Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Asinof Eliot & Gould Stephen Jay

Author:Asinof, Eliot & Gould, Stephen Jay [Asinof, Eliot & Gould, Stephen Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780805065374
Amazon: 0805065377
Goodreads: 11002
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published: 1977-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

5

Meanwhile, there was contract trouble with an infielder of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club. The ballplayer was Lee Magee, who finished the 1919 season with Chicago after signing a two-year contract with them. However, just before the 1920 season began, the Cubs had notified Magee of his unconditional release. For reasons not disclosed to the public, Magee found himself unable to make a deal with any other club. The doors of professional baseball were beginning to shut on players who had been involved with gamblers. The National League had a rather noncommittal method of easing undesirable ballplayers out without explanation. There was a clause in its constitution granting the League the right to pass on the desirability of any player.

Magee, of course, knew the reason: he had been named in connection with Hal Chase's gambling maneuvers. The rumors that surrounded the 1919 Series were starting to force the hands of baseball's power figures.

But Magee was not the kind of man who was willing to be victimized. Defiantly, he hired a lawyer and challenged the National League Commissioner, John Heydler, to do battle. It turned out to be a fruitless gesture for Magee, but it stirred up enough action to frighten Heydler and all of baseball's officialdom.

The ensuing trial revealed that Magee, along with Chase, had been involved in betting against his own club in 1919. The jury decided against Magee who was promptly chased out of baseball forever. If he knew anything about the 1919 Series, it never came out at the trial. Significantly, the Chicago Cubs's attorney, Murray Seasongood, scrupulously avoided bringing that matter up.

It was the first public exposure to crookedness in baseball. To many, it seemed to threaten exposure of any number of other, comparable incidents. But baseball was not so inclined. Once again, business was booming. Attendance figures for 1920 were soaring higher than 1919.

Baseball Magazine had a curious word for it all, and in the process took another random pot shot at its favorite enemy, Hugh Fullerton: "Magee, after all, has not hurt the game in which he will no longer have a part. The greater harm was done by sensational writers like Hugh Fullerton, men for whose actions there was not the slightest excuse."

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The logic of this tack was, at best, devious. The editorial casually dismissed Magee as a crooked ballplayer, but condemned Fullerton for trying to expose him.

The owners, meanwhile, began to attack the disease by picking a few pimples. Plain-clothes men circulated around notorious gambling centers at various ball parks. Ban Johnson announced that the American League had engaged a specially trained squad of detectives. To make a public show of their efforts, forty-six petty gamblers were arrested at one game. They were fined $1 each and told to keep away from the bleachers.

Chicago Tribune sportswriter, Jim Cruisenberry, made mockery of this whole procedure: There was a time when some of the bleacherites "would stake nickels or dimes on batters as they stepped up to the plate. 'A dime he does!' or 'Five he don't!' Detectives in the bleachers have arrested a number of these boys.

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