Notes #483 — Another Openin’ (Day, Another Show

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

#483                                                                                                                         APRIL 6, 2009
                       ANOTHER OPENIN’ (DAY), ANOTHER SHOW
 

            It’s a raw day here in the shadows of Cooperstown, and any team opening in central New York would likely be postponed. It will be a while before the local fields are truly playable, the grass has not reeled out its greenness yet; it is suspicious that there may be one more snowfall out there. And so it is harder to get in the mood for O-Day, when time ceases, and the new season begins. Maybe ESPN can help.
 

            This issue of Notes is about as far as you can get from an O-Day mood. As it turns out, it’s about money, mostly, the ugliest side of baseball — unless you are a player. I think sometimes that money is not the root of all the evils in the game, just the BIG money; just as a little gambling is harmless, but the BIG stakes can ruin a sport.
 

            After a blurb about the good old days, when fans could gamble openly at the ballparks, especially in Boston, I have a little essay on money. Which you can skip, if it ruins your mood, or which you might pass along to any ballplayers you know.
 

            Then we are back in the world of the B-Sox, with a good long look at the salaries of the eight banned players, before during and after 1919. After that, it’s Hugh Fullerton time once again, and instead of reading his attacks on gambling, this time he is down on baseball politics, and on “the color line,” and on the owners who will hire just about anybody to play on their teams, regardless of their moral integrity.
 

            Finally, we’ll explore more of the B-Sox “nooks and crannies,” all in fun, and we look at some more rumors from December 1919 about the White Sox throwing games — but not in October. And then tacked on at the end, compliments of a tip in SABR-L, we will look at what may be the first documented case of a major leaguers injecting steroids — in 1889. And not just any ballplayer, but a guy who wound up in the Hall of Fame. Well, he did nothing illegal, and that just reminds us that many of today’s suspected “performance enhancers” did not knowingly break any law, either; baseball was slow to draw the line, of course, and that’s because fans were kind of excited about guys who could pole a ball 600 feet and hit 70 HRs a season. Seemed like a good idea at the time. So did having gambling spaces at the ballpark.
 

 

SHOCKED, SHOCKED , TO FIND GAMBLING AT THE BALLPARK  
 

Thanx to Joanne Hulbert for passing this along.
 

The amazing discovery has been made that open betting is indulged in at our Boston ball parks. The same discovery could have been made at any time during the past 20 years, writes Bob Dunbar in the Boston Journal. Who can remember at what game no knot of betting fans huddled together, with remarkable symptoms of friendliness, behind first base or third? While betting is of course to be deplored, the amount of it done at the ball parks has never injured the reputation of the game of baseball as an honest sport. The magnates do well to discourage the gambling element from ever getting anything resembling a strangle hold on game or players, but the danger of this particular injury would be much more likely to arise from the so‑called “baseball pools” than from the less highly organized and much more casual wagering of the Dos and Don’ts.
— The Sporting News, September 9, 1915, pg 4.
 

 

“MONEY IS NEVER THE PROBLEM”  
 

            These words became a maxim in my mind in the early 1970s, when I heard them spoken, and explained, by a high school principal. The Catholic school where I taught seemed to be in a perpetual “belt-tightening” mode, and while everybody got their checks on payday, the size of those checks meant that we regularly lost a lot of talent to the public schools (or to jobs that paid better, like delivering beer). But here is what he meant.
 

            Where there’s a will, there’s a way. People determined to obtain something — a new car, a shortstop, a new gym, whatever  — will figure out how to raise the money. Yes, it will take a lot of pancake breakfasts to buy a shortstop these days, but you get the idea. The money is out there. All it takes is finding it and convincing those who have it, to part with it.
 

            Baseball money has been on my mind the past several months, as I’ve worked with those Transaction Cards in Cooperstown, the ones with salary info dutifully recorded by league secretaries, year after year. The boxes in which these 5″ x 8″ cards are stored say they begin in the nineteenth century, but I have not found any before 1910; they run into the 1990s, however, with significant gaps, such as the Federal League. In general, the American League records have better survived and have fewer gaps. They are roughly in alphabetical order, but imperfectly, so if you are pretty sure a player’s card is there, searching “in the vicinity” will often pay off — no pun intended.
 

            Someday, after overcoming the obstacle posed by social security numbers on some of the cards, we may all be able to do digital searches and look up the information the cards contain from our home computer. Or at least the data will be on microfilm, and thus be a bit easier to search. I confess that I have mixed feelings about this, because something in me says that what a person makes ought to be confidential. I certainly do not want to look back at my own salary history, let alone display it to the world. On the other hand, what baseball paid its players is also part of its history. By looking at team payrolls over the years, we can learn a lot — not just about which teams were paid well, or poorly, but whether any of them were candid with the public about what they were paying their employees, the players.
 

            There is no question that the depressed salaries in 1919 were a contributing factor in “the Black Sox scandal,” and that if Jackson and Cicotte were getting paid what they were worth, they might not have gone looking for some extra easy money. Now I could be wrong, because some folks never seem to have enough, and a paycheck of $15,000 would only mean that the bribe money would need to be $30 G or $40 G, instead of $10 G or $20 G. And let me be clear about this, I don’t think the Sox got into the Fix because they wanted to get even with Comiskey. Not Cicotte, not even Williams. I think they just saw a chance to make some easy bucks, with a low risk of exposure or punishment, if caught. And I think they realized very quickly what a terrible idea this was.
 

            It is hard to work with those old contract cards. First, it is hard to learn how little the players were paid in the first decades of last century. An outfielder who was a steady .285 hitter, sometimes over .300, and a terrific base-stealer would get just a few thousand dollars a season, get raises as he does better, but over 14 seasons (1907-1921) his salary would never climb over $8,000; it peaked in the Federal League years, then went back to $5-7 G when that war was won.
 

            Players starting their careers in the 1920s might start at a few hundred a month, or a few thousand a year, and see their pay crawl up to $13-14,000, until the depression hits. The tight times of the 1930s are not easy to document, especially in the NL, and I found few of the 1930s cards that I sought. After WW II, baseball booms, and now salaries in the $20 G range are more common. One of the top pitchers of his day or any day, who started his career in 1942 at $250 a month, jumps to $5,000 after the war, and soon is over $20 G; in the 1950s, his pay climbs from $32 G to 45, then to 50, 55, 57.5, 60, 72.5, 74.5, 77.5, and peaks in 1964 at $82,500. What is hard to accept about cards like his, is that you realize that the talent that produced twenty or more wins, consistently, was not making millions — while today’s mediocre pitchers are.
 

            Gabriel Schechter, a Hall of Fame researcher who is familiar with the T-cards, recently observed that perhaps what we need to do to prevent getting upset, is to step back and take the long view. For every A-Rod pulling down obscene millions today, there is a player a hundred years ago getting a few hundred a month, and maybe, just maybe , all of the overpaid millionaires somehow balance out with all the underpaid players of yesteryear. It’s an interesting theory, but not a satisfying or consoling one.
 

            Perhaps the hardest thing of all to learn from the cards, is how the advent of free-agency changed everything. The long history of baseball up until then is a history of the players having no leverage — not the fringe players, not the stars. A DiMaggio might hold out, but ultimately he had to accept what the club decided to pay him; there was no place else to go.
 

            But suddenly, a player with average talent is being paid more than Cobb, DiMaggio, yes, even Babe Ruth ever dreamed of making. Here’s an example, a NL first baseman who never made an All Star team: $3,000/month as a rookie, then $26 G, 40, 92, 200, 360, 510, 1.4 million, $2.2 million, all between 1983 and 1992. Here is another: $1,900/month, 20 G, 95 G, 150, then in a few years $1.2 million, then $3 million, all between 1983 and 1992.  OK, one more, an AL pitcher who was an All Star: Starts his career in 1979, $1,000 a month; next year, $35 G, then 85, 250, two years missing, then 750 G, 800, 850, 900, 1.5 million, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and $1.9 million — ah, the beauty of a multi-year contract. In those last five years, 1989-1993, this pitcher won 17, 18, 4 and 4, and he actually retired after 1992. Those last eight wins were pretty expensive. Why any team would sign a pitcher, the most fragile of ballplayers, to a long-term contract, is beyond me.
 

            Yes, I know — it’s Entertainment. Thanks to TV, cable, and a lot of other things, the money is there , and the teams are not going broke paying these modern salaries. I cannot weep for an owner, especially after knowing what they paid for the game’s first hundred years. The players are entertaining, but their salaries are not. When I first started NOTES , I recommended a boycott in the media of player salaries — just don’t print or broadcast them, and we’ll all be happier, less distracted. We don’t want to see $6 million on a guy’s back — 6 is just fine.
 

            In NOTES #11 , nearly 16 years ago, I wrote this:
 

In much of what I read, there seems to be a healthy revolt underway, a marked disgust with, and a disinterest in players’ salaries. The novice fan would never think to ask, “What does the rightfielder pull in every year, anyway?”  At least, that question would be ‘way down the list. That’s one reason minor league games are fun: you don’t know what they make, and you don’t care, so you cheer the hit and forgive the error with spontaneity. Those price tags are burdensome for everybody, and we ought to lose them.
 

            Yeah, I know, minor leaguers are probably millionaires, too, or on their way. In fact, they may play harder, better ball than the guys up top, the guys who have made it , precisely because they want to see that seven-figure salary. Here is a scary thought: Ty Cobb, playing even harder , so he can make a million. Ruth, swinging even harder from the heels, so he can be the first billionaire. Honus Wagner, playing for a beer.
 

            OK, this is a long essay, with no end in sight, you are thinking. But there is one, and this is why I started out by talking about schools and not-for-profits.
 

            I would like to turn this essay into an open letter, and address it to Baseball. That’s right, every team, every player getting paid to play the game. Do I have your attention?
 

            First, I want to thank all of you who are generous with your money. You are supporting your family, saving for the future, and, I hope, also planning your next career(s). But you are also giving back to those who helped you get where you are, starting with your schools, your communities. Maybe the hospitals and non-profits in those cities. Thank you. As for the rest of you — what is your problem?
 

            Second, I want to let you know that I see Baseball as a family, and I see today’s players — all of you — related to those who played with the dead ball, played in segregated leagues, played for low wages, kept the game going through wars and the depression. I hope you can all feel related. Now, I want you to know that your family has a kind of family album. No, not my book of baseball poems!   For everyone who has played the game, there is a file folder in the Hall of Fame’s library. There is one waiting for you, to fill with clippings, pictures, and all sorts of things that your grandchildren might enjoy someday. Or some fan, looking you up, for a school paper, or a SABR talk.
 

            Money is never the problem. That’s my headline, and that’s where I want to end. I want every one of you — every player, every team — to think about donating a tiny portion of your earnings to support baseball history, by supporting the Hall of Fame’s library in Cooperstown. Not the museum, they do just fine, fans flock there to see the great displays and buy memberships and shop in their store and catalogs. But with that fraction of your paycheck — if you all did this — the HOF library could do so much more for you and for everybody in the family of baseball. For example, they could afford to make all those old Transaction Cards more easily accessible. Then you will really appreciate your paychecks.
 

            But there are dozens of other projects on deck, too. There must be. The library’s greatest resource is its staff — which could be doubled and still be too small, in my humble opinion. Or maybe just one position could be added, someone to write for grants to fund projects. Or someone to coordinate a small army of volunteers and keep them busy.
 

            You could also donate to SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, nationally or locally, every major league city has a chapter, I think. Why Baseball doesn’t wake up to SABR is another thing beyond me. Look at SABR as thousands of volunteers, ready, willing and able to add so much to every fan’s enjoyment of baseball. They protect and cherish the family history. Your history, and the history you are making with every pitch you throw, every swing of the bat.
 

            Have all of you learned anything from Baseball?  Then Baseball is not just family, but a kind of school, and someday you will be alumni. A few issues back, in #475, I tossed out an idea that would make the Cooperstown Hall of Fame a reunion center for everyone who’s every played baseball, and you would be invited there for events, every few years. You can look up the details. It is just an idea, but if enough of you want it to happen, it could. Money is never the problem.
 

            There is no way that the billions of dollars flowing through baseball today, can splash backward in time, to your ancestors who were so vastly underpaid for so long. But some of your dollars can help honor their memories, and if you donate to a charity or school in the name of Addie Joss or Hooks Wiltse, even better. It’s just an idea, but I think it’s the right thing to do, and the time for doing it has never been better than now.
 

 

B-SOX SALARIES, 1918-20  
 

            Here is the info from the player contracts that the White Sox registered with the AL office, taken from the “Transaction Cards” in the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown.
 

Cicotte.After making $5,000 for 1915, 1916, and 1917 — in that last year, he won 28 games — Eddie signed in 1918 for — $5,000, receiving $2,000 when he signed, 5/28/18. In 1919, he held out till May again, signing for $952.50 a month — for 5 months and a week, that comes to — $5,000. (At the B-Sox trial, it was revealed that Eddie got a $3,000 bonus for 1919, when he won 29.) In 1920, he signed (on May 3) for $10,000, “starting on April 14 and ending on October 14, 1920.”  That clause was inserted into the contracts of all who signed for 1920, presumably on the advice of lawyers, to make it clear that if the team got into another World Series, they were still under contract and could not just treat the post-season as some exhibition.
 

Felsch.Happy signed a three-year contract for 1917-1918-1919 for $3,750 per season. His card notes that he “Arbitrarily left club July 1st, 1918” — many players left their teams, due to the war; Jackson’s and Williams’ cards say “Joined shipyards. Voluntary retired list.”  For 1919, Happy signed for $714.50 a month, or about $3,750. For 1920, he was boosted up to $7,000.
 

Gandil.Chick was making $4,000 a season in 1914, 1915, and 1916 with Washington and Cleveland, and when he joined the Sox to give them a solid, pennant-winning infield, he signed for — $4,000. In 1918, he made $4,000, and in 1919, $666.66 a month — that is about $3,500. If we are to believe Chick, he was offered, for 1920, $4,000 — he was looking for $6,000. But I think he and Comiskey had agreed to part ways when they spoke, right after the 1919 World Series. Chick’s card ends this way: “Suspended by Chicago club (Comiskey letter 4/14/20) for failure to sign contract and report to club for season 1920:”
 

Jackson .Joe came to the Sox from Cleveland, where he was making $6,000 a year. With Commy, he signed a sweet deal — $12,000 for 1917 and 1918; $6,000 per season. For 1919, he signed for $1,000 a month, or about $5,250. For 1920-1921-1922, he sign for $8,000 per season (his wife wanted him to hold out for $10,000). The dispute, the subject of that 1924 Milwaukee trial, was over whether his last contract contained the “ten days clause” or not (as his 1917-1918 contact did). The club argued that it did , and so they could release him from the contract on ten days notice, and therefore they had no obligation to pay him the $16,000 for 1921-1922. Jackson said he didn’t realize the clause was in his contract until he was on trial in 1921.
 

McMullin.Fred made $2,750 in 1918, $500/month ($2,625) for 1919, and was bumped up to $3,600 for 1920.
 

Risberg.The Swede made $2,500 in 1918 (up, after the team won the World Series in 1917, from $2187.50). He then signed a two-year contract for 1919-1920, at $3,250 per season., “with railroad fare for round trip” both years, to & from his home on the west coast. You’ll see that in a number of player contracts, sometimes to/from spring training, sometimes for the wives, too.
 

Weaver.Buck had a multi-year contract at $4,000 a year for 1915-1916-1917, and signed in 1918 for $6,000 (same as Joe Jackson). Before the 1919 season, Buck signed another three-year contract, for 1919-1920-1921, receiving $7,250 per season. So for 1919, Buck was making more than Joe Jackson, but not in 1919-1920. Buck tried to hold out for a new contract in 1920, perhaps because it looked like everyone else were getting nice raises. Buck’s T-Card does not indicate any clauses eliminated, but we know that he sued for back pay, too, and I believe he won. There is no question that Comiskey liked the popular Weaver (Buck made that round-the-world tour with Commy after the 1913 season), and held out the hope that he would be reinstated, even if he was the only player to be let back into baseball.
 

Williams.Lefty’s contract history is by far the saddest, especially when you look at his record. He signed in 1916 for $3,000. Lefty had a couple cups of coffee with Detroit, in 1913 and 1914, just 6 games total, getting $200 and $300 per month respectively. After a 13-7 rookie season in 1916 (same as Dickie Kerr in 1919), Lefty signed for $3,300 for 1917. After winning 17 on that World Championship team, Lefty signed for $3,000 — that’s right, a pay cut, but in 1918, WW I made club owners very worried. Some players made more money when they left their teams in 1918, for military duty or doing war-related work. In 1919, Lefty signed for $500/month, or about $2,625; his contract also gave him a bonus, if he won fifteen games; he won 23. But then he had that 0-3 World Series. So in 1920, he signed for $6,000, and then won 22 more games.
 

            A few caveats about these numbers. First, Charles Comiskey was not the “tightest wad” or “cheapest skate” among the team owners, and it is not clear that he was solely responsible for the payroll — his secretary, Harry Grabiner, was very involved in player signings and presumably in the “negotiations,” if that term can even be used, since the players had zero leverage. But that went for all ballplayers, including Cobb and Ruth. I think Commy was not that extraordinarily Scroogelike — I think he was pretty typical. The Sox may have had the second-highest payroll in MLB in 1919 (behind the Red Sox), but it was a bit lop-sided, with Eddie Collins making $15,000 all by himself. Ray Schalk was also well paid. (We can only wonder if either player would have been more vulnerable to bribery, if they were making much less.)
 

            Another caveat — as low as these wages may seem to us, in this day of multi-millionaire ballplayers, all of these players were making more than the average American. For playing a game, and for just half the year, so they could earn money at other jobs, if they wanted, in the off-season. They had escaped the drudgery of the factories, mines, or farming. Most had little education beyond elementary school. Some had endorsement deals, and probably the New York City players had more than average. And while the figures above are probably accurate, they do not tell the whole story — for example, Cicotte’s $3,000 bonus in 1919 is invisible. Team owners could be generous in other ways that might never be made public, perhaps to avoid the IRS. Some owners gave players more money after a World Series by tossing their own share into the pot (I don’t think Comiskey did this, at least not in 1917 or 1919). And winning teams started sharing in the World Series pot around this time, so a second- or third-place finish could provide a bonus, too.
 

            No matter how poorly paid (to us) these players may seem, none of them mentioned their low pay as a reason for getting involved with gamblers in 1919. It appears that they simply wanted to get some “easy money” — not just be accepting bribes, from an unknown number of syndicates, but by betting on the Reds. The risk seemed small, the payoff huge. Some of the players felt regret because they liked their team, its manager, and even Comiskey; the biggest grip about Commy that they seemed to share, was that he never made good on his promise in October 1917, to make up the difference between their winning shares (about $3,500 each) and $5,000; but we are not certain that that promise was made by Comiskey, or in a pep talk by manager Pants Rowland, and never agreed to by Commy. The “missing” $1,500 wad remembered by every player who sued for back pay after they were suspended and then banished.
 

            This is not to say that the White Sox of 1919 were happy campers. They all understood the tight times for MLB that the war had inflicted, and must have worried along with the owners about whether the fans would return to baseball. When they did, and it was clear that attendance in the shortened 1919 season was booming, the Sox had Gleason ask Commy about raises, but they were turned down — in July, the story goes, although I’ve never found documentation. The raises did come, in the 1920 contracts. But other little things disturbed some of the players — the meal allowances, the laundry bills for their uniforms. The same little stuff that bothers employees today.
 

            Were the salaries of the “eight men out” (except Gandil) all raised partly by “hush money”?  You’re getting a nice bonus, but let’s keep last October to ourselves, OK?   There is no way to say for sure, unless only these players got nice raises, and that was not the case. If you’re in Cooperstown, you can look it up. No, I think salaries went up in 1920 pretty much across the board in MLB. Maybe because the fans showed they would support baseball, maybe because owners wanted their players to be less vulnerable to the bribe offers from fixers. The game had survived the war, and the nasty rumors of October 1919 and the months that followed. A guy named Ruth was filling ballpark seats like never before. Baseball was on its way — so when the B-Sox scandal broke at the end of 1920, baseball had momentum.
 

 

ON THE SCREEN OF SPORT  
 

            Clean-Up of Game Coming, goes the headline over Hugh Fullerton’s column on November 3, 1920. After a year of being scorned by the baseball establishment — because he kept calling for an investigation, a clean-up — Fullerton is enjoying his sixth week of post-scandal vindication. But the clean-up Hughie sees on the horizon is a reform that has gained the support of the NL and the minors, but not Ban Johnson, the AL prez. Hughie think Johnson is interfering with baseball and should retire; in fact, Judge Landis will soon be voted into czarship. Hughie is in New York now, and would also like to see Charles A. Stoneham and John McGraw, heads of the Giants, out of baseball — to restore fan confidence. Who else should retire? George Grant, “the alleged owner” of the Boston Braves, and Augie Herrmann. Hughie is crusading again, this time for full disclosure — he wants each team to let the public know who owns their stock.
 

            In the weeks since the scandal broke, Hughie has seen and heard a lot of talk about reform, and, already a lot of back-pedaling. He had heard that the suspended players might not be expelled, for fear of a lawsuit against baseball. A suit which might affect the pending suit filed by the old Federal League. What if, for example, Buck Weaver sued and his case showed that baseball was a trust that exercised power to deprive men of their rights to earn a living — exactly what Baltimore contended?
 

            The 1920 World Series was a roaring success, and it seemed like the scandal was already behind baseball. Fans seemed to be happy that all the crooks were caught. Some think Jackson and Weaver will be back on the diamond soon; Hughie doesn’t think so. He wants to eliminate Ban Johnson, by the way, because that will go a long way in eliminating politics from the sport. First the crooks, then the politicians. Is this guy timeless, or what?
 

            Moral Fitness of Players Overlookedsays Hughie in a long essay in the Washington Post , February 19, 1921. The B-Sox trial is looming, and Fullerton again shifts attention away from the accused players to the men who hired them. It’s an interesting tack, one you don’t see taken very often. If you owned a bank, you would have a certain standard for honest conduct, but if you need a shortstop or pitcher, who cares if he’s honest?   That is pretty much Hughie’s accusation, in baseball, performance is everything.
 

            And that leads him to a place I’ve not seen him before. He is arguing for the admission of black players into MLB. The Negro Leagues, he notices, have some terrific stars. He says Rube Foster is one of the great managers and leaders of baseball. He heads a disciplined team, “no swearing or rowdyism.” They have toured the South without incident. But Hughie doesn’t pursue it, does not call for the end of the “color line,” he just notes how MLB has lost so much great talent. He hints that a player that is barred for the color of his skin might consider a lawsuit, and have a better case than a player dropped for dishonesty.
 

            It is July 16, 1921, the B-Sox trial is just days away, and Hugh Fullerton ponders the challenge ahead for Baseball — by now, this means Judge Landis in his syndicated column (I’m reading The Atlanta Constitution , as usual). The trial will bring “the real showdown at last.”  Fullerton, who can be as righteous as any pundit today, reports that in his view at least, the majority of the players were in sympathy with the players, “if not with crookedness.” They seemed to show more resentment against those who exposed the guilty — that would include Fullerton, I’m sure — than the suspended men: “They ain’t no worse than some of them owners.” Hughie follows with, It is encouraging at least to know that there never has been a man so bad that he could not find a few character witnesses to swear he was a saint.[Emphasis his]
 

            Hughie has heard a lot since this thing broke, and he urges Landis to go after the owners as the next step in baseball’s housecleaning. But he is not optimistic that anything of substance can be proved to the Commish. Most everybody in baseball seems to just “let the thing die out.” Hughie writes that therefore baseball’s hope lies with the players . The honest players must speak up, tell their managers of any crookedness they see or hear. He says players were wise to Hal Chase and to Lee Mageee before they were expelled. “Not fewer than a hundred ball players”[emphasis mine] “knew that ‘something was coming off’ in the [1919] world series,” and “had information that something was doing when the series started.”  They kept quiet [and probably placed their bets — GC], out of what Hughie calls “a false sense of loyalty to fellow players, fear of being called a ‘squealer.'”  Is he aiming squarely at Buck Weaver?  Because I know what Buck would say in reply — he’d say exactly what Comiskey said and so nobly got away with saying: I wasn’t certain, I didn’t know exactly who was going through with it, if any of them were, and a man’s reputation is too precious a thing to shatter with an accusation that is only based on suspicion .  OK, maybe Buck wouldn’t put it exactly that way. But those were his sentiments, I think. For Commy, he didn’t want to shatter his dynasty, not if he could somehow avoid that.
 

            One reason why so few criminals can be convicted is that we teach our kids that a tattletale is something worse than a criminal.[Emphasis his]  I’ve read and written about this essay of Hughie’s here before, but this time around, the steroid mess seems more on my mind. And also Buck Weaver’s integrity. Hughie forgets, if he is taking aim at Buck, that Gleason and Comiskey already knew about the Fix; and Hughie knew that.
 

            Five days later, Hughie is back at it. Amazingly, to me, he is not in Chicago, covering the trial, but he’s following it. And he’s upset that the ballplayers on trial are apparently getting a lot of sympathy, even from the “clean Sox.” Even from Kid Gleason, who visited the accused Sox, shook hands with them, gave them a pat on the back and wished them success. (By late July, it was plain that the Sox would not be in another World Series any time soon without Buck and Shoeless and Swede and the rest, although if anyone offered them odds that it would take forty years — would anyone have taken that bet?) 
 

            “Gleason was the first man to accuse the players of dishonest work” — Hughie doesn’t say when, but I believe he must have confronted Cicotte before starting him in Game One, and he spoke to the whole team early on in the series — “He accused them severally and individually. He even threatened to ‘use a rod’ — which is thieves’ slang for shooting on some of them if they did not try to play.”  This is at least the second time that Fullerton mentions Gleason threatening his team with a gun — and I wish Asinof had seen one of them, it would have made for an interesting scene in 8MO .
 

            “It is not mentioned that Eddie Collins or Ray Schalk were in the reception committee,” Hughie continues. (They were.) If they didn’t participate in the glad-handing and well-wishing,  they did testify that all the Sox were at the field for practice, knocking a small hole in Bill Burns’ story. Hughie might have noted (but didn’t) that there was no way that Gleason and the other Sox end up trying to help the accused players, without the approval of Comiskey. With Commy, Fullerton had a blind eye, as many have toward their best friends.
 

 

NOOKS AND CRANNIES  
 

            Knowing what happened in the 1919 World Series — not everything that happened, but enough — and in its aftermath, I enjoy reading the press coverage just before the series, and as it was taking place. Some thought the Reds’ pitching would be a big edge in a best-of-nine, others felt the elongated series would help Gleason, who could rest his two aces more, and wring five wins out of them.
 

            In the Washington Post , as the series begins, it is called “the first of the postwar great contests for baseball’s richest prize and highest honors.” Baseball had survived WW I, but a big Series would help it to get back on its feet financially. I think this was a factor in the decision by Ban Johnson & Co. to not cancel or postpone the series, just because of bribery charges.
 

            The first two games in Cincy were sold out and the city’s hotels “groaned under the weight of baseball enthusiasm.” Senator Warren G. Harding — he’d be president in another year or so — had a bridal suite to himself; and Mrs Harding, I suppose, but the Post doesn’t say she’s along. Comiskey and Herrmann have big suites, too — party on . The Post also makes this observation, under the heading Little Betting is Apparent: “Betting on the series was noticeable today for its absence . [Emphasis mine] Several wagers of large amounts were offered. No takers were reported. Local fans are demanding odds while Chicago supporters are asking even money.”  Apparently the Post reporter did not have a room at the Sinton.
 

            At batting practice, the day before Game One, Buck Weaver found the LF bleachers a few times with practice balls, and Felsch and Jackson drove out some long hits, too. “Cicotte declared that he was able to take the mound tomorrow. Manager Gleason and most of his men attended the races today” [the horse races across the river in Kentucky, I think].
 

            On October 2, the Chicago Tribune reported that the New York betting odds favored the Reds by 7 to 10 for the series, after the Sox dropped Game One. The Chicagos had been a 5 to 6 favorite.
 

            The Trib also had this squib: Manager Gleason got a letter from two students at Todd seminary in Woodstock, Ill. — they advised the Kid, as ardent Sox fans, to “use Bill James instead of Eddie Cicotte in the opening game of the series. We think Kerr will be the dark horse of this series.”  Gleason responded to the Trib , “Maybe they are right.” Which raises the question, did these two seminarians have guilty knowledge, too?  Did they bet on it?  Did they get a telegram from Hal Chase?
 

            Read all the accounts of all the papers of America, and we might be able to trace the steps of every player in the B-Sox story. For example, the Trib has Chick Gandil eating breakfast by himself at the Sinton. That was not newsworthy, but when Tris Speaker spotted Chick, and then shook his hand and chatted a while, that was news — because the two had a fist fight at a May 31 game in Chicago, and had not made up until then. Gee, what a heartwarming vignette … what a nice guy that Gandil must have been! Pals once more with Spoke!
 

            Pat Duncan of the Reds made a $200 bet that he’d hit a home run in the Series. That made the NY Times coverage, October 5. The Times also reported on the “song boosters” who entertained the fans during the hours before Game Four in Chicago, using state-of-the-art technology, megaphones. Sherry Magee and Dutch Reuther did some impromptu dancing during batting practice, closing with “a moving exhibition of the shimmy, developed to the nth power.”
 

            The Times reporter gave the nod to Cincinnati in the battle between the two teams’ marching bands. The Reds group, shut out of the action the day before because no one had bought them tickets, played mostly old songs; the hometown guys, jazz tunes. Souvenirs were sold everywhere, “a dozen different kind of red flags and badges” for Cincy fans, and white stockings for the home rooters. Arm bands were also popular. There were more women at this series than ever before, and they were vocal. Some things never change: when Greasy Neale lobbed a ball he caught during fungo practice into the RF stands, fifty kids stampeded to get it. I am reminded of a scramble at my local ballpark, where a fellow in suit and tie emerged from a scramble for a foul ball with the prize, fighting off a dozen kids. He was booed mercilessly until he turned the ball over to the kids.
 

            Was the fixing of the 1919 Series just “business as usual”?I ask this because something in the news at the tail end of 1919 caught my eye. Several papers reported that some St Louis gamblers were in Chicago at the request of Charles Comiskey, in that nothing-much-doing week between Christmas and New Years. When their meetings were over, team secretary Harry Grabiner had an announcement. “Two members of the syndicate” stated that their knowledge was hearsay. So Commy’s reward of $10,000 for hard evidence was still safe. But the St Louis fellows were not just talking about the recent World Series. There were rumors circulating that December that had three members of the Chicago White Sox getting $200 per week, from St Louis gamblers, each week of the regular season past. The rumors had this trio wiring the gamblers in advance so the latter would know on which games to place their bets.
 

            Nothing much resulted from this, except that Comiskey was showing the public that he really was trying to investigate. Hugh Fullerton’s series just weeks earlier had perhaps increased the pressure a bit. Fullerton had named Carl Zork and Harry Redmon,
both of St Louis (Zork had once managed Abe Attell). Redmon had met with Kid Gleason and another Sox rep right after the Series, in East St Louis. His testimony to the grand jury in 1920 had him informing the White Sox at that time about the Fix, something the Sox did not deny — they said Redmon had no solid evidence. Here is where I wish we could scan old bank accounts, as easily as we can scan old newspapers. Was Redmon given money to keep quiet in October 1919, and was he back for more in December, after seeing his name in Fullerton’s article? 
 

 

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN  
 

            Ecclesiastes was right. A recent item on SABR-L sent me into the Washington Post stories in 1889 featuring a magical elixir developed by Doctor Brown-Sequard of Paris. It was touted as a substance that not only would “enhance your performance” (those are my words) but make you just about immortal. It was like drinking from the mythical fountain of youth, but in this case, you didn’t sip, you were injected. It turned out that the Doctor had come up with the elixir by draining testosterone from the gonads of monkeys. You can read more about this at NPR’s web log, March 31, 2006.
 

            This would not interest us much, except that at least one athlete was injected, and this pioneer of steroid use was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1965. Pud Galvin was a subject in a trial conducted at a medical college in Pittsburgh, where Pud was pitching in those days. He went 23-16 in 1889, en route to a lifetime 361-308.
 

            Apparently, nobody was upset by this. Probably other athletes ate, drank, and injected themselves with lots of other stuff, harmless or harmful, in order to get an edge. The Post commented at length on the problems that a real “elixir of youth” would cause — for example, undertakers would be out of work, and your mother-in-law would live on … and on. And you might be dating your best friend’s great-grandmother. On the other hand, maybe you could win 400 games. Hmmm.