The Original Curse Read online

  THE ORIGINAL CURSE

  THE ORIGINAL CURSE

  DID THE CUBS THROW THE 1918 WORLD SERIES TO BABE RUTH’S RED SOX AND INCITE THE BLACK SOX SCANDAL?

  SEAN DEVENEY

  FOREWORD BY KEN ROSENTHAL

  Copyright © 2010 by Sean Deveney. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  For Robbie, who shaped and inspired my ideas for this book; for Mom and Dad, who read eagerly and pushed me along; and for Brice, who always kept the volume on the television low when I was working

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Ken Rosenthal

  Author’s Note

  ONE

  Fixes and Curses: Aboard a Train with the White Sox

  TWO

  Luck: Charley Weeghman

  THREE

  Preparedness: Harry Frazee and Ed Barrow

  FOUR

  Discipline: Five Days in Spring Training with Ed Barrow

  FIVE

  Sacrifice: Grover Cleveland Alexander

  SIX

  Morality: Max Flack

  SEVEN

  Cheating: Hubert “Dutch” Leonard

  EIGHT

  Usefulness: Newton D. Baker

  NINE

  Loyalty: The Texel

  TEN

  Strategy: Harry Hooper

  ELEVEN

  Money: Recollection of Boston Gambler James Costello

  TWELVE

  Labor: Charley Hollocher

  THIRTEEN

  Death: Carl Mays

  FOURTEEN

  World Series, Game 1, Chicago

  FIFTEEN

  World Series, Games 2 and 3, Chicago

  SIXTEEN

  World Series, Games 4 and 5, Boston

  SEVENTEEN

  World Series, Game 6, Boston

  EIGHTEEN

  History: Throwing the World Series

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Ken Rosenthal

  I have known Sean Deveney for the better part of a decade, and I’ve always known him to be a thorough journalist and an entertaining storyteller. Of course, I’ve gotten accustomed to seeing that from Deveney in 2,000- or 3,000-word magazine features. Now he’s written a book, and even in this much longer format my opinion hasn’t changed. He’s both thorough and entertaining.

  In The Original Curse, Deveney artfully attacks one of baseball’s most widely accepted notions—that the sport’s gambling problem in the early part of the 20th century was restricted to the 1919 Black Sox, who conspired to fix the World Series.

  Baseball, by banning eight members of the Black Sox, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, attempted to portray gambling as an isolated problem. History has generally accepted that view. Deveney does not, challenging that preconception with the drive and curiosity of a classic whistle-blower. The job of a great writer is to provoke thought, and here Deveney has created a veritable riot for the imagination.

  Gambling in baseball was rampant in the early part of the 20th century, and the pages that follow make a convincing argument that the 1918 World Series also was fixed—maybe not the entire Series, but at least part of it. Whether Deveney’s conclusion is accurate we will never know, because the game did such a thorough job of covering up its gambling problem. This notion of a cover-up should ring true for those who follow baseball now, because baseball’s gambling culture in that era was not unlike the steroid culture that infiltrated the sport eight decades later. Clandestine. Widespread. A charade worthy of deep and intense investigation.

  The Red Sox met the Cubs in the 1918 Series, back when they were considered merely baseball teams, not the two most famously cursed voodoo dolls of sports. History shows that the Sox won the series, four games to two. But look closer. After Game 3, the players learned their share of the Series receipts—usually around $3,700 for the winners—would be about $1,200.

  That fact alone would make a fix understandable, if not quite forgivable. But, by detailing the social and economic forces triggered by World War I, The Original Curse goes further and sympathetically examines the social forces that explain the players’ motivations. Contrast that with today’s scandalized players, the steroid users. They are not viewed sympathetically but were motivated by outside forces as well. Owners and players used their own rationales in reacting slowly to the excesses of the era. Baseball needed to recover from the players’ strike of 1994–95. The players wanted to capitalize fully on that recovery and on their growing celebrity in an entertainment-driven society.

  By the end of this book—after the players’ haunting stories are detailed and fresh insight is given into an age marked by rampant inflation, domestic terrorism, and, above all, fear of Germans—the corruption of the 1918 World Series seems not only plausible but also probable. Deveney does not pretend to offer certainty. He is, af
ter all, writing about events that took place 91 years ago. While he vividly portrays players such as the Cubs’ shortstop prodigy Charley Hollocher and their future Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, Deveney obviously did not follow the Cubs and Red Sox in 1918 the way authors track professional sports franchises today.

  But, like any good journalist, he challenges conventional wisdom, especially that stemming from the self-righteous judgment of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first-ever commissioner. Landis banned the Black Sox’s eight alleged fixers, tainting them forever, though they were acquitted by a grand jury. At the time, baseball wanted the public to believe that Landis’s ruling was the final say on the matter, that the sport had addressed the threat of gambling once and for all. Sound familiar? In 2007, baseball issued a report by former senator George Mitchell detailing the excesses of the Steroid Era. The report, combined with the toughest steroid testing in professional sports, was intended to be the final word on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) in baseball. But check the headlines. Neither the report nor the testing has achieved its desired effect.

  As prevalent as steroids were in the baseball culture from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, gambling might have been just as ubiquitous in 1918; gamblers shadowed players as diligently as drug pushers did decades later. Not every player back then gambled. Not every player today uses performance-enhancing drugs. But enough engaged in illicit activity to shape the perceptions of their respective eras.

  The beauty of The Original Curse is the empathy displayed toward players who are effectively being accused of dishonesty. Few men are born cheaters, but many find temptation difficult to resist, particularly when desperate. If you were outfielder Max Flack, say, with a young wife and a newborn son, or Phil Douglas, with money problems that went hand in hand with a drinking problem, surely you would have been tempted to accept gambling money. And surely anyone facing the prospect of a tour in World War I’s trenches also would have been tempted.

  The cheaters of today—the wealthier ones anyway—are less forgivable. Alex Rodriguez said he used steroids because he felt pressure to justify a new $252 million contract. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, if the allegations against them are true, seemingly wanted only to achieve a higher level of immortality. Such rationales elicit little sympathy from disgusted fans. Players with more to lose, though, warrant a different view. When two pitchers, one a PED user, one not, vie to be the 5th starter or 12th man on the staff, the nonuser no doubt experiences tremendous pressure to cheat, knowing his career otherwise might be in jeopardy. The same goes for two shortstops or two outfielders of similar ability—any players in competition, really.

  Context is critical, and Deveney provides just the right perspective. The Original Curse is not just about baseball. It is a sweeping portrait of America at war in 1918, one that examines baseball’s place in that unsettled society. The revelation of this book is not simply what might have happened but why. In the end, the proper question is not “How could a player from that era fix the World Series?” It’s “How could he not?”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  So that readers can truly see things from the perspective of the players, officials, and citizens of 1918, many of the chapters that follow begin with words and thoughts attributed to the various characters involved. Though the bulk of the book is strictly historical, these opening interludes are, of course, not verifiable. They are based on the facts of the actual life histories of the characters, though, and in many cases their language and attitudes are borrowed directly from newspaper, magazine, and other accounts. The reader simply seeking entertainment may take the interludes on their face. The reader interested in the historical background and the research on which these interludes are based, however, is encouraged to find that information in the end notes.

  Special thanks to Peter Alter of the Chicago History Museum and the staff of the research library at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  ONE

  Fixes and Curses: Aboard a Train with the White Sox

  SUMMER 1919

  Picture it. A bunch of ballplayers, lounging in a Pullman car in the summer of 1919, speeding past Midwestern greenery, jackets unbuttoned, sleeves rolled, games of poker and whist in high pitch. These are members of the White Sox, and they’re talking, increasingly hushed, squint-eyed, smiling slyly, as if not quite sure about the nature of the conversation, not sure if this is for real. Because if this is serious, it’s the beginning of something very big. A conspiracy. A conspiracy to throw—take a dive, lose intentionally—the biggest event of the season, the game’s crown jewel: the World Series.

  Who would have to be involved? How much money could be made? And, most important, could an entire World Series really be fixed?

  These players were not dumb. Game-fixing talk on team trains was nothing new. Sometimes it was idle chatter. Sometimes not. Gambling and baseball were already intricately linked, the sport being one of the nation’s most popular outlets for both casual and serious bettors. Small-timers could get in on widely circulated pools for dimes and quarters, bets could be made easily in the stands of any ballpark—where gamblers would haggle and shout like traders in a Casablanca market—and for those who preferred higher stakes, there were backroom bookies who made their livings out of pool halls and cigar stores. For the public, that’s where the association between gambling and baseball ended. Players played. Gamblers gambled. Ne’er the twain did meet.

  This was what the game’s overlords wanted the public to think. In truth, ballplayers were never far from gamblers, but the perception of the game as pure and honest was well crafted and managed. In 1914, American League president Ban Johnson wrote an article called “The Greatest Game in the World” that typified this see-no-evil posture. “There is no place in baseball for the gambler; no room in the ball park for his evil presence,” Johnson wrote. “The game, notwithstanding loose occasional charges, stands solely and honestly on its merits. In the heat of an exciting race for the pennant, with clockwork organizations in rivalry, imagination sometimes runs riot and assertions are made, under stress of excitement, that games are not played on the level. As a matter of fact, to fix a ball game, that is, to arrange in advance a scheme by which one team would be sure to win, would be harder than drawing water out of an empty well.”1

  This was tripe. Gamblers were all over baseball. They knew players intimately, and fixing a game was not difficult. While the 1919 White Sox held hushed conversations about the World Series, it may have been that members of the New York Giants were simultaneously conspiring to throw the entire season to the Cincinnati Reds.2 Approach a player of the era with a notion of fixing a game or two, and you’d likely get a range of reactions. Some reveled in it, because the extra money was handy and over a 154-game season no one would notice if a few games were not played on the level. Other players might pucker their lips in disapproval and say, “No, thanks.” Some might even tell the team’s manager about their crooked teammates. Still others might answer a fix proposal with a punch to the jaw. Whichever reaction came forth, though, there would be no long-term consequences—few players squealed on teammates, and when they did, their complaints were ignored. Gambling was simply tolerated, and gamblers were just part of the bawdy off-field scenery that accompanied baseball teams, like high-stakes card games, hotel bars, and women who did not answer to “Mrs.”

  In a 1956 Sports Illustrated article, Chick Gandil—one of those members of the ’19 White Sox—remembered the attitude toward gamblers at the time: “Where a baseball player would run a mile these days to avoid a gambler, we mixed freely. Players often bet. After the games, they would sit in lobbies and bars with gamblers, gabbing away. Most of the gamblers we knew were honorable Joes who would never think of fixing a game. They were happy just to be booking and betting.”3 Another player of that era, catcher Eddie Ainsmith, later told an interviewer, “Everybody bet in those days, because it was a way of making up for the little we were paid.”4

 
So it wasn’t unusual for the White Sox to be talking this way, about taking a fall for a cut of the gambling loot. Not just any loot—World Series loot. The 1919 White Sox were the best team in baseball, spending most of the season in first place. As likely American League champions, their spot in the World Series was almost assured. No matter who won the National League pennant, the White Sox would be favored to win the championship. Even modest bets made on the NL underdog would yield big payoffs. Which was why the White Sox’s discussion of throwing that Series was so intriguing. It had the potential to be very big indeed.

  Now picture this: While considering the World Series fix, one of the White Sox says, “Hey, why not? The Cubs did it last year.”

  Whoa.

  We know what happened to the ’19 White Sox. They did throw that year’s World Series, to the Reds. A year later, in 1920, they got caught and forever became known as the Black Sox. Eight members of the team were indicted in a Chicago court, acquitted by a sympathetic jury, but then famously banned from baseball for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis despite the acquittal. Their story was retold in a popular book and movie, Eight Men Out, though the facts of the Black Sox case are still debated. The trial was poorly run, documents disappeared, and interference from baseball officials and gamblers left the truth forever obscured. What cannot be debated is that the Black Sox attempted the loosest, clumsiest, and most audacious gambling fix in American sports history. What also cannot be debated is that they were hardly the first, or the last, crooked players of their era. They’re just the ones that history remembers best.