The season after a group of White Sox players threw the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson met a perplexed young fan after testifying before a Chicago grand jury. Jackson was the A-Rod of his day, a slugger whose graceful swing Babe Ruth looked to model, and the scandal attracted a media horde, including a reporter who wrote that the boy asked:
"It ain't true, is it, Joe?"
"Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is," Jackson was said to have answered.
Years afterward, Jackson claimed it never happened, and many scholars say it was fabricated, the product of the lax journalistic standards of the day. Still, it became the iconic story of the Black Sox scandal, overshadowing the real news from that day: Jackson telling the Tribune he had confessed to the grand jury that he'd gotten stiffed by a teammate for the better part of the $20,000 he was due for being in on in the fix: "All I got was $5,000 that Lefty Williams handed me in a dirty envelope."
Fact or fable, the image of a heartbroken boy passed into baseball legend and lore as a metaphor for the mixture of disappointment and disbelief fans suffer when betrayed by wayward heroes. A prosecutor drew upon it in the 1921 trial of Jackson and seven teammates for conspiring with gamblers to fix the Series, telling the jury, according to the Trib's account: "The public, the team owners and even the small boy playing on the sandlots have been swindled."
With last week's suspensions of Alex Rodriguez and 12 other major leaguers for using performance-enhancing drugs, the Black Sox of 1919 have once again become the benchmark against which other sports scandals are measured. It's an oft-told tale, fodder for movies like "Eight Men Out" and "Field of Dreams," and novels like Bernard Malamud's "The Natural."
If players' sky-high salaries and the pressure to live up to superstar expectations were factors in the current doping scandal ? Rodriguez stands to lose almost $31 million if his 211-game suspension sticks ? Shoeless Joe and his teammates were tempted to cheat by meager salaries and the callous treatment many players felt they received. While Jackson made $6,000 in 1919 (nearly $81,000 in today's dollars), Williams received just $2,625 ($35,000 inflation-adjusted). And an alternate theory of the "Black Sox" label holds that team owner Charles Comiskey, a notorious tightwad, refused to pay even for cleaning players' uniforms.
Nevertheless, the White Sox, World Series winners two years earlier, were heavy favorites going into the 1919 contest with the Cincinnati Reds, the National League's champions. "It seems to me that I have seen the Sox outfielders throw more runners out at home than all the rest of the American league outfielders put together," wrote longtime umpire Bill Evans in a Tribune opinion piece that gave the Series edge to the Sox.
But the Series opened poorly for the Sox, which wasn't an accident, as it turned out. Chicago's star pitcher, Eddie Cicotte, started on the mound and hit the Reds' leadoff batter in the back, the signal that the dirty deal was on. The Sox lost 9-1.
Game 2 wasn't much better, a 4-2 Chicago loss, but the Sox won Game 3.
In Game 4, the plotters again took control. In the fifth inning, a Reds batter hit a single that Jackson fielded and heaved home to keep a runner from scoring, but Cicotte cut off the throw, ostensibly to keep the batter from advancing. "There wasn't any occasion for Cicotte to intercept the throw," manager William J. "Kid" Gleason later complained to a Tribune reporter. The batter "had no more intention of going to second than I have of jumping in the lake." The Sox lost 2-0, and the Reds had a 3-1 Series lead.
After several more questionable plays, the Reds clinched the championship in the eighth game (a best-of-nine Series that year). Of the final game, the Tribune noted: "They burned up the White Sox 10-5 on the anniversary of the day Mrs. O'Leary's cow burned up nine-tenths of Chicago forty-eight years ago."
Rumors of a fix began immediately. Faced with speculation that his players hadn't tried to win, Comiskey offered a $10,000 reward for information that the Series was thrown. True to form, he refused to pay several claimants, reportedly including Jackson's wife, who ostensibly sent a letter because Shoeless Joe was illiterate. But the rumors continued, prompting a criminal investigation.
The tainted players returned for the 1920 season, and the team played well.
But in the fall, three players ? Jackson, Cicotte and Williams ? signed confessions, which went mysteriously missing. According to the Trib, the confessions were bought for $10,000 by Arnold Rothstein, the big-time New York gambler who had bankrolled the whole scheme. Evidently pleased that his name wasn't mentioned in the confessions, Rothstein tried to peddle them to the media, including the Tribune, which reported the offer to the state's attorney's office.
Comiskey then suspended those three players and five others believed to be part of the conspiracy, even though the team was in a pennant race. The Sox narrowly missed going to another World Series even without them.
When the trial finally opened in 1921 it was a circus, even by Chicago standards. A special prosecutor appointed to represent organized baseball joined the state's team. Rothstein didn't show, successfully arguing that he wasn't the same Arnold Rothstein named in the court papers. Over the defense's objections, the judge who had taken the missing confessions was allowed to describe them to the jury, though the players alternately said they had repudiated them or been promised immunity. Comiskey went ballistic when a defense attorney accused him of "contract jumping" ? leaving a team in the lurch for a few extra bucks ? during his playing days.
Surprisingly, the jury acquitted them, but Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, newly appointed baseball commissioner, confirmed Comiskey's suspensions ? permanently banning eight players from baseball. By that point the team's fortunes had tanked. They wouldn't be contenders for years to come.
Most of the banished players faded into obscurity, but Jackson's persistently loyal fans continued to petition for his reinstatement, even after he died in 1951. It was argued that he wasn't one of the players who organized the fix, that he was a simple country boy who didn't realize what he was getting into, that he clearly didn't play poorly (he hit .375 in the Series and committed no errors). His partisans have argued that a man deserves to be remembered for his best, not his worst, and that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. It was in that spirit that Tribune sports columnist Dave Condon placed a wreath on Shoeless Joe's grave in 1979.
Condon wrote that when the florist asked what the card should say, he suggested:
"Maybe it wasn't so, Joe."
rgrossman@tribune.com
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