CHICAGO (AP) If Chicago has been willing to believe that a cow caused the nice Chicago Fire, maybe it's going to buy this one: The White Sox got the concept to throw the 1919 World Series after the Cubs did the same thing one year earlier.
That's the suggestion more of a hint, really from Eddie Cicotte, one of the infamous Black Sox banned from baseball after their tainted World Series against Cincinnati.People in the
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In a 1920 court deposition the Chicago History Museum recently placed on its website, Cicotte said "the boys for the club" talked about how a Cub or a number of Cubs were offered $10,000 to throw the 1918 Series they lost 4-2 towards Boston Red Sox.
Cicotte is as vague as vague could be, failing to name any names or provide any information regarding how the players might have completed it or even if he believes the Cubs threw the Series. However, if what he suggests does work it means that when it found fixing ball games noisy . 20th century, Chicago was nobody's Second City.
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"It is interesting to me as a Cubs fan including a historian of Chicago that both teams could possibly be involved in back-to-back years," said Peter Alter, an archivist on the museum who examined the document and various artifacts that the museum paid $100,000 for at auction.At auction, the wholesale nfl jerseys is very popular.
If Cicotte's deposition lacks specifics, it will offer a glimpse into the lifetime of a player when their lives were much more the working stiffs who rooted on their behalf than the wealthy owners they played for.
Players commonly groused about being underpaid high wasn't anyone in the majors who didn't hear rumors about fixes. T had been impossible not to see the gamblers on the games, the lobbies of the hotels where they stayed maybe in the taverns where they drank.
And they also talked about such rumors constantly, including, steelers jerseys
Cicotte said, on a long train ride from Chicago on the East Coast.
"The ball players were preaching about somebody trying to fix the nation's League ball players or something that is," Cicotte is quoted as saying while in the deposition.
"Well anyway there was some focus on them offering $10,000 as well to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series," he explained. "Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into the Series, to tennis ball so the Series."
Cicotte apparently likes the noise of $10,000 because that is what he was quoted saying somebody left in his college dorm for his role from the fix of the 1919 Series. He died in 1969.All he like is the
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Whether any one this is true is unknown, but a writer who wrote about the 1918 Series after examining the deposition and also other material said not only was a real fix possible, it was understandable.
"They didn't make much money," said Sean Deveney, a reporter while using the Sporting News whose book, "The Original Curse," said a fix through the Cubs was likely. "They had the incentive to do something like that."
Both the Cubs as well as Red Sox were upset the teams' owners were not paying their great number of the World Series receipts, Deveney said. Before one Series game in Boston, the two squads refused to come on the field until the owners paid them what they have to were promised.
"The owners said no," Deveney said.
Deveney said the squad quickly understood that they could hardly win a public relations battle by refusing to experiment with a game during World War I, not inside a ball park filled with soldiers. So they played.
So did the Cubs tennis ball so the Series? No great hitter suddenly forgot ways to hit, and the Cubs pitchers were terrific, finishing the Series through an astonishing 1.04 ERA.
Still, "there were definitely some suspicious plays," Deveney said, and the majority of of them involved outfielder Max Flack.
Inside fourth game, Flack was picked off not once, but twice. Flack turned a catchable fly ball inside the sixth and final game into a mistake that allowed two runs to attain in the Red Sox's 2-1 win.
And there was any time Babe Ruth came to the plate for any Red Sox a pitcher at the time, but emerging as one of the game's best hitters and the Cubs' pitcher, Lefty Tyler, saw that Flack wasn't playing deep enough in right field.
"He waved him back and Flack just stood there," Deveney said. "Sure enough, Babe hit one over his head" for the triple that scored two runs.
Later in the game, Cubs pitcher Phil Douglas came in the game long enough to field a grounder and chuck the ball ball over the first baseman's head, allowing the decisive run to score in the Red Sox's 3-2 win.
Some three years later, Douglas was banned from baseball for the papers called "treachery" after proposing that another team in the pennant race pay him to go out of the team and "go fishing."
All six games in the 1918 Cubs-Red Sox Series were close Boston never won a game by more than a run and may well only take a dropped ball here or perhaps a badly thrown ball there to turn victory into defeat.
"It didn't take much to throw an activity," Deveney said. "It really didn't."
If you find a record of a baseball official asking Cicotte a particular question about the 1918 World Series, Deveney doesn't find out about it.
"Baseball didn't want to investigate," he was quoted saying. "They wanted to make it all about the Black Sox and say, 'OK, gambling's gone.'"
And imagine if the Cubs a team that hasn't won some sort of Series in 103 years, blaming the curse of your goat and the glove of a fan named Steve Bartman en route had actually beaten Boston way back in 1918?
"It would have bumped the curse up a decade," joked Alter. "We could be investigating a century (without winning a global Series) seven years from now."
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