It was almost unthinkable: players throwing the World Series? Yet, that's what happened--or maybe didn't happen--in the fall of 1919.
The players on the Charles Comiskey's 1919 Chicago White Sox team were a fractious lot. The club was divided into two "gangs" of players, each with practically nothing to say to the other. Together they formed the best team in baseball--perhaps one of the best teams that ever played the game, yet they--like all ball players of the time--were paid a fraction of what they were worth. Because of baseball's reserve clause, any player who refused to accept a contract was prohibited from playing baseball on any other professional team. The White Sox owner paid two of his greatest stars, outfielder "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and third baseman Buck Weaver, only $6000 a year. Comiskey's decision to save expenses by reducing the number of times uniforms were laundered gave rise to the original meaning of "The Black Sox." Comiskey has been labeled the tyrant and tightwad whose penurious practices made his players especially willing to sell their baseball souls for money, but in fact he was probably no worse than most owners--in fact, Chicago had the highest team payroll in 1919. In the era of the reserve clause, gamblers could find players on lots of teams looking for extra cash--and they did.
In 1963, Eliot Asinof published Eight Men Out, a book about the Black Sox scandal which later became a popular movie and has, more than any other work, shaped modern understanding of the most famous scandal in the history of sports. In Asinof's telling of history, the bitterness Sox players felt about their owner led members of the team to enter into a conspiracy that would forever change the game of baseball. Asinof suggested that Comisky's skinflint maneuvers made key players ready to jump at the chance to make some quick money. For example, Asinof wrote that Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte was intensely irritated when, in September of 1917, as Cicotte approached a 30-win season that would win him a promised $10,000 bonus, Comiskey had his star pitcher benched rather than be forced to come up with the extra cash. Whether the story about the denied bonus or true is subject of dispute among baseball historians.
