Benign Conspirators: Reflections on the 1926–27 Baseball Scandal

This essay is written in part to honor the late baseball historian Dorothy Seymour Mills. At a NINE conference a few years ago, she suggested I should've given a whole chapter in my biography of Smoky Joe Wood to the 1926–27 scandal. I agreed that it deserved a more complete discussion, but I failed to write that piece before she died in the fall of 2019. Even at this late, maybe too late, date, I want to accept her invitation as a way of thanking her for her kind words about my work. Also, I am inspired by Ian Kahanowitz's Baseball Gods in Scandal, published in 2019. Ian covered all the bases, including the background, major players, and legacy of the scandal. But he stopped just short of reaching conclusions about some of the circumstances. While following his lead, I want to take a couple of steps, as speculative as they may be, toward more answers to the scandal's many mysteries. Finally, in addition to adding my two cents to the conversation, as Dorothy suggested, I want to join my voice with Ian's in noting the significance of these events in the history of the game. In terms of the rules and expectations for players, this scandal is, many of us believe, as consequential as the Black Sox Scandal of 1919–20.

As Ian Kahanowitz and others have noted, Hubert Benjamin "Dutch" Leonard was a player of much celebrity in the deadball era. A left-handed pitcher, he started his first game for the Boston Red Sox, in 1913, four days before his twenty-first birthday. The next year he set a record for ERA by a starting pitcher, .96, in 224 2/3 innings, going 19 and 5. In his first seven years in the majors he won 104 while losing 77. But by 1924 and 1925 his ERA slid to 4.56 and 4.51, though he was 11 and 4 in 1925, the year of interest for those studying the scandal.¹ Better known to his peers was Leonard's provocative personality. As Lowell Blaisdell summarizes, "Dutch Leonard […] offended almost everybody: opposing batters who regarded him as a 'beanballer'; umpires who saw him as a ball-and-strikes whiner; his own pitching teammates, to whom he was a shirker; each manger because he would leave the team whenever he felt so inclined; and owners who were outraged by what they viewed as his exorbitant salary demands."² Smoky Joe Wood, his teammate for the Red Sox, expressed the feelings of many major leaguers: "I loaned the son-of-a-bitch $200 to buy his first motorcycle in Boston when he first joined us. … That dirty little son-of-a-bitch Leonard. He died a millionaire, but he died young. He was a great pitcher too. But he was a first-class crook."³

In the spring of 1926 Leonard, no longer in the major leagues, told American League President Ban Jonson that he, Smoky Joe Wood, Tris Speaker, and Ty Cobb had met under that stands on September 24, 1919, in Detroit to bet on and fix a game between Cleveland and the Tigers the following day. By late spring, Johnson traveled to Cleveland to inform Speaker of the charges. Cobb soon learned them from Tigers star Harry Heilmann. By the Fourth of July, Speaker had contacted Wood by phone. That fall, on September 9, Johnson relayed the story to AL presidents, who brought Commissioner Landis into the loop. Landis tried to arrange meetings with Leonard, in LA and Chicago, but Leonard repeatedly offered many excuses, one being his fear of thugs in Chicago.⁴

The drama intensified when Johnson asked Speaker and Cobb to resign from baseball and Landis finally met with Leonard, in Sanger, California, on October 29. As the struggle for power between the AL President and the Commissioner ratcheted up, the specifics started to surface. Leonard asserted that Cobb agreed to put up $2,000, Leonard $1,500, and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each and play for Detroit to win a game...