The Black Sox scandal was hardly an isolated incident or aberration. Skip to content. Other errors are more consequential. The White Sox were not in revolt because they were underpaid. The idea for the fix did not originate with gamblers. Here's how the Chicago Tribune covered the 9-game series.
White Sox pitcher Claude 'Lefty' Williams in Unfortunately, the fiction became accepted fact. The position of the player, the ball, team-mates and opponents will be collected, along with their speed, the movement of the ball, where the ball is struck, the time of the game, the state of the game and much more. This event will be added to thousands collected in each match. Football, like almost every other sport, has undergone a data revolution.
And the conclusions drawn from analysis of that data has in turn transformed the way sport is played. For example in basketball, players of the modern era are far more likely to attempt three-point shots. Much of this analytical explosion was triggered by the book, and film, Moneyball, which followed a new approach in baseball.
What is perhaps less well known is that a wide range of sports employed data collection systems and analysis going back to Victorian times. Baseball was one of those sports and one of the pioneers in this regard was Hugh S Fullerton.
Born in Ohio in , Fullerton fell in love with baseball at an early age and, although he reported on other issues and even dabbled in fiction, it was the thing he always came back to. He also loved numbers and collected detailed information on every game he attended, eventually more than 3, Fullerton wanted to use the data he collected to find out how games were won and lost, not just to be added up for record keeping.
He believed his scientific methods could predict a season's worth of results based on mathematical values he assigned to players and positions. Using the system he was able to make bold predictions about each year's World Series. In , he leapt to prominence when he picked the 'hitless wonders' of the Chicago White Sox to beat the Chicago Cubs, despite the latter having won a record-setting games during the regular season. He wrote that the Sox would win games one and three, the Cubs would win game two and that it would rain on the fourth day.
He was spot on with each pronouncement. It revealed some of his methods, alongside diagrams of theories and deductions. He was one of the first published writers to show the shorthand markings he used to denote batted balls, hits and pitches. As more recent innovators have found, traditionalists didn't like his new approach.
A letter to Baseball Magazine complained that Fullerton "would have us believe that good ball can only be played by those men who work with the assistance of a tape-measure, a tee-square and an intimate knowledge of algebra and fractions". But using his data, Fullerton had correctly predicted the winners of the , , and World Series, often going against perceived wisdom, and including the exact numbers of games needed to win, using his self-devised ratings system.
So in , when he gave his opinion on what was happening between the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox, those words carried weight. And he was right. White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil was the ringleader.
He admitted as much in a Sports Illustrated interview, 37 years later. He'd had discussions with gamblers in mid-September, weeks before the first match. The question of whether the World Series could be bought was answered - "yes, it could" - and by the end of the month he had a number of accomplices. The key was star pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who Gandil knew had money troubles after buying a farm. Six others agreed to help, with varying degrees of apprehension.
There were rumours. By the time Fullerton had heard enough to become concerned, Gandil had taken delivery of a first cash payment. There was no going back for them now. Meanwhile, Fullerton wired a message to all 40 of his syndicated newspapers: "Advise all not to bet on this series.
Ugly rumours afloat. No-one would believe a World Series could be crooked. Game one of the best-of-nine series - a new format - took place on a beautiful autumnal afternoon at Cincinatti's Redland Field. Everyone involved in the conspiracy knew that White Sox pitcher Cicotte would give a clear signal that the fix was on: if he hit the first Reds batter it was happening. Later, New York gambler Arnold Rothstein reluctantly endorsed it.
The scandal came to light when the gamblers did not pay the players as promised, thinking that they had no recourse. But when the players openly complained, the story became public and authorities were forced to prosecute them. The trial against the players was actually just for show. After a tacit agreement whereby the players assented not to denigrate major league baseball or Comiskey in return for an acquittal, the signed confessions from some of the players mysteriously disappeared from police custody.
The jury acquitted all of the accused players and then celebrated with them at a nearby restaurant. But the height of the hypocrisy surrounding the entire matter came when Shoeless Joe was forced to sue Comiskey for unpaid salary. Arnold Rothstein never even faced trial, and Comiskey hoped to go back to business as usual.
However, all did not end well for everyone. Other baseball owners, hoping to remove any hint that the games were illegitimate, hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be the new commissioner of baseball. Landis was a hard-liner and also a racist—he prevented blacks from playing in the major leagues during his reign into the s who then permanently barred the implicated Black Sox players from baseball.
Buck Weaver, by all accounts, had refused to take any money offered by the gamblers. He was purportedly banned from baseball for refusing to turn his teammates in.
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