October 9, 1919. The eighth game of the baseball world series is played between the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox. Despite the fact that the latter are the clear favorites, the Cincinnati team wins by 10 innings to 5 and wins the title of champion. Rumors quickly spread about the fixing of the final that ended up being confirmed when, after an investigation, eight players from the White Sox ( Stockings white in Spanish) are considered guilty and expelled from the competition for life. They were nicknamed the Black Sox (Black Sox) in reference to the name of his team and the stain that the performance of the eight involved meant for it.
The beginning of the plot to fix the World Series came weeks before it began when a gambler named Joseph Sport Sullivan zoomed in on one of the Chicago players named C.Arnold Chick Gandil. Initially he was reluctant to the proposal, but not for moral reasons (it was not the first time that a result had been rigged by bribing players attracted by money) but because of the magnitude and repercussion of the proposal, which affected the final of the championship, with all the attention of the public and media coverage.
However, the substantial economic offer ($100,000 to be distributed among all the players who participated) ended up convincing Gandil, who in turn recruited several of his teammates for the match (Eddie Cicotte, Claude Lefty Williams, Charles Swede Rosberg and Oscar Happy Felsch). They even successfully sounded out the great figure of the Shoeless team. Joe Jackson.
Once the players were convinced, Joseph Sullivan began the fundraising campaign with other professional gamblers. Among some minor underworld figures, the main suspect of having been instrumental in the match-up and putting up the majority of the money was New York mobster Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was a Jewish New Yorker who had dealings with the different mafia gangs in the city, both Italian, Irish and Jewish. He knew a young Jew named Meyer Lansky who was forming a gang with other ambitious young mobsters named Charlie Lucky. Luciano and Bugsy Siegel. Rothstein became a mentor to the group and a kind of second father to Lansky and above all to Luciano... but that's another story.
Rumors in the betting world about the existence of a match began to spread (it seems that the players of the White Sox involved tried to get money from more than one source). A few weeks before the start of the series, the Chicagoans were clearly betting favorites, but as the date approached, more and more people began to bet significant amounts in favor of the clearly inferior Reds.
On October 1, 1919 the White Sox they lost the first game of the series (best of nine) by a resounding 9-1, with several disastrous plays by Cicotte. In the second game it was Lefty Williams who had a dismal performance, which allowed the Reds win 4-2 and make it two-nil in the series.
When the result marked an advantage of four games to one in favor of Cincinnati (that is, when they were only one victory away from winning the series and proclaiming themselves champions) the players of the Chicago team involved in the match were furious because someone of the payments agreed with the bettors had not been carried out and they decided to back out of the deal and play the rest of the matches fairly. The Sox they won the next two games and put the series on a tight 4-3 scoreline.
The next game, to be held on October 9, would be decisive. If the Chicagoans won again, the series would be tied at 4 and everything would be decided heads or tails in the ninth game. But backing out of a deal with professional gamblers, some of whom had ties to the New York mob, wasn't easy. Later some of the White Sox players involved stated that both they and their families had received threats from the gamblers. The point is that. as we said at the beginning of the post, in the eighth game the Reds They won 10-5 and became champions for the first time in their history.
Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton was the most distinguished in denouncing the fixing of the 1919 final in various articles in the New York Evening World newspaper. However, the defense of the owner of the White Sox Charles Comiskey of the performance of his players and the lack of evidence meant that initially nothing happened. Comiskey cannot say that he was clean wheat either and he was surely interested in burying the matter so that others of his dealings would not be investigated.
However, when a grand jury meeting was called to investigate the fixing of a 1920 league match, the events of the 1919 World Series came to light again. First one of the bettors named Bill Maharg and then player Eddie Cicotte confessed their involvement in the match. Cicotte did so before the grand jury through tears and protests that he had done it to protect his wife and children from him. There was a cascading series of citations from White Sox players before the grand jury and eight of them confessed to receiving money for letting themselves win against the Reds. Among them was his great figure Shoeless Jackson.
The eight players were charged with conspiracy and their trial date was set for June 1921. However, the mysterious loss of all grand jury evidence caused the Black Sox were acquitted in criminal proceedings. Suspicions about the disappearance of the evidence fell mainly on Arnold Rothstein and the president of the Chicago team Charles Comiskey, although nothing could be proven in this regard.
But one issue was the criminal sanction on the players who had gone unpunished and a very different one was the professional one. All eight involved were branded cheaters, and league commissioner Kenesaw Landis made it abundantly clear that none of them would ever play in a major league game again. The Black Sox they had been scarred forever, and the 1919 world series fixing scandal spelled the end of their professional careers.
Despite widespread suspicion of being the main instigator of the plot and the rumor that he had won a fortune from the bets placed, Arnold Rothstein was never formally charged for the events of the so-called Black Sox Scandals and continued with his criminal and mafia activities until on November 4, 1928, he was shot dead in New York, apparently due to the large gambling debts he accumulated in a three-day poker game in a hotel in the city.