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 gamblers to throw games. He used that money to recruit other players to help to get the fix in. There is a reason that—despite all of his athletic skill, physical grace, and sheer baseball talent—outside of hard-core baseball fans, Hal Chase is largely a forgotten figure today. The reality is that he deserves to be forgotten. He sabotaged his own career with his chicanery and, through his endless illegal schemes, effectively worked to undermine the only business that ever employed him. The Black Prince, indeed.

Dewey and Acocella, however, seem to have enormous sympathy for him: the curse of biographers, one imagines. Based on the story they offer, it is not clear why. “But to this day nobody has ever embodied the national pastime—in sheer physical hours on the field and in mental priority—more than he did. First and last he was a baseball player who did what he knew best whenever and wherever. As long as he was paid for it” (p. xvi).

In all of baseball history, according to The Black Prince, no one has embodied the game more than Hal Chase. Really, no one? And, after all, he just wanted to be paid for what he did best. His career earnings, like those of other players for most of the twentieth century, were depressed by the “reserve clause” and its accompanying drag on players’ salaries. He worked in “a company town,” so of course he scrambled to make a buck (p. 417). And besides, both sides benefited. “Baseball gave Chase money and fame, and Chase gave baseball dash and notoriety” (p. 416). The book does provide a very thorough exploration of his life, but this conclusion is far from satisfying.

One imagines somewhere that Pete Rose is taking solace in this kind of storytelling. If there is hope for Hal Chase, surely there is hope for him, too. Luckily, Charles...