commy coaxed him back to manage the Sox. This time, it’s Dick Hoblitzell wandering by, possessing “guilty knowledge” long before the scandal broke, and trying to convince Greasy Neale of the Reds that the fix was in. Another path to explore. And did any of the Sox players talk about the 1919 Series, when they went home for the winter?  If not, they surely said something to their local papers the next winter, after the cover-up had ended. If you want to join the search for clues — pretend it’s an Easter-egg hunt — I’ve listed the Sox’ hometowns in 1919-20 below. Hey, you never know.
 

            I’ve been peeking under some stones on the trail myself, and report here on a few new findings about Sleepy Bill Burns, one of the more colorful folks who camp regularly on the trail — we bump into him often as we hike along. I’ve also found a bit more on one of the primary trail guides, Hugh Fullerton, and there are some leads below on the nuggets that Hughie might still yield, too.
 

            It looks like we might, just might have a real springtime here in the shadows of Cooperstown. As I process these words, the sun is visible and we are supposed to be in the high 50s tomorrow. No one wants to say we’ve seen the last blizzard — that would surely be a jinx. But we can think about putting away the boots and scarves. And that’s something.
 

 

SHINE ON … AND ON!  
 

            Just a couple issues ago, in Notes #478 , I reported that Eddie Cicotte denied that he ever threw “the shine ball” and that the pitch was never more than an invention of the imagination. I knew he said that to Westbrook Pegler in 1960, but that he also said it in between his two biggest winning seasons, to a Sporting News reporter, in 1918, was news to me.
 

            By chance, I was browsing thru The Reach Guide for 1920 the other day, and found on page 80, among a collection of thumbnail descriptions of all of the AL Champion White Sox players, this note on Eddie:
 

He has been accused time and again of using the “shine ball,” which is nothing more than a myth. Ball after ball has been taken out of the game and brought to the headquarters of the league for examination, and there has never been found any foreign substance on the sphere.
 

            And remember, at the time the Czar of the American League was Ban Johnson — public enemy of Charles Comiskey. So we might assume that any hint of a foreign substance would have been detected. I don’t know how reliable The Reach Guides are for tidbits like this, but this sounds credible to me.
 

 

IF YOU HAVE THE TIME  
 

            The same Reach Guide also gives some personal info on the Sox — a short history of their baseball careers, height & weight, whether married or not — and where they reside. If you think that the players were interviewed back home, after the 1919 Series, and are curious about what they said, here are some leads for you:
 

Eddie Cicotte — Detroit, MI
Claude Williams — Springfield, MO
Dick Kerr — Paris, TX
Urban Faber – Cascade, IA
Grover Loudermilk — Odin, IL
William James — Ann Arbor, MI
J.J. Lefty Sullivan — Chicago, IL
R.H. Wilkinson — Canandaigua, NY (I can look him up!)
J. Erskine Mayer — Philadelphia, PA
Chick Gandil — Chicago (but not in the off-season; try CA)
Eddie Collins — Lansdowne, PA
Buck Weaver — Chicago
Swede Risberg — San Francisco, CA
Fred McMullin — Los Angeles, CA
Hervey McClellan — Cynthiana, KY
Joe Jackson — Savannah, GA
Kid Gleason — Philadelphia, PA
Ray Schalk — Litchfield, IL (check those small papers!)
Byrd Lynn — Unionville, IL
Joe Jenkins — Hanford, CA
Happy Felsch — Milwaukee, WI
John (Shano) Collins — Pittsfield, MA
Harry (Nemo) Leibold — Detroit, MI
Eddie Murphy — Dunmore, PA
 

            Might be even more interesting to look up the interviews they might have given back home after the 1920 season, after the scandal broke.
 

 

EDDIE VS. ELIOT  
 

            When Eliot Asinof visited Eddie Cicotte, as he toured the country looking up surviving members of his 8MO , Eddie Cicotte refused to talk with him. And I’m not sure why, because just a few years before, Eddie talked rather freely with Westbrook Pegler (see Notes #391). Asinof tells the story that at the end of Cicotte’s life, when Eight Men Out had been in print for six years, he changed his mind and called for Asinof, but Eddie passed away before Eliot could get to Detroit.
 

            The 1988 film Eight Men Out has cemented many images into the psyche of the American baseball fan (my wife might quip that we seamheads have no minds at all). I believe these images are buried so deep, that only another film can dislodge them, replacing them with the more nuanced version of things, or just plain correcting the record, based on what we have learned since Asinof called it a wrap with his book. We are now farther in distance from that 1963 book, than the book is from 1919. As Pogo might put it, that’s a mighty soberin’ thought.
 

            Recently I’ve written here about Cicotte’s problem of convincing people — first about his famous “shine ball,” and then about whether he pitched the 1919 Series to win. (See Notes #478 and then above.) The film 8MO takes almost all of its cues from the book (a notable exception, director Sayles moves the “Cicotte bonus” to 1919, from 1917; I think both are phantoms). So what did Asinof write about Cicotte?  I looked it up
 

From the book EIGHT MEN OUT:
 

Lardner lived in Chicago, and as a consequence, his great admiration centered on the White Sox. Among them, his favorite was Eddie Cicotte. Lardner believed him to the finest pitcher around. He liked Cicotte’s cleverness, his artful use of the knuckle ball, the incredibly deceptive “shine ball.”He saw Cicotte as the image of the “little man,” once abused and discarded, then rising above the conventional prejudice of small‑minded baseball owners against lack of size and power. Besides, Cicotte was a colorful character. A funny guy, capable of rare pranks and wisecracks, adept at the hilarious banter of locker rooms and hotel lobbies. He could almost make Lardner laugh.
 

            In the film, John Sayles played Ring Lardner, and expanded, I think, the role that Ring had in both Asinof’s book, and in the B-Sox story. Hugh Fullerton (played by Studs Terkel) had a much more significant role, and perhaps spoke more with Cicotte about the Fix, before and during the Series.
 

            About whether Eddie pitched to win, Asinof clearly believed (as most people do today — thanks to Asinof!) that Eddie earned that $10,000 he found under his pillow. In the 1921 B-Sox trial, he has prosecutor Prindeville sum it up like this:
 

I tell you, at least three of their clients, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, and Joe Jackson have condemned themselves so badly that I don’t see how you can acquit them. In his confession, Eddie Cicotte tells how the games were fixed.
 

            Well, he actually didn’t do that, he said he hit the leadoff Red on purpose, then pitched the rest of the Series to win, Games One, Four and Seven. That was also read into the trial record, and reported. ( ProQuest -ing, I recently found that the Atlanta Constitution of September 30, 1920, in a page two story “More Details By Cicotte and Jackson,” had Eddie’s grand jury tale right — that is, they had it closer to what he said than most other sources: “The first ball I pitched I wondered what the wife and kiddies would say if they ever found out I was a crook. I pitched the best ball I knew how after that first ball. But I lost because I was hit, not because I was throwing the game .” [Emphasis mine])
 

            As it turns out, the person that Eddie failed to convince who hurt him most — as he has gone down in history thus far — was Eliot Asinof. We can only imagine how we all might view Eddie Cicotte differently today, had Eddie convinced Asinof that he pitched to win; had that been in the book, and then portrayed in the movie.
 

            Had they spoken, he might even have convinced Asinof that the “shine ball” was fiction — like much of Eight Men Out .
 

 

 

UNDER-THE-STONES DEPT.  
 

Leave no stone unturned. — Anonymous
 

            As I look back on the last 213 or so issues of NOTES — which I did recently, when I updated the “Annotated B-Sox Index” which is in the “Recent Issues Archive, near the top — I sometimes think that my success on the B-Sox trail was simply a matter of being in the right position. That is, on the internet, and connected to SABR. Near a public library that could find me almost every book and article I requested, and handle inter-library loans of microfilm to boot. Positioned in my life at a time when I had the time, and the momentum of writing baseball habitually. And certainly not least importantly — positioned geographically, living just in the shadows , an hour away from the best friend a baseball researcher can have, the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown.
 

            I must have made between one and two dozen trips there over the last six-plus years, the distance shrinking each time so that although it still takes less than an hour in real time, it seems like much less — especially when I have a good book tape or CD in the car (mine takes both, a double-duty as rare as a doubleheader these days). Of course I rooted thru, early on, all of the folders of all of the players, White Sox and Reds alike, even the fringe guys. (Hmmm … I’m not sure I covered the managers and the umpires — OK, they are now on deck .)
 

            But only in the days since last issue, did I visit the files of a couple B-Sox figures that I had missed: Sleepy Bill Burns, and Billy Maharg. Maharg? Well, he only played in two major league games (and played a part in a few more, October 1919). But anyone who played even one game is “immortalized” in Cooperstown. Well, they have a folder. Sometimes it is empty, or nearly so. But it’s there , like a tombstone. This guy made it to the top.
 

            Bill Burns’ file was interesting, but disappointing — I was expecting more. I chuckled at a faded clipping from the Chicago News of August 11, 1919: “Burnsy” (we call him that because of the film 8MO , of course) was on a train with the Cubs, probably heading east, his usual sales route; “He prefers travel with a ball club, as he knows he can have a lot of entertainment.”
 

            According to his death certificate, Burns never married. But a letter in his file from his younger brother, C.B. Burns, of Richmond, CA, a letter that accompanied a Questionairre returned to Lee Allen at the HOF in February 1961, says that Bill had a wife. She was a Cincinnati girl, and her sister also married a big leaguer. Bill and his wife separated in the late twenties, she returned home. Sadly, his brother is as clueless as the rest of us about the last twenty years of Sleepy Bill’s life. He “lost trace of him.” When he passed, in June 1953, his sister was notified. 
 

            “Sleepy Bill Burns Caught Napping in Series Sell-Out,” goes The Sporting News article’s headline, on October 21, 1920. “Time will tell what and how much Bill Burns, one-time major league pitcher, had to do with cooking up the World’s Series sell-out of 1919.”  Or not. Burns talked, providing a huge piece of the B-Sox puzzle. But I believe his role and therefore his knowledge was limited. He went for broke, betting on Game Three, and lost, and then got lost, until he turned state’s witness for the 1921 trial.
 

            TSN speculated that the crooked players went to Burns. That was suggested by Rube Benton to the grand jury, and by Billy Maharg in his Isaminger interview. TSN had more, from Damon Runyon, who sat with a visitor from Texas at the 1920 Series.
 

            The visitor had heard all about the Fix from Burns. He said Burnsy won $4,000 on the first two games, then lost it all when Dickie Kerr stopped the Reds in Game Three. Joe Jackson had said that the team tried to “kick away” that game on the Busher, but as TSN notes, others claim the Sox played together and hard to win Game Three, because they had not been paid enough.
 

            Using its usual baseballese, TSN reports that “Burns’ friend says Bill went down with a crash. He was out.” Back in Texas, he managed the Mineral Wells team in the little West Texas League — another target for B-Sox miners. Was there a budding Hugh Fullerton in the Lone Star State?  The managing paid a small salary, and Burns was “still wearing the same loud suit of clothes in which he attracted some attention at the World’s Series.”  Burns was still in Texas and “financially flat.”
 

            TSN comments that when Burns dropped out of baseball and returned to Texas, he “‘got into oil,’ as most Texans do, and when one ‘gets into oil,’ he’s likely to lose much of his moral sensibilities.” He later visited Cincinnati where several of the Reds also were deep “into oil.” TSN thought Burns would boast of having made millions on his trips east, from St Louis to New York. Making him an “opportunity” for the White Sox crookeds?
 

Bill, at the season’s close, the dirty work arranged for, went along to the World’s Series games, in Cincinnati and Chicago. He plunged heavily — all he had at least — on the Reds, as was natural for one with his inside dope. But he didn’t seem to keep the secret from anybody. He whispered it loud to friends and sent wires to others that it was to be a “killing,” or something that even would beat the oil game.
 

            For a long look at Sleepy Bill Burns, see Notes #346 , “Those Crazy Oil Men.”  Two paragraphs from that report:
 

Testifying in Milwaukee in 1924, Fullerton said that he heard of the Fix before Game One directly from Sleepy Bill Burns. Christy Mathewson may have heard of the Fix from Burns before the Series, too. They apparently were on the same train from New York to Cincinnati, and as Dewey and Acocella note, Burns had a “lack of discretion with everybody … about fix possibilities.”
 

Here’s what Ban Johnson recalled: “It appeared that Fullerton, traveling between Chicago and Cincinnati during the series, had overheard conversations between one Billy Maharg, an auto salesman, Bill Burns, an old White Sox player, and others. Fullerton, it developed, had heard remarks made by Burns to Mayor John Galvin of Cincinnati about the games being thrown and he had written his story around that.” (Bill Burns testified at the 1921 trial that he had spoken with the mayor of Cincinnati in the smoking compartment of the train he took back from Chicago after Game Five.)
 

            I found a little more on Burns in Al Wolf’s “Sportraits” column in the LA Times , March 14, 1950. Wolf reprinted a letter from Harry Williams, then sec’y of the Pacific Coast League. (Williams was another reporter who took a special interest in the B-Sox.)  Williams recalled Burns pitching on the coast in 1906, and “his record is not available because of chaotic conditions prevailing after the San Francisco earthquake.”
 

Burns had the best move to first base of any pitcher in baseball. He was the last word in lethargy and lassitude, and pursued the path that promised the ultimate in effortless ease. In short, he frequently would purposely walk a batter in order to pick him off first moments later. Bill was the nearest thing to perpetual somnambulism in league history. The great national pastime had on him a lulling or somniferous effect. He was known to fall asleep between innings. In fact, the manager never was sure Bill wasn’t still slumbering when he walked to the mound.
 

            Billy Maharg’s file was not as newsy. He was not “Peaches Graham” — his name was Maharg, just like his father’s. ( Eight Men Out helped perpetuate that mistaken theory, even though toward the end of the book, Asinof cites the court testimony where Maharg clearly denies being Graham.)  Maharg once roomed with Old Pete Alexander, and was his chauffer.
 

 

FULLERTON’S FILE — NOT FULL  
 

            I’ve been in Hugh Fullerton’s HOF folder before, but I wanted to check it again. For the B-Sox Research Committee, I’m going to try to compile a list, with the help of others, of everything Hughie wrote about the Fix.
 

            But his Cooperstown place was not the place to start. Lots of articles by HSF, mostly for magazines, about the inside game of baseball. And lots of articles about HSF, most of them noting his role in uncovering the B-Sox scandal. (Most give him more credit than he deserves, Hughie’s best efforts to get Baseball to investigate were in 1919. No one tried harder than Fullerton to end the cover-up, but in fact, he did not pull it off.)
 

            “Scandal Case Delay Puts Fans in Doubt,” from the Washington Post of March 21, 1921, is the only article in his HOF file that refers to the B-Sox. And its only one of several topics in his column. At the time, the B-Sox trial had been postponed, and HSF accused the owners of fearing a public trial.
 

            Hughie was not crazy about the guys who ran baseball in the early Twenties. An October 20, 1920, article in The New Republic pointed to corruption above the level of the players — something I mention here last issue. He rated the owners incompetent, and among their sins, they “subsidized (consiously or unconsciously) sportswriters to suppress accusations and punish those who demanded an investigation.”  Hughie was speaking from his own experience, having been both subsidized and punished. Hughie was close friends with Comiskey, and seemed to constantly worry, in 1919, that his efforts to blow the whistle on the Fix would cost him that friendship.
 

            I remain hopeful that we will find more from Hughie on 1919. After he left the newspaper business, he spent six years at Liberty magazine, then worked for the Bell syndicate, then went “home” to Ohio, working in 1928 for the Columbus Dispatch , and also for the Philadelphia Inquirer . (His file has lots of obits.) If anyone mining in Columbus is interested, look up an piece by William Lucius Graves, “The Crow’s Nest,” in the Ohio State University Monthly ; I have the date (Feb 27) and page (203) but not the year!
 

            SABR members can look up something on Hughie by Tom Nawrocki, “The Chicago School of Sportswriters,” in The National Pastime, #13 (1993, pp 84-86). I have not seen this (yet), but am familiar with Nawrocki from his contribution on Fullerton to  20th Century American Sportswriters , Volume 171 in The Dictionary of Literary Biography , edited by Richard Orodenker (Gale Research, 1996.) In the same volume, see Paul J. Sandin on Damon Runyon, and Peter Cava on Ring Lardner.
 

 

SCATTERED TIDBITS ON THE TRAIL   
 

            Once the cover-up of the Fix was ended, with Eddie Cicotte’s statement to the grand jury on September 28, 1920, there was a kind of feeding frenzy in the newspapers. Editors were competitive, and everyone wanted a scoop, something that no one else had. This was not always a good thing for today’s readers.
 

            For example, the Washington Post of October 1 ran a two-paragraph item under the headline “How Eddie Collins Saw Ed Cicotte Throw Game.”  But all the Post did was re-run what Collins had written for them during the 1919 Series. Collins simply said “it is most unusual to see a man like Cicotte commit two errors in one inning, as he did today” [in Game Four]. But Collins said the first was due to “overanxiousness” and “why he interfered with Jackson’s throw home following Kopf’s single to left still remains a mystery.”  Not really an accusation, and if the Post had known what Cicotte said to the grand jury, they might have used a different headline.
 

            The Chicago Tribune did someting similar, in their September 29, 1920, issue. “First Crooked Play of Series Told in Detail.” They didn’t quote Cicotte, they just dug up their play-by-play from Game One, and reprinted their description of what the Reds did when they broke the game open in the 4th inning. (Had they instead based their story on what Eddie actually said , they would have simply noted that he plunked the first man he faced — it was the first, and maybe the only crooked play all day, according to Cicotte.) One out, man on first, Kopf taps back to the box. Cicotte fields it cleanly, then — does he hesitate?  Doe Risberg hesitate, getting to second? The throw is (acc to the Trib ) low and to Swede’s left, instead of leading him to get the DP. Does Swede stumble over the bag? Does he delay too long, making Kopf easily safe at first? It seems to me that this is another play where we need to collect as many different accounts as we can.
(Here’s one, from the Spalding Guide : “Cicotte made a dazzling stop of Kopf’s torried smash in time to throw to Risberg for a forceout of Duncan at second. Risberg’s slow throw to Gandil failed to double up Kopf.”)
 

            The Trib puts the blame on Eddie; Spalding credits Eddie with a great stop, and blames Swede — something that Eddie never did, I think, or at least not in such a way as to accuse Swede of an intentional delay. The Trib follows with this: “With this chance to retire the side dissipated, Neale, Wingo, Reuther, Rath and Daubert made safe hits in succession and five runs resulted. Cicotte was then removed from the slab.” What the Trib does not report is that the Reds not only stayed alive this inning on the missed DP, but the hit that followed was a weak pop by Neale that Risberg reached, but dropped. Eddie should have been out of the inning. (The generous score-keeper ruled it a hit; if he had not, all the runs that scored that inning would have been unearned. Cicotte’s ERA for the 1919 WS would have then been 0.83, instead of 2.91. No one makes Cicotte’s case much better than Victor Luhrs in his 1966 The Great Baseball Mystery — but that was three years after Eight Men Out , and like that throw to first, too late.)
 

            In the same issue as their Collins story, the WA Post had another short item, “Reds Claim White Sox Tried to Win Series.”  “We had the jump up on the Sox in every game,” said Jake Daubert. And he added that the Reds hit Dickie Kerr harder in Game Three, than Lefty in Game Two. “The Sox fielding in the third game looked good to me.”  Jake was addressing that line attributed to Jackson, that the Sox tried to kick away Game Three. Larry Kopf and Ivy Wingo said Cicotte was pitching hard to make them easy outs. But the intriguing quote for me was from Greasy Neale: “Dick Hoblitzell, manager of the Akron team, told me last year that he suspected the White Sox players. I told him the Chicago team played their best.”
 

            Dick Hoblitzell had played eleven seasons with the Reds and Red Sox, the last in 1918. Boston was a mecca for gamblers, and perhaps Hoblitzell kept in touch with a few when he left MLB for Akron. If he didn’t talk with the Ohio press in 1919, we wonder if he spoke up more in 1920, after Greasy Neale’s quote appeared. More places to look: after Akron, Hoblitzell moved on to manage in Reading, PA, in 1921, then in Charlotte in 1922.
 

            We are all familiar with the famous phrase attributed to Ban Johnson, “that’s the yelp of a beaten cur.” It has lots of variations, and Johnson denied ever saying it, but denying things in the B-Sox world doesn’t usually do much good, especially if what one was supposed to have said, made it into Eight Men Out . Anyway, I recently found another phrase attributed to Johnson, which shows us what he might have said, if he were actually asked to comment on Commy’s worries about a Fix, early on in the 1919 Series.
 

            This quote can be found in a couple places; one is the Los Angeles Times , September 28, 1920 — after Maharg, but before Cicotte’s grand jury appearance. Johnson had been in the news himself, saying that he heard that gamblers had threatened the White Sox with exposure unless they let Cleveland win the AL pennant. Commy then accused Ban of making those charges to break his team’s morale. To which Ban replied that Commy’s statement was the “vaporing of a man who long has been vindictive to the president of the American League.” The Boston Globe limited its quote to “vaporings.”
 

            On September 28, Hartley Replogle was in the news, too. You have to squint, and his statement would soon be lost under the avalanche that Cicotte unleashed. Anyway, Replogle denied that “every major league team had been implicated in gambling and throwing of games” in the evidence collected so far by the grand jury. “There are only one or two teams implicated thus far and just a few players.”   Huh?  Only one or two teams? Foreman Harry Brigham apparently didn’t get Replogle’s e-mail. He said, that same night, that he expected to obtain enough information to start simultaneous baseball investigations in all the cities supporting major league teams. 
 

            “Players to Fight Charges” was the banner over the Atlanta Constitution story by James L. Kilgallen on October 5, 1920. Kilgallen is one of the reporters who took an interest in the B-Sox story, and would revisit it in later years. (I recently asked at a museum that has a lot of his papers, if they could find any B-Sox items in his archive; it appears it has none.) Two notes in his story are worth a comment. First, Kilgallen reports that Swede Risberg has made Joe Jackson apologize for that “Swede is a hard guy” remark. I’ve seen that before, and I’m starting to wonder if Jackson actually spoke the line. Kilgallen also notes that Cicotte had hoped to get in and out of the grand jury unnoticed by the press, and he almost succeeded. He left by a rear door on the sixth floor and reporters chased him down two flight of stairs before catching him — all for naught, Cicotte “begged not to be asked to talk.”
 

            My mind boggles some at the possibiity that Cicotte might have testified to the grand jury, and the confidentiality of his information kept out of the press. Would Jackson still have followed him, and Williams the day after?  Would the press feast a while on Maharg’s tale, but finally discredit that story as something Billy could easily have concocted from newspaper accounts and a bit of imagination — to get Commy’s $10,000 reward?  We’ll never know.