The Black Sox

The Black Sox Scandal was a Major League Baseball match fixing incident in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein. The fallout from the scandal resulted in the appointment of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first Commissioner of Baseball, granting him absolute control over the sport in order to restore its integrity.

Despite acquittals in a public trial in 1921, Judge Landis permanently banned all eight men from professional baseball. The punishment was eventually defined to also include banishment from post-career honors such as consideration for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Despite requests for reinstatement in the decades that followed (particularly in the case of Shoeless Joe Jackson), the ban remains in force as of 2017.

White Sox club owner Charles Comiskey was widely disliked by the players and was resented for his miserliness. Comiskey long had a reputation for underpaying his players, even though they were one of the top teams in the league and had already won the 1917 World Series.

Because of baseball's reserve clause, any player who refused to accept a contract was prohibited from playing baseball on any other professional team. Players could not change teams without permission from their current team, and without a union the players had no bargaining power. Comiskey was probably no worse than most owners—in fact, Chicago had the largest team payroll in 1919. In the era of the reserve clause, gamblers could find players on many teams looking for extra cash—and they did.

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