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Saying It Was So: Exploring the Black Sox Scandal

The history of gambling in baseball is nearly as long as the history of professional baseball itself. Gambling scandals plagued the sport for years. As both books note, the gambling scandals of the twentieth century—especially the infamous Black Sox scandal, which saw professional baseball players work with professional gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series—had scandalous forerunners going back to the nineteenth century. Baseball, as a sport, proved stubbornly prone to regular cycles of game fixing, or hippodroming, as the late nineteenth century called it—especially during the 1870s, the turn of the century, and the late nineteen teens. The sheer audacity of the Black Sox scandal forced professional baseball to act to get its house in order. Fixing a game here or there, fixing a regular season series of games—these were bad enough, and clearly threatened the integrity of the sport. There is no reason for fans to invest in their team if the outcome of the game is settled before the players take the field. But fixing the culmination of the entire baseball season—fixing the World Series? There were those who thought professional baseball could not recover from such a blow. As sportswriter Hugh Fullerton famously vented in The New York World in October 1919: “Yesterday’s, in all probability, is the last game that will ever be played in any World Series.” These two books, The Black Prince of Baseball and The Betrayal, together tell us about the scandal and its players. The Black Prince is a biography of Hal Chase, the best-known criminal in baseball. A first baseman of outrageous talent, he squandered his gifts in betting and fixing games. He bet on games in which he played, as well as on those in which he did not. He repeatedly accepted money from professional