The Original Curse

THE ORIGINAL CURSE

DID THE CUBS THROW THE 1918 WORLD SERIES TO BABE RUTH’S RED SOX AND INCITE THE BLACK SOX SCANDAL?

SEAN DEVENEY
FOREWORD BY KEN ROSENTHAL

Copyright © 2010 by Sean Deveney. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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For Robbie, who shaped and inspired my ideas for this book; for Mom and Dad, who read eagerly and pushed me along; and for Brice, who always kept the volume on the television low when I was working

Ken Rosenthal

I have known Sean Deveney for the better part of a decade, and I’ve always known him to be a thorough journalist and an entertaining storyteller. Of course, I’ve gotten accustomed to seeing that from Deveney in 2,000- or 3,000-word magazine features. Now he’s written a book, and even in this much longer format my opinion hasn’t changed. He’s both thorough and entertaining.

In
The Original Curse
, Deveney artfully attacks one of baseball’s most widely accepted notions—that the sport’s gambling problem in the early part of the 20th century was restricted to the 1919 Black Sox, who conspired to fix the World Series.

Baseball, by banning eight members of the Black Sox, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, attempted to portray gambling as an isolated problem. History has generally accepted that view. Deveney does not, challenging that preconception with the drive and curiosity of a classic whistle-blower. The job of a great writer is to provoke thought, and here Deveney has created a veritable riot for the imagination.

Gambling in baseball was rampant in the early part of the 20th century, and the pages that follow make a convincing argument that the 1918 World Series also was fixed—maybe not the entire Series, but at least part of it. Whether Deveney’s conclusion is accurate we will never know, because the game did such a thorough job of covering up its gambling problem. This notion of a cover-up should ring true for those who follow baseball now, because baseball’s gambling culture
in that era was not unlike the steroid culture that infiltrated the sport eight decades later. Clandestine. Widespread. A charade worthy of deep and intense investigation.

The Red Sox met the Cubs in the 1918 Series, back when they were considered merely baseball teams, not the two most famously cursed voodoo dolls of sports. History shows that the Sox won the series, four games to two. But look closer. After Game 3, the players learned their share of the Series receipts—usually around $3,700 for the winners—would be about $1,200.

That fact alone would make a fix understandable, if not quite forgivable. But, by detailing the social and economic forces triggered by World War I,
The Original Curse
goes further and sympathetically examines the social forces that explain the players’ motivations. Contrast that with today’s scandalized players, the steroid users. They are not viewed sympathetically but were motivated by outside forces as well. Owners and players used their own rationales in reacting slowly to the excesses of the era. Baseball needed to recover from the players’ strike of 1994–95. The players wanted to capitalize fully on that recovery and on their growing celebrity in an entertainment-driven society.

By the end of this book—after the players’ haunting stories are detailed and fresh insight is given into an age marked by rampant inflation, domestic terrorism, and, above all, fear of Germans—the corruption of the 1918 World Series seems not only plausible but also probable. Deveney does not pretend to offer certainty. He is, after all, writing about events that took place 91 years ago. While he vividly portrays players such as the Cubs’ shortstop prodigy Charley Hollocher and their future Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, Deveney obviously did not follow the Cubs and Red Sox in 1918 the way authors track professional sports franchises today.

But, like any good journalist, he challenges conventional wisdom, especially that stemming from the self-righteous judgment of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first-ever commissioner. Landis banned the Black Sox’s eight alleged fixers, tainting them forever, though they were acquitted by a grand jury. At the time, baseball wanted the public to believe that Landis’s ruling was the final say on the matter, that the sport had addressed the threat of gambling once and for all. Sound familiar? In 2007, baseball issued a report by former senator George Mitchell detailing the excesses
of the Steroid Era. The report, combined with the toughest steroid testing in professional sports, was intended to be the final word on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) in baseball. But check the headlines. Neither the report nor the testing has achieved its desired effect.

As prevalent as steroids were in the baseball culture from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, gambling might have been just as ubiquitous in 1918; gamblers shadowed players as diligently as drug pushers did decades later. Not every player back then gambled. Not every player today uses performance-enhancing drugs. But enough engaged in illicit activity to shape the perceptions of their respective eras.