Presented by LIGHTING ON DEMAND.
This Day In Sports…October 9, 1919:
The Cincinnati Reds defeat the Chicago White Sox, 10-5, to win the World Series five games-to-three. A year later it was learned that eight White Sox players were involved in throwing the Series, leading to the infamous “Black Sox Scandal”. Outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was at the center of it, and his guilt or innocence has been debated ever since—right through the 1989 motion picture “Field of Dreams”.
The White Sox had won the 1917 World Series, but there was no windfall thanks (or no thanks) to club owner Charles Comiskey, a renowned penny-pincher. Players had few rights and no leverage at the time, and they resented Comiskey. There were gamblers under every rock looking for money-hungry players, and they found some takers in Chicago. The eight Black Sox took a Boston bookmaker, Joe “Sport” Sullivan, up on his $80,000 offer to throw the Series against the Reds.
The star of the White Sox was Jackson. He wasn’t part of the scheme’s planning, and to this day there are those who believe he wasn’t involved. But Jackson did testify during the 1921 trial that he accepted $5,000 in cash from the gamblers, although he denied doing anything during the Series to throw it. (Jackson led both teams in batting with a .375 average, threw out five baserunners and committed zero errors.) On the other hand, historians decry the “Field of Dreams” portrayal of Jackson as a martyr. He did take the money, after all.
As a result of the scandal, baseball’s first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Landis, was tasked with restoring the sport’s integrity. When the indictments were handed down in October, 2020, a young boy outside the courthouse allegedly said to Jackson through tears, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” (That’s never been confirmed, but it’s a great story.) The eight players were acquitted in a 1921 trial, but Landis permanently banned all eight of them from baseball nevertheless. Earlier this year, current commissioner Rob Manfred reinstated the Black Sox Eight—along with Pete Rose and others.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
