Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (4 page)

But Cicotte remained adamant. He wanted no part of it. And as the weeks went by, it seemed to Gandil that his efforts were fruitless; it frustrated him terribly, since it had been clear from the start that he could not begin to operate without Cicotte.

Then, one night on a Pullman heading for Boston, Cicotte sat down next to him. Inexplicably, he mumbled his change of heart: "I'll do it for ten thousand dollars. Cash.
Before
the Series begins!"

That was all he said.

Immediately Gandil was off and running. With Cicotte aboard, he knew he could get others. Second on the list—there would be no trouble here—was shortstop "Swede" Risberg. He had already mentioned to Risberg the possibility of "fixing" the Series. Once too often, in fact. They had discussed it briefly in the locker room, not knowing that another ballplayer was lying on a bench behind a set of lockers. Utility infielder Fred McMullin, a friend of Risberg's, overheard and wanted in. There was no way to exclude him.

Gandil needed another pitcher. Cicotte would pitch two, maybe three games. The 1919 World Series was to run five out of nine. Gandil went after Claude "Lefty" Williams.

It was in New York, after a ball game against the Yankees. Gandil stood outside their hotel, the Ansonia, on Broadway and 74th Street, waiting for Williams to return from dinner. He pulled the great left-hander aside, and broached the matter to him. Williams was baffled, refusing at first to believe that such a wild scheme would be attempted. But Gandil was persistent and persuasive. Though Williams shied away, he didn't close the door behind him. He wanted to think it over.

That was enough for Gandil. He said that he'd already lined up the whole deal and that they were going ahead with it regardless of what Williams decided to do. So, if he was smart, he might as well get in on the take.

Williams was flustered. "Cicotte, too?"

Gandil nodded. He knew he had Williams now.

file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html All he needed to complete the roster were a few of the big hitters. He set out after Chicago's big three, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th hitters. They were George "Buck" Weaver, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, and Oscar

"Happy" Felsch. Somehow Gandil got them all to a meeting on the following night.

That Gandil had selected a powerful combination, there was no doubt; it was also a convenient one. The White Sox had spent the season split into two cliques, and Gandil's eight ballplayers made up one of them. Unknown even to loyal Chicago fans, this was a ball club ridden with dissension. The rival group was led by the brilliant team captain, Eddie Collins, recently of Columbia University, New York City bred, high-salaried. (Collins had been smart enough to have his $14,500 Philadelphia salary written into his contract when Comiskey bought him from the A's in 1915. This was more than double the salary of any of his teammates.) Risberg hated this great second baseman, resenting his income and his background. Though they played side by side, the Swede refused to talk to him. So did Gandil. Collins could legitimately complain that there were times when he didn't get a chance to feel the ball unless Ray Schalk threw it to him.

Schalk, a fiery little catcher, was another whom Gandil hated. Schalk was hardly the sociable type: he had no trouble despising them back. Schalk and Collins, pitchers Urban "Red" Faber and rookie Dickie Kerr were constant companions. The two groups seemed like strangers.

Not all of the reasons for the animosity are known, or even explicable. Much of the conflict stemmed from clashes of temperament that grew to serious rifts. Some of it sprang from sectional prejudices: Jackson, an illiterate Southerner, found affinity with Lefty Williams, another Southerner. He also seemed to feel at home with the undisciplined toughness of Gandil and Risberg, both from the wilds of California. Felsch was a smiling, easygoing, badly educated boy from Milwaukee, constantly seeking raucous pleasure and adventure. This group was alive with it. Collins and his clique seemed somber and subdued.

To anyone who knew this ball club intimately, it was incredible that, with all the bitterness and dissension, they could continue to win ball games. That they did was, perhaps, the greatest possible testimonial to their baseball abilities.

On September 21, the eight ballplayers assembled after dinner in Chick Gandil's room at the Ansonia. In the history of American sport, it would be difficult to find another meeting that led to events so shattering. The ballplayers, however, appeared to have treated it all lightly. There was none of the conspiratorial somberness that might normally be attached to such occasions. Several of them made a joke out of it all, suggesting special bonuses to the guys who could make the most errors or leave the most men on bases. Happy Felsch lapped it up: he recalled—aptly—that when he was a kid, he used to get hit on the head by fly balls that seemed to slip through his glove.

Gandil, however, made sure that the terms were clearly specified. He recounted how he had demanded $80,000—in advance—at his meeting with Sport Sullivan, who had agreed to get it. The ballplayers file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html would be paid off in full before the opening game. Details on how the games were to be thrown would be worked out with Sullivan and his backers, depending on how they wished to manipulate the odds—

and how Kid Gleason chose to work the pitchers.

With hindsight, this meeting looms as a macabre opening to a tragedy. No doubt a wiser man than any of these eight players would have known it then and there. Here were eight men at the peak of their careers, playing on a pennant-winning club that might well be rated as one of the great teams in baseball history.

They were idols to millions of fans, especially in Chicago, perhaps the best baseball town in America.

With the exception of Cicotte, they could look forward to six to ten years of continuing triumphs and rising incomes. Instead, they chose to risk all this for a sleazy promise of dirty money.

Here was Shoeless Joe Jackson, commonly rated as the greatest natural hitter the game had ever seen. At thirty, he had passed ten sensational years in big-league ball, compiling a remarkable batting average of .356. His tremendous skill as a hitter kept improving with each passing year. He was a superb outfielder with a rifle for an arm.

Here was George "Buck" Weaver, smiling, boyish, not quite thirty, already heralded as the classiest third baseman in the game. Agile as a cat, defiant of all hitters, the only man Ty Cobb refused to bunt against.

He had become a steady .300 hitter, climbing each year. He was an indomitable lover of baseball.

Here was Charles "Swede" Risberg, twenty-five years old, and in his third season in the majors. A big, rangy, brilliant shortstop, who could throw bullets to first base, who played ball like a man on fire.

Here was Oscar "Happy" Felsch, a warm, smiling, fast-moving outfielder, also under thirty. He was rapidly becoming a leading power hitter. As a centerfielder, he was among the best.

Here was Claude "Lefty" Williams, number two pitcher for the Sox. A quiet, soft-spoken Southerner with a highly skilled left arm. He had won 23 games, could boast of the finest control in baseball. On the mound, he always knew exactly what he was doing.

Then why…?

Or, perhaps more significantly, why not?

It never entered their minds that they could not get away with their plan. There was almost no discussion of its dangers. They didn't even care about the men who would back it. The only security measure they ever took was to leave the hotel room one or two at a time.

For this was the world of baseball in 1919. Every one of them knew of thrown ball games. Two years before, they had participated in a strange manipulation that helped them win the American League pennant: almost the entire club had been openly assessed $45 each, ostensibly to reward two Detroit Tiger pitchers for beating Boston in a crucial series, but actually to bribe them to throw a double header file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html to the Sox. Their own experience, as well as the existing corruption in baseball, made their participation in the fix all too easy.

Money was the goal, to be leaped at from a springboard of bitterness. These were eight bitter man with a common enemy: Charles Albert Comiskey. Whatever his stature in professional baseball, however many his notable contributions to its turbulent history, to his employees he was a cheap, stingy tyrant. All baseball salaries suffered in 1919, as noted, but even before that a skimpy paycheck was nothing new to a Chicago White Sox ballplayer. Joe Jackson, one of the greatest sluggers of his time, had never earned more than $6,000. Buck Weaver, the same. Gandil and Felsch were paid $4,000. Lefty Williams and Swede Risberg got less than $3,000. No players of comparable talent on other teams were paid as little.

Compared with their 1919 World Series rivals from Cincinnati, these figures seemed pitiful. Outfielder Edd Roush, leading Reds hitter, though some 40 or 50 percentage points below Jackson, made $10,000.

Heinie Groh, at third base, topped Weaver's salary by almost $2,000. First baseman Jake Daubert, recently acquired from Brooklyn, earned $9,000. It was the same all around the leagues. Many second-rate ballplayers on second-division ball clubs made more than the White Sox. It had been that way for years.

The White Sox would receive their annual contracts and stare glumly at the figures. In the face of Comiskey's famous intransigeance, their protests were always feeble. Harry Grabiner, who, as club secretary, handled the contracts, would repeat the timeworn threat: Take it or leave it! The threat had absolute impact, backed by the rules and contracts of professional baseball itself. For each of them was owned by the club, totally and incontrovertibly. If they refused to accept the terms offered them, they could not play baseball anywhere else in the professional world. No one could hire them. This was the famous reserve clause, included in every contract, the rock upon which professional baseball rested. It said, in effect, that the club owner would employ the player's services for one year, holding in reserve the right to renew his contract the following year. And so on, in perpetuity.

But there was more to their grievances. Comiskey's penuriousness went beyond their salaries. It was his habit to squeeze them in petty ways as well. They resented his $3-a-day meal allowance while on the road. It was a kind of joke among other clubs, almost all of whom received a minimum of $4. Even the poorer clubs that finished in the second division did not cut such corners. This was all the more an irritant since Comiskey seemed inordinantly concerned about the newspapermen who hung around. For them, he had a special room in Comiskey Park, with a huge table laden with succulent roasts and salads, a chef to serve them, and a bottomless supply of fine bourbon to liven their spirits. His generosity here was unmatched. Yet his great ball club might run out on the field in the filthiest uniforms the fans had ever seen: Comiskey had given orders to cut down on the cleaning bills.

There were betrayals, too. Like Comiskey's promise to give Cicotte a $10,000-bonus in 1917 if he won 30 games. When the great pitcher threatened to reach that figure, it was said that Comiskey had him benched. The excuse, of course, was to rest him for the World Series. There had also been talk that Comiskey had promised all the players a bonus if they won the 1917 pennant. They won it—and the world's championship. The bonus was a case of champagne at the victory celebration.

file:///C|/Palm%20Stuff/Eliot,%20Asinof%20-%20Eig...tml]/Eight%20Men%20Out%20by%20Eliot%20Asinof.html A monetary frustration hung over them all. If the public looked up to them, admired them, chased after them, this very prominence served to exacerbate their sense of helplessness. Their taste of fame whetted their appetites, but there was no meat and potatoes to satisfy them. All they'd been eating was Charles Comiskey's garbage. They wanted to shout to everyone: "Look, it's not the way you think it is!" The obvious outlet for their complaints was cut off from them, for newspapermen were Comiskey's boys.

Their bread was buttered on the other side. They rode in the Pullmans as guests of the club owner, all expenses paid and then some. Officially they were on the staff of their respective papers, but Comiskey always made them feel as if they were working for him. And in the process, he made the ballplayers feel like dirt.

It was foreboding that Gandil's meeting broke up without any real resolution. The players could rationalize that the next move was not theirs anyway: it was up to Sport Sullivan to come up with the money. Even now Lefty Williams didn't particularly go for the idea. Happy Felsch covered a growing uneasiness.

They would all wait and see.

The "spirit" of the coming World Series was not confined to Chick Gandil and company. It also bit the sweaty palm of one William Thomas Burns, known among his old baseball colleagues as "Sleepy Bill."

Burns was a former ballplayer, a third-rate pitcher with a record of five unsuccessful years in the majors.

(He won 29 games, lost 55.) His nickname was derived from his somnolent personality as well as his habits: it was said that he used to fall asleep on the bench during the ball games. It was also said that he was a little odd about riding on trains. He claimed to have witnessed, as a boy in Texas, many daring train robberies. As a man, he could not free himself from his fears of brigands, and often placed a giant revolver under the pillow in his berth. Any unusual sound was a cue for him to level the shiny iron at the passer-by. It became customary for his teammates to move with extreme caution in Burns's car.

Burns retired from baseball in 1917, and went into the oil business, a logical outgrowth of a lifelong ambition to get rich quick. Incredibly, he did. And by the late summer of 1919, he was ready to head back north to do a little business with some oil leases and a little boasting on the side.

It was perhaps coincidence that he arrived in New York at the time the White Sox were there. But when he started hearing some talk, it was no coincidence that he bumped into his old baseball buddy, Eddie Cicotte, in the lobby of the Ansonia. As pitchers in rival clubs, they had talked baseball many times.