The Original Curse (34 page)

Might Mann have known something about the 1918 World Series and spoken up about it? Might he have implicated Douglas? Could that be why Mann thought Douglas was framing him?

In the span of one week in the summer of 1919, the Cubs traded away Douglas to Brooklyn for Lee Magee and then traded Mann and Charley Pick to the Braves for Buck Herzog. Magee and Herzog both were known gamblers. We know how teams at the time handled gamblers—they shuffled them around to other teams. Perhaps, at some point in the 1919 season, Mann had gone to team officials about the 1918 World Series, perhaps he pointed at Douglas, and perhaps that put him “in wrong” with his Cubs teammates. Thus the Cubs would have had to trade away Mann and Douglas under duress, agreeing to take problem players from the Braves and Dodgers in return. That, at least, would explain what Mann meant when he wrote to Herrmann.

This is all theory, of course, but that’s precisely the challenge. Baseball was so secretive about its gambling problem that, nearly a century later, we are left only with theories and best guesses. The truth was buried very effectively. But, given all the evidence—the uncertain circumstances of the players in general, the drastic and unexpected reduction in World Series shares, the rumors that have popped up in a diary and a deposition—the best guess is that, yes, something was not right about the 1918 World Series.

It is unlikely that the Series, though, was fixed from the beginning. There was some question about the Cubs’ play in Game 1—Charley Hollocher was often out of position, according to writer Hugh Fullerton, and the Cubs allowed Dave Shean to get a questionably large lead off second base to set up the winning run—but, mostly, the performance of the two teams was sharp in the first three games at Comiskey Park. It was not until the train ride from Chicago to Boston, when players were finally hit with the reality of the poor payouts the World Series would bring, that the games turned suspiciously sloppy. At that point players would have been low-hanging fruit for would-be fixers.

Considering the prevalence of gamblers around the Series, and the ease with which they mixed with players (Gene Fowler, for one, saw
gamblers hanging out in Doc Krone’s room, drinking with Babe Ruth), it’s likely that bribe offers were made to players even before the Series. If those offers were resisted over the course of the first three games, the National Commission’s stubborn unwillingness to beef up the teams’ very slim payouts probably eroded that resistance. Why should players not accept some money to play some crooked games? Why should the players protect the honor of a sport that was not, as they saw it, being honorable to the players? The Cubs may have intended to play an honest Series. But the actions of the National Commission would have made it easy to shove aside honest intentions.

Game 4 smells very foul. Max Flack’s performance was not just bad. It was historically bad. He was picked off twice, he tapped a harmless grounder back to the pitcher in a key situation, and he committed an obvious misplay on Ruth’s triple. Flack also made the fatal error in Game 6, and though he did score the Cubs’ only run in that game, he was excessively aggressive in scoring that run—he stole third with two outs, and if he had been caught, he would have broken the time-honored baseball maxim that states baserunners should never make the third out at third base. Flack certainly had incentives. He had a young child at home outside St. Louis and, unlike many of the players, did not have a farm to which to return. As the Series ended, Flack was one of the few Cubs who had not lined up essential employment. He would have needed money.

Claude Hendrix, too, comes into question for his awkward Game 4 baserunning, which was bad enough to force Mitchell to pull him out of the game. Hendrix, it was reported, was lucky not to have been caught while taking an unnecessarily big lead after reaching second base, which would have killed a Cubs rally had he been thrown out. And Hendrix has a questionable reputation working against him. In 1920, he would be pulled from a scheduled start because gamblers contacted the Cubs and claimed he was crooked. Hendrix was not officially banned because of that, but he was released the next year, and suspicion about his connection with gambling lingers.

Douglas’s performance in Game 4, too, is suspicious. He probably was rusty, and that could very well explain his struggles. But Douglas found a way to make mistakes at every turn. He pitched a terrible eighth inning, allowing a hit and a passed ball, which he followed with his wild toss to Merkle on a bunt attempt. That throw lost the game. Because of the letter that he sent to Mann in 1922, Douglas,
too, has a reputation working against him. Douglas also was notoriously bad with money and, like Flack, did not have essential employment lined up as the World Series was progressing.

If there was a Cubs fix, it probably involved these three, and perhaps others. Remember how Cicotte had phrased the fix rumor: “Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series. There was talk that somebody offered this player $10,000 or anyway the bunch of players were offered $10,000.” Perhaps Flack was “this player.” Or, perhaps Flack, Hendrix, and Douglas were “the bunch of players.”

Of course, Hendrix and Douglas were not starting pitchers at all during the World Series, so their impact was limited. But, remember, Mitchell’s decision to use only Vaughn and Tyler in the Series was unexpected and controversial—most thought that either Douglas or Hendrix, if not both, would get starts in the Series. It would make perfect sense for gamblers to target them. Considering how awfully they performed when they finally did appear on the World Series field in Game 4, if gamblers had bribed Hendrix and Douglas, it would have been money well spent. And there’s another possibility. Maybe Mitchell knew something. Maybe he’d heard that gamblers had gotten to Hendrix and Douglas, and he decided to use only Tyler and Vaughn not because of his percentage system but because he didn’t trust that his two right-handers were on the level.

The Chase-Magee affair in Boston shows how easy it was for players looking to throw a game to find gamblers to back them in 1918. If the Cubs threw the Series, they could have found ways to make money from it on their own. But if, as Grabiner’s diary indicates, pitcher Gene Packard was involved with fixing the Series, he would have been well connected on the Cubs side. Packard had been with Chicago in 1916, as well as for spring training and part of the 1917 season. He had been a teammate of Hendrix, Flack, and Douglas and was an ex–Federal League comrade of Flack and Hendrix (though Packard played for Kansas City). Packard had spent the season in St. Louis, a town well stocked with gambling characters. A year later, St. Louis would be one of the epicenters of the Black Sox scandal—gambler Carl Zork, of St. Louis, was among those indicted with White Sox players for the fix. During the Black Sox trial, theater owner Harry Redmon testified that Zork bragged about fixing the 1919 World Series with “a red-headed fellow from St. Louis.” St. Louis was also home to Kid Becker, the
gambler rumored to have set up a 1918 Series fix that he called off because of a lack of funds.

The Cubs had the motive and the means to fix the last half of the World Series, and Games 4 and 6 have the crucial errors and bizarre baserunning mistakes that are indicative of fixed games. But, if there was a fix, one question looms: what about Game 5, a 3–0 Cubs win? Why didn’t the Cubs throw that one? There are two possible explanations. It may be that Vaughn, not in on the fix, was simply having a dominant day and, even if his teammates behind him wanted to throw the game, they would not get the opportunity. The Red Sox got just three hits after all. But if we really want to expand the conspiracy possibilities, there is the chance that it was the
Red Sox
who played indifferently in Game 5. They would have had plenty of incentive not to win that game. Boston held a 3–1 lead at that point, as players for the Red Sox and Cubs were still trying to get either their club owners or the National Commission to give them better payouts for the World Series. The only leverage the players had in the fight was playing or not playing—their power was derived from the threat of another strike. If the Red Sox had won, the Series would have been over and the players’ leverage would have been gone. It may have been that the Red Sox did not get many hits off Vaughn because they were not trying to get many hits off Vaughn.

Ambrose Bierce wrote, “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” This notion fits neatly around the days of gambling scandals in baseball. The game’s history was easily manipulated by its knave rulers (the magnates) and its fool soldiers (the players). There was, obviously, one great scandal in that era of baseball—the fixing of the 1919 World Series—and once word of that conspiracy reached the public, the challenge for baseball’s leaders became to limit the damage such a massive hoax could cause to the image of the game. After much political struggle among league power brokers, and after the embarrassing criminal trial that ended in 1921 with eight accused White Sox players granted an acquittal, major-league baseball did precisely the right thing from a public-relations standpoint: it shaped history as favorably as possible.

Already, tough, well-respected federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had been brought in as the commissioner, the white knight
who would, in the eyes of the public, single-handedly clean up base-ball’s gambling problem and return honesty to the game. Landis immediately went to work, banning the eight Black Sox players despite the acquittal and famously declaring, “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

Landis’s message was clear: the Black Sox were guilty, they were banned, the gambling problem was solved. Landis would continue to deal with game-fixing allegations throughout the early part of his tenure as commissioner, but never did he act as decisively as he did with the Black Sox. Nor did he delve into the questions that surrounded the scandal. He did not investigate teams (the 1919 Giants, for example) that were known to be riddled with gamblers and problem players. He did not seek answers to obvious questions, like why Cubs official John O. Seys had been a stakeholder for Abe Attell’s 1919 bets or why former Cubs president Charley Weeghman was so friendly with Mont Tennes, a gambling kingpin whom Landis himself had investigated. He did not seek to find out whether other teams might have thrown past World Series. He did not even look into the initial scandal that started the courtroom revelation of the Black Sox—the fixing of the August 31, 1920, game between the Cubs and the Phillies.

To do so only would have deepened baseball’s wounds and further shaken the public’s faith in the honesty of the game. Landis did not deal with gambling in baseball by getting down to the roots of the problem. He dealt with it by containing it, by funneling as much as he could into the Black Sox file, punishing those involved and ignoring the rest. He was successful—history says little about the allegedly fixed 1920 Cubs game, the 1919 Giants, or the possibility of other fixed World Series. Now fans who look back on the early days of baseball see eight men suspended from the White Sox for fixing the 1919 World Series and leave it at that. History does not tell us about World Series fixes in 1912 or 1914 or 1921, because, if those Series were crooked, baseball’s knave rulers did not want anyone to know. So, we can look back on that era of baseball and accept the official history, which says that big-time game fixing started and ended with the Black Sox (with a Hal Chase or a Lee Magee sprinkled in for those who happen
to look closely). Or we can examine history’s fringes for clues about what’s been omitted intentionally from the official story.

Skeptics will, no doubt, wonder how baseball’s magnates could pull off such an extended hoax, how officials and players of the game could allow such a problem to blossom without exposing it or cutting it off altogether. The answer is simple: they were making money. Dragging the game down with gambling scandals made no sense for owners. Prosperity tends to provide a pretty big blind spot. We see that in today’s game. Baseball is currently in the midst of a two-decade Steroid Era, and there is no question that the higher-ups of the game have known about and ignored deadly drug abuse over the past 20 years. One of the hallmarks of the Steroid Era, though, was that players were hitting tremendous home runs and fans were flocking to ballparks in record numbers. The game’s drug problem was known, but owners were making so much money that it was better to simply ignore it.

We can put baseball’s gambling problem in the early 20th century in the same context as the current performance-enhancing drug problem. Only in recent years have revelations about PEDs become widespread, and though we now have public accusations and evidence against players such as Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Roger Clemens, there are likely dozens of players—especially those who played in the 1990s, before the drug problem became widely known—who used performance enhancers but, effectively, got away with it. So it was with gambling in the 1910s. Many simply got away with it. Yes, the 1919 Black Sox got caught, and, yes, Landis made examples of the eight Chicago players and a handful of others. But he did not poke through every game-fixing rumor from the previous 20 years, fearing that he would do too much harm.

Similarly, in December 2007, former senator George Mitchell, appointed by commissioner Bud Selig to look into the doping problem in baseball, released his report, naming 89 players accused of using performance enhancers. Far more than 89 players used PEDs, of course, and more names have come out as a result of other investigations. But the Mitchell Report was designed to do exactly what Landis and baseball had done 86 years earlier with the gambling problem: to contain it and to shape history favorably.