Judge Landis Takes a Different Approach: The 1917 Fixing Scandal between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox

The early twenty-first century witnessed the arrival of a new major headache for baseball, namely, evidence that some players had turned to steroids as performance enhancers. Nearly a century earlier, baseball had to deal with scandals concerning the likelihood that games were not fairly contested and had prefabricated winners and losers.¹ Both problems share the difficulty of locating convincing evidence of guilt, and they both also offer insight into baseball's ability to regulate itself.² Fixing cases also raise the specter of the game's reduced popularity.

Proving a fix is, obviously, difficult without confessions from the participants. However, exceptionally inept play—out of keeping with the players' or the team's normal performance—arouses suspicion. In the Deadball Era, the pitchers and catchers were most easily able to affect game results through unusual wildness, extreme ineffectiveness, and—in the case of catching—allowing wholesale larceny to opposing base runners. Lastly, the existence of a monetary or psychological motive for playing less than one's best added a powerful reason to fear chicanery.³

Over the Labor Day weekend of 1917, a series took place in Chicago between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers that raised a host of questions much later. The games had an important bearing on the American League race. At the start of the series, the White Sox had a three-and-a-half-game lead on the Boston Red Sox—comforting, but by no means safe. The White Sox went on to sweep the series with Detroit, winding up six and a half in front of Boston and close to home free for the pennant.⁴ In late December 1926, the two leading, banished conspirators of the fixed 1919 World Series, Chick Gandil and Swede Risberg, emerged from their exile to announce that the 1917 White Sox–Tigers Labor Day weekend series had been rigged. At the end of that season, the Sox players had presented a payoff to their Labor Day opponents. The cache was distributed seven ways among the Tiger players.⁵

To handle the problem that the two exiles had raised, baseball's first commissioner, retired federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, convened a set of hearings over several days in Chicago, to which he summoned thirty-five or more players and ex-players from the two teams. The White Sox manager of 1917, Pants Rowland, and his former coach, Kid Gleason, were also in attendance.⁶ Landis served not only as judge but also as prosecutor, defense attorney, and jury. How these functions were defined, he alone decided. Further, the evidence consisted of oral testimony only. When the hearings began, Risberg, the instigator of the crisis, spoke first. On January 1, 1927, he recited his story in Landis's office; in addition to the commissioner, a dozen reporters and fellow "Black Sox" Buck Weaver were present. As Risberg told his tale, Weaver nodded in agreement to most of what he had to say.⁷ On January 5, during the public hearings that followed, Risberg repeated his account with all the other invitees present. Gandil first submitted a sworn affidavit, which was printed in the Chicago Tribune, and on January 6 he offered his testimony with all of the others present.⁸ Risberg, who had an impetuous disposition, easily exaggerated and jumped to conclusions. In contrast Gandil testified matter-of-factly and offered a plentitude of details that, when put into context, rang with authenticity. Moreover, among the many witnesses, Gandil alone conceded that he might be in error regarding some of the details and allowed for various shades of understanding and intention.

"Sloughed Off"

The gist of the accusations was that the Tigers had deliberately "sloughed off" the two doubleheaders played on September 2–3 and that the White Sox players knew or strongly suspected that their opponents were playing with unbelievable ineptitude. At the season's end, nearly all of the Pale Hose contributed to a purse of about $850 for their nominal foes.

The two accusers made conflicting statements. For...