The Original Curse

In his new book, The Original Curse, sportswriter Sean Deveney claims the Chicago Cubs inspired the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, when the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

Deveney uses newspaper articles and official documents from the era to illustrate how and why the Cubs could have planned to lose the last three games of the 1918 World Series against the Boston Red Sox. More importantly, he taps into the psyche of the players, the owners and the fans themselves to try to make sense of what might have happened almost 100 years ago.

Playboy talked with Deveney from Chicago about the processes that went into researching a book entirely composed of dead people, the most striking evidence to support his theory and how the politics of baseball hasn’t changed all that much in the past century. He also shares a few excerpts from the book.

PLAYBOY: What initially sparked your interest to look into the Black Sox scandal further?
DEVENEY: I was at the Chicago History Museum for an interview, and the curator [and I] were going through some of the papers. One of the papers was this deposition from Eddie Cicotte that said, basically, that they had heard the Cubs had thrown the World Series the previous year.

Cicotte was one of the chief conspirators in the Black Sox plan and the first to confess. He mentioned rumors about the Cubs matter-of-factly in a deposition, saying: “The way it started, we were going east on the train. The ballplayers were talking about somebody trying to fix the National League ball players or something like that in the World’s Series of 1918. Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series. There was talk that somebody offered this player $10,000 or anyway the bunch of players were offered $10,000. This was on the train going over. Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into the Series.”

This should have perked up the ears of investigators. But, though the investigation originally promised to tackle widespread aspects of baseball gambling, political struggles among the game’s leaders (chiefly, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and Ban Johnson) tightened the focus on the Black Sox. Cicotte’s Cubs rumor—as well as significant other rumors about the Cubs—was discarded, and only the 1919 World Series fix was bared by the legal system. Still, if Cicotte is to be believed, there’s reason to wonder whether, in putting together their series-fixing scheme, the 1919 Black Sox had immediate inspiration from their Cubs friends on the North Side, who had lost a chaotic 1918 World Series in six games to the American League’s Red Sox.

—The Original Curse, p. 3-4

PLAYBOY: Were you more interested in explaining how they could have pulled this off or in their motivations behind it?
DEVENEY: I think the motivations were the most important thing. People probably don’t realize that this was in the middle of the war; this was the end of baseball as we know it. Baseball had a very bad year in 1918, public relations wise. Players were seen as slacking. They were shirking their duties toward the war, and nobody knew how much longer the war would be going.

For ballplayers, as the end of the season—and, quite possibly, the end of baseball and the good living the game provided—drew near, there was an increased need to squeeze out every dollar before the shutdown hit. […] It wasn't a stretch for them to look at pictures of the invalided soldiers, to hear stories about the sailors sick with Spanish flu, to see someone like Leonard being kicked into the army, and to imagine their future selves. How were they supposed to provide for themselves and their families? What about mortgages and car payments and kids? What if they were invalided?

—The Original Curse, p. 183

PLAYBOY: What is the biggest piece of evidence you found that the Cubs fixed the 1918 World Series?
DEVENEY: I don’t think in the first three games that the Cubs intended to throw the World Series. After the first three games, they looked at the receipts and they saw what the share was going to be for the players—every World Series the money gets divided between the owners and the players. They were expecting to get $2,000 for the winners and $1,400 for the losers. You can look at the receipts and see there wasn’t that much money in there. The attendance was bad, prices were low and everything they thought they would be getting they weren’t. The first three games the play was pretty crisp. After that, all of a sudden, play starts to fall apart.

[J]ust a few miles from the site of the tent camp at Corey Hill, Garry Herrmann received a phone call from Cubs outfielder Les Mann. The player representatives wanted to talk about World Series shares. They were not about to let this issue go. They felt they'd been promised $2,000 for the winners and $1,400 for the losers, and "their stand is that the other clubs should be left out of the proposition until the stipulated sums are paid, or that the commission should come up with the deficit." If they could not be guaranteed that money, they would not play Game 4. […] The players had not really been promised $2,000 and $1,400—if they had read the new rule for World Series shares closely, they would have seen that the commission was merely giving the players what had already been agreed on. They were entitled, after the war charities donation, to 55.5 percent of the receipts for the first four games, minus the money that would go to the second-, third-, and fourth-place teams. That was what the commission was authorized to pay them.
[…]
Still, Mann and the players agreed to go forward with Game 4 only with the understanding that they would meet with the commission later (some reports had the meeting scheduled for that night, while others put it at 10:00 A.M. the following day). This was a happy turn of events for Boston fans—around the city, interest in the World Series had slowly perked up. "A revival of some of the oldtime World Series enthusiasm was seen in Boston in the increased crowds that gathered about the bulletin boards in newspaper row to cheer the news of the Red Sox's victory in Chicago," the Tribune reported. They figured to have quality entertainment. The World Series games had been very well played, if not well attended.
[…]
The final games of the Series were defined by strange and crucial blunders. This, quite possibly, was not a coincidence. The players knew they were coming up short on money and had plenty of time and opportunity to consort with each other on the issue. They were in Boston, the capital of baseball betting, where less than two months earlier two Reds players had sauntered into a poolroom and easily arranged to fix a game. […] The setting was perfect for the enterprising bettor. There was no easier target for gamblers hoping to fix ball games than a group of players dissatisfied with their pay. 

—The Original Curse, p. 183-186

PLAYBOY: So why did this alleged Cubs fix get swept under the rug?
DEVENEY: I think it was mostly political. Ban Johnson was the president of the American League and had been very powerful. He was losing his grip on power, and there was a surge from other owners to try to get rid of him. The way to do it was to keep the focus on gambling going on in the American League. So the stuff happening in the National League got swept under the rug.

PLAYBOY: What parallels do you see between baseball’s gambling problem and steroids?
DEVENEY: Baseball had no choice but to confront its gambling problem. For years they tried to shove it aside. They just traded players and hoped that the problem went away. When all that became public, baseball couldn’t do that anymore. So it decided to put the whole problem into a box, make everything these guys’ fault. And I think with steroids, baseball pretty much did the same thing. It was obvious when the BALCO and the Barry Bonds stuff was coming out. And so they came up with the Mitchell Report; they put a bunch of names in there, and they said we’ve solved the problem and we’re going to enact these measures. Of course, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

PLAYBOY: How do you think these scandals changed the game of baseball and the public’s perception of it?
DEVENEY: There’s a line from The Great Gatsby where one of the characters based on Arnold Rothstein, who was one of the gamblers who helped throw the 1919 World Series, says something like, ‘There’s the man who shook the faith of 50 million people.’ The reality is, though, it didn’t work out that way. The attendance in 1919, 1920 just shot through the roof. We’ve seen this with steroids, too. Attendance in the 1990s went up and up and up. You could say that people thought the game was cleaned up. I don’t think the fans were that naïve, though. I think they just didn’t care.