In June 1882 Dick Higham, an umpire, was fired by the National League after confessing to collusion with gamblers. Scandals in baseball reached their peak in the period from 1917 to 1927, a decade in which sagging attendance revenues and acrimony between players and owners resulted in a rash of unscrupulous behavior. No less than thirty-eight major league players were either banned or brought up on serious charges on issues relating to the integrity of the game.
The Black Sox scandal, a behind-the-scenes agreement to throw the 1919 World Series, remains the most well-known disgrace to the game. The contest, which pitted the Chicago White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds, looked at first like an easy win for the White Sox (who called themselves Black Sox because their owner, Charles Comiskey, refused to pay for the teams' uniforms to be washed). The team's first baseman, Chick Gandil, persuaded a few players to join him in throwing the series, among them pitchers Claude "Lefty" Williams and Eddie Cicotte. Each of them was to be paid off, some $10,000 and others $20,000, to make errors that would cost the White Sox the Series. "The cash seems to have been provided mostly by New York's most celebrated gambler, Arnold Rothstein" (Ward and Burns, p.
This is a free page. This page contains 198 words. This
article contains 4,030 words (approx. 13 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our The Natural Access Pass.
