Entrapment and Other Writings (34 page)

Major leaguers were our gods. We weren’t worshipful. We knew they were merely men like our brothers and fathers. Yet with a difference. When a father or a brother died, he left no record of himself for remembrance. But a major leaguer, even though up for only a season and most of that spent on the bench, yet left a batting, fielding, or pitching record for All-American time. Major leaguers possessed immortality.

Every neighborhood has its golden boy. Ours was a scrawny, pug-nosed, freckle-faced thirteen-year-old, Jake “Lefty” Somerhaus, who was already pitching to eighteen-year-old semipros and whipping them. He possessed a deadly eye on a basketball court, was a dazzling open-field runner, and, the first time he picked up a cue, played rotation like a pro. None of his four older brothers had ever excelled in anything. Jake had it all.

In a neighborhood of tough kids, Jake wasn’t tough. He didn’t have to be. Whatever sport he turned to he knew, beforehand, that he would be better at it than anybody. Even in pitching baseball cards he was better than anybody.

The cards were ten-for-a-penny colored strips of major leaguers. Every kid on our street carried a pack of them, waxed, and bound with a rubber band. Baseball cards were our currency. The wax was to stiffen them for gambling.

We’d play five, ten, or fifteen up, but would pitch only one card. Each player would finger-snap it off the top of his pack, at a line three sidewalk squares away. The kid whose card drew closest to the line then took cards from the others and tossed them over his head. Those that came down face up were his. Second closest followed.

Jake’s, as often as not, slid right
onto
the line. Mine usually came in third or fourth. The last kid was lucky if he got a single card back from his investment.

Every kid had to pick a favorite player. I couldn’t pick Lefty Williams because I threw right-handed. Moreover, he already belonged to Jake. I couldn’t have Shoeless Joe Jackson or Happy Felsch or Ray Schalk or Urban Faber or Buck Weaver or Eddie Collins or Nemo Leibold or Dick Kerr either. It looked like I might have to settle for McMullin, a utility infielder. Then the kid who owned Swede Risberg moved off the block and Risberg became mine. My name immediately became Swede and remained so for many years.

Risberg played shortstop deeper than any other player of his day. He was tall, rangy, and lantern-jawed. James T. Farrell remembers
him as “snaring a grounder deep over second base and getting the ball to first base like a bullet.”

He would have looked dazzling anywhere, except playing beside Eddie Collins, because Risberg possessed prescience. He’d begin moving to his left with the pitch, knock down a drive through the middle, and cut the runner down with that iron-handed peg. But everything Risberg did, Collins did with more flash. When Risberg singled, Collins doubled. When Risberg doubled, Collins doubled and stole third.

Himself a grammar-school dropout and strictly a boy for the girls and the booze, it hurt to be perpetually outplayed by a college graduate who didn’t drink, smoke, or chew. What hurt even more was getting less than $3,000 for the same plays the graduate was being paid $14,500 to make.

The Swede was a hard guy. He took to fighting as easily as he did to baseball and occasionally confused these crafts. At Oakland he’d protested a third strike simply by stepping up to an umpire and knocking him cold with a short chop to his jaw. “Call
that
a third strike,” he’d commented while the other umpire was trying to bring his colleague back to life. And walked back to the dugout in disgust.

The cards were a variable currency, their value depending upon a player’s prestige. I had to give two Hod Ellers and one Dutch Ruether to Jake to get just one Eddie Cicotte.

Cicotte was a thirty-five-year-old French Canadian who had grown up believing, as Eliot Asinof has observed, that “it was talent made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. Wasn’t that enough of a reward? But when he’d gotten there he had found out otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him, and when they’d used him up they would dump him. In the years he’d been up, they’d always made him feel like a hero to the American people. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The newspapermen who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about
him made more money than he did. Comiskey made half a million dollars a year out of Cicotte’s right arm.”

Cicotte had brought the pennant to Comiskey Park in 1917 by winning twenty-eight games and had brought it there again, in 1919, by winning twenty-nine. When Comiskey had benched him, toward the season’s end, he explained that he did so to avoid risk of injury to his star with the World Series coming up.

The real reason was that Cicotte had gone to Comiskey, before the season opened, and had asked him for a raise. After twelve years at the top he was still earning only $5,500 a season. Dutch Ruether, for one example, after pitching only two seasons, was earning twice that sum.

Comiskey turned him down. “However,” he assured the pitcher, “I’ll do this for you. I’ll pay you a bonus of $10,000 if you win thirty games for me.”

Cicotte had accepted. When he’d won twenty-nine and there were enough days left for him to pitch twice more, Comiskey had benched him.

“Comiskey throws money around like manhole covers,” was all Cicotte said.

I had to give Jake two Edd Roushes to get one Shoeless Joe Jackson. Edd Roush, the Cincinnati center fielder, was hitting around .350 and earning $11,000. Jackson, hitting fifty points higher, was earning half as much. Harry Grabiner, Comiskey’s front man, went to see Jackson at his home in Greeneville, South Carolina.

Jackson couldn’t read or write, but his wife protected him. When Grabiner assured her that the contract he offered guaranteed Jackson $9,000 a season for three seasons, she wanted to know whether it contained a ten-day clause: the clause that entitled an owner to fire a player with ten days of notice. This protected the owner from having to support a player who’d been seriously injured. It didn’t do much for the player. Grabiner assured her his contract contained no such clause; but he did not show it to her.

Instead he maneuvered Jackson out of the house, put the contract up against the house’s wall, and handed Jackson a pen.

Jackson signed. The contract contained a ten-day clause.

I traded Jake three Heinie Grohs for one Buck Weaver. Weaver was the third baseman whom sportswriters had nicknamed “Error-a-Day Weaver” when he’d first come to the White Sox from Pennsylvania mining country. His hitting was as weak as his fielding.

Kid Gleason, Comiskey’s manager, had made a .300 hitter of Weaver by switching him at the plate. He had developed him into the finest-fielding third baseman in either league.

Buck Weaver had a habit of grinning while inching up on a batter, which so unnerved Ty Cobb that he refused to bunt against Weaver. Weaver was a joyous boy, all heart and hard-trying, who guarded the spiked sand around third like a territorial animal.

He was one of eight players who met with the gamblers. Then he dropped out of the conspiracy. His only guilt was that he possessed guilty knowledge. At the trial he was denied the right to take the stand and defend himself.

He took no money. Nonetheless, he was banned from professional baseball by Landis, an enraptured Puritan. The judge’s statement read:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked gamblers discussing ways and means of throwing a ball game, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

Weaver was the sort of man who could wear a pitcher down by fouling pitch after pitch until the pitcher blew sky high; but he was not the kind of man who would inform. He was outlawed because he did not.

“Landis wanted me to tell him something I didn’t know,” he explained to Jim Farrell in his last interview, in 1954. “I didn’t have any evidence. A murderer,” he added, “serves his sentence and is let
out. I got life. I never threw a ball game in my life. All I knew was win. That’s all I know.”

Fourteen thousand fans signed a petition requesting that Weaver be reinstated.

Year after year, long after his playing days had passed, Buck Weaver tried for reinstatement, to prove his honesty. Year after year his petitions were turned down.

He wound up coaching a girl’s softball team, and died of a heart attack on the street, in 1956, on Chicago’s South Side.

Arnold Rothstein, a multimillionaire gambler who never gambled on anything until the fix was in, walked into the Green Room of the Ansonia Hotel, in New York City, a few minutes before the opening game of the 1919 Series began in Cincinnati.

Tokens, representing the players, would be moved, by telegraphic report, on the big green diamond-shaped chart suspended on the wall. The chairs were all filled. Rothstein didn’t care. He had no intention of watching the full nine innings anyhow. Arnold didn’t care for the game.

He had left his instruction—indirectly—to Cicotte: “If you hit the first man up, in the first inning, with a pitched ball, I’ll know the fix is in.” Cicotte had found $10,000 beneath his pillow the night before, in the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati.

Cicotte’s first pitch was a called strike right across the plate. His second hit Rath between the shoulder blades. Before Rath had reached first base, Rothstein had left the hotel on his way to do some heavy betting against the White Sox. His betting would not be on individual games, but on the Series. He was not a man to take chances.

It was a 1–1 ball game until the fourth inning. Then, fielding an easy grounder off the bat of Larry Kopf, with a man on first, Cicotte turned too slowly and threw too high to Risberg on second, so that Kopf was safe at first. Greasy Neale singled, and Ivy Wingo did the same, scoring Kopf. Then Cicotte fed a ball to Dutch Ruether, a
weak hitter, that Ruether smashed for three bases, bringing in Neale and Wingo. Final score: Reds 9, White Sox 1.

The brightest cookie on the White Sox pitching staff was Lefty Williams. He was a Southerner, in his mid-twenties, who kept mental book on every player in the league. He’d won twenty-three games for Comiskey in 1919. He pitched with great deliberation, studying his man head to toe before every throw. He could cut the outside corner at the knees or break a curve below a batter’s chin. He’d often complete a ball game without giving a single walk.

With the score 0–0 in the fourth inning of the second game, Rath got a base on balls off him and got into scoring position on a sacrifice bunt. Groh walked and Roush singled to center; Rath scored and Groh slid safely into third. Williams gave Duncan a base on balls and Kopf slammed a triple into deep left. Final score: Reds 4, White Sox 2.

The players had been assured, before the Series began, that they would have $100,000 to divide among themselves if they went along with the gamblers. Cicotte had been paid $10,000, Jackson $5,000, and Williams $5,000 by the time the third game was to be played.

An ex-pitcher named Burns, acting as go-between between gamblers and players, distributing Rothstein money, asked one Abe Attell for the balance. Attell, at the moment, was preoccupied, with two other gamblers, in counting and packaging their winnings off the first two games. Every corner and crevice of the room was stacked with greenbacks. Attell flat refused to pay off the players.

Burns became so enraged he started to go for Attell, who’d been featherweight champion of the world. The two assistants stepped between, spoke urgently to Attell, until he finally handed $10,000 to Burns and said, “That’s enough for them bums—that’s all they get.”

Burns, now awestruck by Attell’s demonstration of consummate stupidity combined with unlimited arrogance, picked up the money. He had to wonder how in God’s name he was going to explain to the players. Not to mention how he was going to get his own cut.
“Tell them bums to win the third game,” Attell called after him. “It’ll be better for the odds.”

Were the players scapegoats? That’s putting it too lightly. Worse, far worse. They were as solid a group of horse’s asses as were ever tricked into playing crooked in any sport on earth.

With a single exception: Weaver.

Weaver sat in on the first session with the gamblers, with seven other players, and made the only decision, later, that made good common sense:

“Take everything they offer us. Then we go out and whip Cincinnati four straight. What do we care about
them?
As much as they care about us.”

He batted .324 for the Series and played errorlessly.

James T. Farrell, who saw Dick Kerr pitch the third game, describes Kerr as “small and frail.” Because of his lack of height and heft, Kerr was twenty-six before he got into the majors. He’d won thirteen in his rookie season of 1919 and had lost seven.

The feeling of the players behind him was that, if they couldn’t win behind veterans like Cicotte and Williams, why give support to a busher?

Kerr didn’t require their support. The Reds could hit nothing off him but feeble infield grounders. “His curve ball dropped, that day, with startling suddenness,” Eliot Asinof assures us, “all his pitches had eyes. Perfectly placed, perfectly timed.” Everything that Schalk asked for, he delivered. Final score: White Sox 3, Reds 0.

Roush came to bat in the fifth inning of the fourth game, with the score 0–0, and tapped a slow grounder to Cicotte, who knocked it down, then threw wildly to Gandil, who let it get away. The runner went to second. Kopf lined a single to left and Jackson rifled a perfect throw to the plate that didn’t get there. Cicotte got a glove in its way and deflected it. Two runs, two hits, two errors by the pitcher. Final score: Reds 2, White Sox 0.

Again, in the sixth inning of the fifth game, neither side had
scored. Eller popped a fly ball between Jackson and Felsch, and Felsch picked it up but threw badly to Risberg, who let the ball roll away from him. Final score: Reds 5, White Sox 0.