Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (30 page)

"Who is the dumbest guy of those eight players?"

The reply, after a brief hesitation, was Felsch.

Reutlinger asked, "The one they call 'Happy'?"

"That's right," was the reply.

Reutlinger smiled. He sensed he was already on the right track. "Where does one find this happy chap?"

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he asked further.

"The Warner Hotel," he was told.

Less than an hour later, he knocked on Felsch's door. Under his arm was a bottle of good Scotch whisky, wrapped sloppily in a copy of the morning
American
. Felsch smiled. He was in his bathrobe, and had been soaking a swollen big toe.

Reutlinger smiled back. "Hap," he said. "I can cure that bad toe." And he withdrew the wrapping from the bottle of Scotch. "All we need is a couple of glasses…."

Felsch was too friendly a man not to warm up to a person like this. Reutlinger, himself, delighted in talking to the ballplayer. He told Felsch he was a writer. He wanted to understand what went on with this rotten scandal. He thought the public would like to know. By God, why shouldn't Felsch tell his own story?

For the life of him, Felsch couldn't figure out why not. He began to spill it all out:

"Well, the beans are all spilled and I think that I am through with baseball. I got my five thousand and I suppose the others got theirs, too. If you say anything about me, don't make it appear that I'm trying to put up an alibi. I'm not. I'm as guilty as any of them. We all were in it alike.

"I don't know what I'm going to do now. I have been a ballplayer during the best years of my life, and I never got into any other kind of business. I'm going to hell, I guess. I intend to hang around Chicago awhile until I see how this thing is going to go. Then, maybe, I'll go back to Milwaukee."

The smile that gave him his nickname faded as he considered his prospects.

"I wish that I hadn't gone into it. I guess we all do. We have more than earned the few dollars they gave us for turning crooked. All this season the memory of the World Series has been hanging over us. The talk that we threw games this year is bunk. We knew we were suspected and we tried to be square. But a guy can't be crooked part of the time and square the rest of the time. We knew that sooner or later somebody was going to turn up the whole deal.

"Cicotte's story is true in every detail. I don't blame him for telling. He knew the Grand Jury had a case against him and there wouldn't have been any object in holding out. He did the best thing to do under the circumstances. I was ready to confess myself yesterday, but I didn't have the courage to be the first to tell. I never knew where my five thousand came from. It was left in my locker at the clubhouse and there was always a good deal of mystery about the way it was dealt out. That was one of the reasons why we never knew who double-crossed us on the split of the hundred thousand. It was to have been an even split. But we never got it.

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"Who was responsible for the double cross I couldn't say. I suspected Gandil because he was the wisest one of the lot and had sense enough to get out of baseball before the crash came. But I have heard since that it was Abe Attell. Maybe it was Attell. I don't know him, but I had heard that he was mixed up with the gamblers who were backing us to lose.

"I didn't want to get in on the deal at first. I had always received square treatment from 'Commy' and it didn't look quite right to throw him down. But when they let me in on the idea, too many men were involved. I didn't like to be a squealer and I knew that if I stayed out of the deal and said nothing about it they would go ahead without me and I'd be that much money out without accomplishing anything. I'm not saying this to pass the buck to the others. I suppose that if I had refused to enter the plot and had stood my ground I might have stopped the whole deal. We all share the blame equally.

"I'm not saying that I double-crossed the gamblers, but I had nothing to do with the loss of the World Series. The breaks just came so that I was not given a chance to throw the game. The records show that I played a pretty good game. I know I missed one terrible fly ball, but you can believe me or not, I was trying to catch that ball. I lost it in the sun and made a long run for it, and looked foolish when it fell quite a bit away from where it ought to be. The other men in the know thought that I had lost the ball deliberately and that I was putting on a clown exhibition. They warned me after the game to be more careful about the way I muffed flies.

"Whether I could actually have gotten up enough nerve to carry out my part in throwing the game I can't say. The gold looked good to all of us, and I suppose we could have gone ahead with the double cross.

But as I said, I was given no chance to decide. When we went into that conference in Cicotte's room, he said that it would be easy for us to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, that we were expert ballplayers, and that we could throw the game scientifically. It looked easy to me, too. It's just as easy for a good player to miss a a ball as it is to catch it—just a slow start or a stumble at the right time or a slow throw and the job is done. But you can't get away with that stuff indefinitely. You may be able to fool the public, but you can't fool yourself."

Reutlinger then asked him: "How did Cicotte get ten thousand dollars?"

"Because he was wise enough to stand pat for it, that's all. Cicotte has brains. The rest of us roundheads just took their word for the proposition that we were to get an even split on the hundred thousand.

Cicotte was going to make sure of his share from the jump off. He made them come across with it.

"I'm going to see Buck Weaver and get him to go over to see the State's Attorney with me. I'm going to get through with all of this. It will be a load off my mind to tell everything I know. It's been hell for me.

I have a bad foot—the big toe is all smashed and it kept me awake all night. And then on top of that came this action by the Grand Jury.

"As for hiring a lawyer and putting up a defense in this case, I haven't made any plans. I haven't talked to anybody about this case but you, and I want to see Weaver and Williams before arranging for a defense.

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"I got five thousand dollars. I could have got just about that much by being on the level if the Sox had won the Series. And now I'm out of baseball—the only profession I knew anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us."

Harry Reutlinger was moved. How much of Felsch's story was honest and accurate, he had no real idea.

What evoked his admiration was the genuine remorse and lack of self-pity. Felsch was guilty, yet he had pride in himself. The entire confession was devoid of anger or bitterness. He had simply done a bad thing and was ready to take the consequences. If he admired Cicotte for his good sense in getting paid in advance, he did not really believe that Cicotte was anything but an idiot like himself. Reutlinger had seen enough of America to know that the written rules were rigid and righteous, while the real rules were often wide open and dirty. Such he assumed, were the rules of baseball itself. You played hard and got away with as much as you could, legal or otherwise. Wasn't Ty Cobb supposed to be the greatest of them all at that game? It was all Felsch ever knew, he guessed. To the people of America, professional baseball was clean and honest and Reutlinger had been naïve enough to believe that himself, though he'd never given it much thought. Now he sensed that it never really had been, that Felsch and the others had taken no real departure from the only reality they knew. Not that it could be justified or excused. It was, at best, stupid and downright dishonest. But it opened the door to an examination of just how dishonest the men who ran this great national pastime must be. Felsch had said, "I had always received square treatment from 'Commy' and it didn't look right to throw him down." Reutlinger knew what that meant: square treatment from Comiskey was merely honest exploitation. Felsch and the others must have hated Comiskey for their own assortment of reasons, for a decent man would not betray another without some basic cause for bitterness. Call that Reutlinger's law; he saw in Felsch's defense of his boss only the honest desire not to hide his guilt.

What struck Reutlinger was that Happy Felsch was completely without basic evil. He wasn't even a dishonest type. He would never steal a dime from you, even if you left him alone with an unlocked safe.

He would probably stake you with his last five dollars. He had merely been sucked into a plot for some easy money in a society that thrived on the worship of it. The cruel irony was that the unseen men who used him—the gamblers—had gotten rich on his broken back.

"The joke," as Felsch so artfully put it, "seems to be on us."

Reutlinger went back to his office and reread the reports of Cicotte's and Jackson's confessions. He compared them with Felsch's. The conclusions were dismaying. He was struck by the almost incredible lack of organization that surrounded the entire fix. One ballplayer did not know what the other was doing. Jackson, for example, said that the third game was fixed, but that they won it anyway. Williams did not even know. No one checked on the distribution of the money. They never sought to confer with one another except in rare, isolated instances. They had maintained a more rigid silence within their own group than did the gamblers with those outside the fix. If Williams knew little of the inner workings, Jackson seemed to know less. Felsch could offer no report as to what happened. But most of all, Reutlinger could not understand the curious ignorance as to where the money went—the whole reason for the frame-up. It was as if these four men wanted to pretend that the whole thing was not really file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:46 AM

happening at all. They simply resigned themselves to what they called the "double cross" and let the Series and the money slip away from them. They were "roundheads," as Felsch described them, passive participants in their own destruction. They had spoken a halfhearted "yes" to the persuasive Gandil, and then let happen whatever might happen.

"Never bet on anything that can talk!"

Nick the Greek

The Hot Stove league has openedAhead of time this year;'Twill be the hottest seasonOf all its long career.

George PhairChicago
Herald and Examiner
September 29, 1920

As the impact of the confessions sank in, the American people were at first shocked, then sickened.

There was hardly a major newspaper that did not cry out its condemnation and despair. Henceforth, the ballplayers involved were called the Black Sox. But the scandal was a betrayal of more than a set of ball games, even more than of the sport itself. It was a crushing blow at American pride. The year before, America had won the war in the image of nobility and humanity. "Saving Europe from the Hun" was a sacrificial act. Our pride in victory was the essence of American pride in itself. Baseball was a manifestation of the greatest of America at play. It was our national game; its stars were national heroes, revered by kids and adults alike, in all classes of our society. In the public mind, the image was pure and patriotic. The game had become part of our culture, intruding on our very speech patterns: "He began life with
two strikes
on him…. I'll take
a rain check
on that lunch…."

Now, suddenly, that pride was shattered. The National Pastime was nothing more than another show of corruption. To a kid-as to many adults-it seemed terribly indicative. If baseball was corrupt, then
anything
might be-and probably was. If you could not trust the honesty of a big-league world series, what
could
you trust?

There is no way to gauge the extent of the damage on the American psyche. It is impossible to add up bitterness like a batting average. How great was the layer of cynicism that settled over the nation? How many kids developed tolerance for a lie, for a betrayal, for corruption itself?

The scandal touched all strata of American life. Newspapers dramatized its destructive effect on children, but adults, even intellectuals, sensed its cutting impact. Ring Lardner, for one, was deeply hurt by this full, final realization of his worst suspicions. His adoration for the White Sox disintegrated; his file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html2/17/2004 11:47:46 AM

love for professional baseball began to fade with it. In time, he stopped reporting baseball, even stopped going to ball games. The scandal scarred him, leaving a wound that would remain tender for the rest of his life. Significantly, he never wrote a column on the fix or a word about any of its participants. The disillusion, however, was undoubtedly a contributing element to Lardner's bitter portrayal of sporting figures in his later short stories.

There was something almost prophetic about the scandal. The 1920's, a decade of unprecedented crime, corruption, and immorality, were just beginning.

"Say it ain't so, Joe…say it ain't so." It was like a last, desperate plea for faith itself.

A week later, Chicago kids were hollering derisively: "Play bail!" in lieu of the usual cry to begin a game….

The fans were angry, and in their anger, they did not seek solutions or explanations. They cared less about retribution for the eight men who had sold them out than the ugly fact that the thing had happened at all. If the spokesman for the owners tried to isolate the scandal (clean out the dirty players and baseball will be pure again), the fans were not buying it. You simply could not convince them that Jackson, Weaver, Cicotte
et al
were a combine of evil. It was somehow vaguely understood that the problem was bigger than that.