The Original Curse (3 page)

The Black Sox have
Eight Men Out
to commemorate their role in baseball’s gambling era, but the Cubs were nearly as deep in betting associations of the day as the South Siders. Even most Chicagoans do not know that the Black Sox scandal might never have become public knowledge if not for a smaller-scale Cubs gambling scandal. Only after word spread that some Cubs had thrown a game on August 31, 1920, did the state of Illinois convene a grand jury to investigate baseball gambling. That grand jury, brought together because of the Cubs, eventually uncovered the 1919 plot. (Thus White Sox fans who are harassed by Cubs fans over the Black Sox should be quick to point out that it was crooked Cubs who started it all.) And just before the start of the 1920 season, the Cubs released a player—Lee Magee—who admitted to club officials that he had wagered on ball games.

The Cubs had gambling ties at all levels. One of the odd features of the Black Sox trial was the calling of Cubs ex-president Charley Weeghman as a witness. Under oath, Weeghman testified to his close relationship with Chicago gambler Mont Tennes. According to Weeghman, Tennes told him as early as August 1919 that the upcoming World Series would be fixed. Weeghman claimed he didn’t give the notion much credence and thus could not remember whether he had reported it to baseball officials. Of course, why Weeghman associated with the likes of Tennes, the biggest (and baddest) Chicago gambling figure of his day, is a mystery.

This does not mean the Cubs of the time were completely tainted or that the World Series of 1903, ’12, ’17, ’19, ’20, and ’21 were
all
fixed. But there’s an awful lot of smoke for there to have been just one fire. No series-fixing evidence remains, which should not be surprising. It was by design. One of the primary aims of Ban Johnson and his friends who ruled “the greatest game in the world” was to push the view that baseball stood honestly on its merits, and to do that they snuffed out rumors about crooked players and kept whatever they knew about gamblers in baseball safely out of public view.

But Cicotte’s deposition—part of a series of Black Sox documents purchased by the Chicago History Museum and shared for direct quotation for the first time in this book—provides a voice from the grave, raising a rumor and, at the same time, some questions. What if the ’19 White Sox had a very recent and close-to-home inspiration for their bungled fix? What if the World Series of 1918, baseball’s most tumultuous season, was thrown? What if the Cubs and Red Sox, in their only on-field meeting of the 20th century, played in a World Series tainted by gambling interests?

Considering what would become of the two franchises after the 1918 World Series, that would be fitting. Entering ’18, few teams were more successful in the brief history of modern baseball than the Red Sox in the American League and the Cubs in the National League. In the first 14 World Series, each team made four appearances—the Red Sox won four times, and the Cubs won two. Boston was an unstable franchise, having undergone six ownership changes in 15 years, but fan support was strong and the team was a consistent contender. The Cubs excelled in the early 1900s behind their famed infield trio of Joe Tinker, John Evers, and Frank Chance and put on some of the best pennant races in history, against archrival McGraw and his powerful New York Giants. From 1904 to 1913, either the Cubs or the Giants won every NL pennant except one, and their ’08 chase was a classic.

But the Red Sox and Cubs never met in a World Series until ’18, and a funny thing happened after they did. Both teams took epic downward turns, their brief histories as dominant franchises forever replaced with a different kind of history altogether. The Red Sox and Cubs spent the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st century, as baseball’s two most star-crossed franchises. For the next 85 years the Red Sox would not win a World Series and would make just 10 play-off appearances. The Cubs would not win a World Series at all and would also make just 10 play-off appearances. The way the teams
lost—blowing huge leads, making confounding mental errors, falling apart at the worst possible moment—left their devoted fan bases pained and desperate for explanation. To this day the mere mention of certain players and phenomena can induce psychosis among fans in both the Hub and the Windy City.

The black cat. Tim Flannery. Steve Bartman.

Bucky Dent. Bill Buckner. Aaron Boone.

Under those circumstances, it’s natural for fans to turn to the supernatural. Surely there must have been something beyond human understanding intervening at Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. Surely, somewhere, baseball gods were angry, and for decades it was the Red Sox and Cubs who would pay. Thus the teams share both a sad-sack history and the distinction of the two most famous curses in sports. For the Red Sox, the curse was traced to the regrettable decision of team owner Harry Frazee to sell the greatest player in history, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees in 1920. That move was christened “The Curse of the Bambino,” which was finally broken in 2004. For the Cubs, the curse source is William Sianis, owner of the famous Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Avenue. As the story goes, when ushers asked Sianis to remove his pet goat from Wrigley Field (Sianis had bought a ticket for it) during the 1945 World Series, the angered barman cursed the team. The Cubs lost that series and have not played in another since.

But maybe those curses are entirely misplaced. What if the gods were not angry about Ruth or Sianis? What if the karmic problems of the Red Sox and Cubs started with their participation in a fixed World Series played at the end of a wartime season that probably never should have happened in the first place? Wouldn’t that be cause for a curse if ever there was one? Two dominant teams, a fixed World Series, and decades of doom. Makes as much sense as a couple of curses imposed on behalf of a sold player and a malodorous goat, right?

Curses are, of course, silly. They’re irrational ways to answer this perfectly rational question: “Why doesn’t my team win?” In the cases of the Cubs and Red Sox, that question was asked so many times and over such a long period that a curse came to look like just as logical an answer as any other. Reasonable fans don’t take the notion of curses seriously, and there are ways to explain the years of failure that defined both the Cubs and the Red Sox. For example, the teams play
in relatively small parks that should favor power hitters, and for years neither paid proper attention to pitching and defense.

There are other explanations. Even after the sale of Ruth (which was accompanied by the sale of several other Red Sox stars to the Yankees), Boston didn’t have the resources or the executive know-how to keep up with the dominant Yankees. Beyond that, the franchise’s resistance to accepting African-American players put it at a competitive disadvantage. The Cubs, meanwhile, have a history of indifferent ownership, with lucrative national television and radio networks that have bolstered the franchise’s bottom line. On-the-field performance was almost irrelevant to profits, and the team had little incentive to spend big money on top free agents. These are far more credible explanations for failure than voodoo and curses.

Still, most of us take curses for what they are: fun, offbeat ways to imagine that baseball is at the center of the universe and that, somewhere, higher powers dictate the success and failure we see on the field. And we like to think that higher power has a solid sense of right and wrong, as well as a long memory—100 years, even. If we can, with a wink and a smile, agree that baseball gods are meting out curses, the throwing of baseball’s annual grand finale would have to get their attention.

As for 1918, there is nothing that can definitively prove a fix, and we should be mindful that evidence of a fix in that World Series is circumstantial. It’s rumors and vague suspicions. It’s dead men talking, like Cicotte, with no opportunity to press them for details. It’s a skeptical reading of box scores and play-by-plays. It’s questionable connections and questionable characters, within the teams themselves and lurking on the periphery.

Cicotte’s deposition is not the only instance in which the possibility of a crooked 1918 World Series was raised. Henry “Kid” Becker, an associate of some of the St. Louis gamblers who were involved in the fixing of the 1919 World Series, had planned to fix the ’18 series but came up short on cash and was murdered seven months later.
¹¹
In his 1965 book,
The Hustler’s Handbook
, baseball executive Bill Veeck transcribed parts of the lost writings of Harry Grabiner, longtime secretary to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. Grabiner and Comiskey were wise to the Black Sox and hired a private investigator to look into the ’19 series. Grabiner’s diary chronicled the investigator’s findings all over baseball. (It’s important to note that Comiskey and Grabiner had
no intention of going on a public crusade with the information their investigator gathered—their goal was to cover up whatever gambling they found, not expose it.) Among the notes Grabiner made was the name of Gene Packard, a pitcher for the Cubs in ’16 and part of ’17. Next to Packard’s name, Grabiner wrote: “1918 Series fixer.”

Veeck’s reaction: “Oh boy.”
¹²

Whether or why the Cubs and Red Sox, as franchises, have been cursed can be debated, as can the possibility of a 1918 fix. But there’s something strange about those teams that goes beyond franchise futility. There’s a bizarre level of
personal
futility too. Scan the rosters of those who played and worked for the Cubs and Red Sox (especially the Cubs, the supposed fixers) and look at what happened to them after the 1918 World Series. You’ll find an inordinate number of tragic endings, disturbing downturns, and sullied reputations—especially sullied by gambling scandals. You’ll find that, not only did the 1918 World Series seem to leave what had been two very successful franchises dragging the ball-and-chain of stubborn curses, but a high number of individuals involved with those franchises suffered cursed fates too.

Weeghman, the team president and one of the city’s best-known businessmen, went broke 16 months after the World Series. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee would die young, at age 48, and his lasting legacy would be pariahdom in Boston decades later. The Cubs’ ace pitcher left to fight in World War I and came back an alcoholic and epileptic, later tainted as “crooked” in Grabiner’s diary. One star Red Sox pitcher would get caught up in a gambling scandal of his own making, and another would become the only pitcher to kill a man during a game. Two reserve Cubs who left for war in ’18 died young, one during an appendicitis operation and the other after a fall from a building. One star Cubs pitcher was forced out of baseball for contract jumping, and another suffered an arm injury from which he never recovered. A fourth Cubs pitcher, an alcoholic, was banished in 1922 after writing a suspicious letter to an opposing player (who had been his teammate with the ’18 Cubs). Chicago’s star shortstop mysteriously quit baseball at the peak of his career and later committed suicide. One Red Sox player, three Cubs players, and a Cubs secretary wound up entangled in the Black Sox scandal.

How’s that for cursed?

But the story of these two teams is about more than curses, more than baseball, more than gambling. It’s about the lives of those involved in baseball that year. The 1918 season presented unique pressures, which altered attitudes toward the game, toward gambling, toward salaries, and toward prospects for the future, not just as players but as men and citizens in a very turbulent United States. There was a constant threat of domestic terrorism. The drive toward prohibition was on, and there was a moral tug-of-war over vice—including gambling, which was as strong in Chicago and Boston as anywhere in the nation. Inflation was near its worst in history, making whatever money Americans had on hand increasingly worthless. And there was the Great War, the most brutal conflict in history, which was thrashing Europe with mechanized warfare, introducing the world to battles fought with submarines, airplanes, poisonous gas, long-range guns, tanks, and trench warfare. In 1918 the war was being joined by waves of just-drafted young American soldiers, ballplayers included.

This was a set of circumstances ripe for crookedness in baseball. Indeed, it was in 1918 that baseball’s gambling problem finally pushed through to the surface, as actual allegations of game fixing, backed by evidence, were publicly brought before a league president with the press watching. It was due to happen, and with all of the ’18 season played under the threat of early closure (and the probable shutting down of the game for 1919), it should be no surprise that this was the year when the baseball-gambling link began to unravel. It was in the 1918 season—not in the fixed 1919 World Series—we can say, for the first time with utter certainty, that there was game fixing in baseball.

That fixing might have spilled into the World Series. But, before judging the alleged fixers, we should get to know them, to know how the world looked at the time. It’s not hard to muster empathy—those times were similar to our own. There was war abroad and fear at home, a stumbling economy and rampant corruption. There wasn’t Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but there was Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. In baseball, writers of that time, as in our time, pined for the good old days, when players were not overpaid, when the game wasn’t dependent on specialists and dominated by commercialism, when wealthier teams could not simply buy pennants. And in 1918, baseball was seeing problems crop up from the gambling issue it had ignored and covered up for the previous 15 years or so—the same pattern of
denial that has defined baseball’s approach to today’s problems with performance-enhancing drugs.

We can’t prove that the Cubs threw all or even part of the ’18 series, but we can wonder—if they did, would reasonable, moral people have done the same in their situation? If participation in that World Series left both the Red Sox and Cubs franchises with curses to carry into the following century, if the baseball gods can’t find them worthy of forgiveness, at least, maybe, we mortals can.