Cold Open

It’s a beautiful day in 1908 at Furman Park, a baseball field in Greenville, South Carolina that serves as the home of the Spinners, Greenville's celebrated minor league team.

The crowd erupts as Joe Jackson steps out of the dugout.

Joe is a twenty-year-old textile mill employee who moonlights as an outfielder for the Spinners, one of six teams that play in the newly formed Carolina Association. Joe, who bats left and throws right, is their best hitter and quickly becoming a fan favorite.

But today, as Joe walks toward home plate, confused murmurs ripple through the crowd. There’s something different about Joe.

Instead of wearing his usual spiked baseball cleats, today Joe only wears stockings on his feet.

That’s because the cleats he wore during the previous day’s game caused blisters. Joe planned to take today off, but at the last minute, his manager informed him that he’d be needed in the lineup, so Joe has removed the spikes and will bat shoeless.

As he takes his position at home plate, Joe can hear the derisive jeers of the opposing team’s fans, and he can sense the quiet apprehension of his own supporters, who are unsure if their star player will be able to perform in stocking feet. But Joe lets neither reaction get him down.

He readies his bat, and when the pitch is thrown, Joe knocks the ball way out into the field.

He takes off for first base, continues to second, and just as he’s about to round third, he hears the voice of a fan yell out, “You shoeless son-of-a-gun!”

That day “Shoeless” Joe Jackson earns a nickname that will stick, and he will go on to finish his first year with the Spinners with impressive statistics. His play will attract the interest of the Philadelphia Athletics, who will buy his contract from the Spinners. And after one year with the A’s, he’ll be traded to the Cleveland Naps. Then in 1911, his first full season as a rookie, Joe will set a number of baseball records as he begins what seems like a very promising career in the Major League.

But within a decade, his fate will take a turn. In 1915, Joe will be traded to the Chicago White Sox, a team that will come to define him as a baseball icon, not just for his impressive performances, but for his role in one of the biggest scandals in professional sports history, which will be revealed on September 28th, 1920.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is September 28th, 1920: The Black Sox Scandal.

Act One: Frustrated Players

It’s September 18th, 1919, at the Buckminster, an upscale hotel in downtown Boston.

A taxi pulls up to its doors, and a smartly dressed man in a white suit and bow tie steps out of the car. His face is set with determination.

Today, Joe Sullivan is a man on a mission. Joe Sullivan is a local gambling bookie, and he has been developing a plan to fix this year’s World Series. If he can get a team to intentionally lose games, then he and his clients can easily cash out by placing bets against them.

It sounds like a tall order — getting players to sabotage their own team and potentially, their own careers. But Joe has a very specific target in mind, one he suspects will be more than open to his proposition: the Chicago White Sox.

The team is owned by Charles Comiskey, widely known as a shrewd businessman with a penchant for underpaying his players. Charles, while popular with the public and the press, has become a polarizing figure inside the White Sox organization. He is generally disliked by most, if not all the players, who have grown frustrated with their poor compensation.

And the players are at the top of their game. Two years ago they won the World Series. But under the terms of their current contracts, the players have been left with little to no leverage to improve their situation. This has led to dysfunction in the locker room. Rather than forming a united front, the players have fallen into two camps: the more conservative ones, who walk a straight line, and their rebellious counterparts, who prefer to play by their own rules.

The latter faction have tried to protest. Annoyed with having to foot the bill for their laundry, for several weeks, the players wore the same increasingly dirty uniforms – a stunt that helped them earn the nickname “the Black Sox.” Eventually, Charles had the uniforms washed, but the expense was deducted from each player’s final paycheck. In the end, nothing changed; their grievances weren’t redressed, and infighting between the strait-laced and more rebellious players continued.

But regardless of the tension that this has created within the team, their success on the field is remarkably high: the White Sox have accumulated a 76-42 record over the course of the season and have advanced to the World Series once again, where they will face the Cincinnati Reds.

As the first World Series after World War I, Americans are more enthusiastic about baseball than they have been in years. But despite the attention being showered on him, star player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his White Sox teammates are struggling to make ends meet, and they all agree on one thing: Charles Comiskey is short-changing them, and while he stands to profit handsomely from a World Series win, the players themselves are unlikely to see more than a small bonus for their efforts.

Bookie Joe Sullivan hopes this is enough to make at least some of them, vulnerable to his powers of persuasion.

He enters the hotel and heads straight for one of the lobby’s telephones, dialing up the room of White Sox first baseman, Chick Gandil. He tells Chick that he has an important business proposition for him. One that could be lucrative for them both. Chick is interested and has Sullivan head up to Room 615.

There, he offers Chick $80,000 – the equivalent of around one and a half million dollars today — and he promises more money to whatever teammates Chick can convince to throw the upcoming World Series. And to Sullivan’s delight, Chick is very receptive.

Three days after their interaction at the Buckminster hotel, Chick convenes a small group of White Sox players, who like him, have expressed discontent with the team. He tells them about the proposed scheme to intentionally lose the World Series against the Reds, and the players react favorably, agreeing to move forward with the plan.

But soon, word of the scheme reaches the more strait-laced players who have every intention of playing to win against the Reds. They are faced with a difficult decision: report the scheme and risk losing a chance to compete for a World Series being disqualified as cheats or join the scheme and risk their careers.

In the meantime, the conspiring players continue to meet to work out the details of the arrangement, specifically, how they will make it look like they are playing to win games while intentionally making mistakes to lose them.

After weeks of planning, Shoeless Joe’s teammates will successfully devise a plot to throw the World Series. It will be one of the most ambitious attempts to fix the outcome of a contest in the history of professional sports. And if they can pull it off successfully, they will stand to earn life-changing sums of money for their efforts. But if they fail, they will risk losing everything they’ve ever worked for.

Act Two: The Series

It’s September 30th, 1919, twelve days after Joe Sullivan proposed his business scheme to Chick Gandil.

It’s the evening before the opening game of the 1919 World Series, pitting the Chicago White Sox, led by star left fielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, against the Cincinnati Reds, in a battle for bragging rights and a championship trophy.

Joe sits alone in his hotel room, pondering what lies ahead of him in the highly publicized series.

Should the Reds succeed in defeating the heavily favored White Sox, a handful of people stand to make a large amount of money, including some of the players themselves. That’s because they’re all in on a little secret – the White Sox are going to intentionally lose the series, having accepted a bribe from bookie Joe Sullivan. At Sullivan’s urging, gamblers have wagered significant sums of money against the White Sox, and they’re expecting a sizable return.

Personally, Joe is torn. He knows about the scheme and doesn’t like it, but he doesn't want to rat out his own teammates either. At the same time, by knowingly participating in a crooked series, he risks jeopardizing the integrity of his legacy as a baseball player. Caught between two impossible decisions, Joe pays a visit to the hotel room of Charles Comiskey, the team’s owner. There, he begs Charles to let him sit out the series. Flabbergasted that his best hitter would be removed from the competition, Charles responds by reminding Joe how important he is to the team, and that he has every intention of playing him.

After this unsuccessful meeting with his boss, Joe continues to ruminate back in his own room.

Joining a scheme like this one seems not only dishonest but dangerous. The uptick in betting in favor of the Reds has already sparked rumors in gambling circles that there’s a “fix” is in. And if there is fallout from this, Joe doesn’t want to be part of it.

So as he heads to bed, his mind is made. He knows what he has to do: play the best he can and let the chips fall as they may.

The series starts the next day. With pitching ace Red Faber out with the flu, Eddie Cicotte, one of the players involved in the gambling fix, takes the mound for the White Sox. When the Reds’ leadoff hitter steps up to the plate, Eddie delivers a strike in convincing fashion. Then, he does something unusual - he turns to his teammates on the field and delivers a pre-arranged signal, confirming their willingness to go forward with the scheme. Players signal back in agreement and Eddie springs into action. When the next batter steps to the plate, he throws a pitch that hits him in the back and sends him to first base.

Later in the game, Eddie makes a bad throw to his teammate at second base, causing fans and sportswriters to raise an eyebrow. But for the moment, things just seem out of sync for the White Sox, and the Reds go on to secure the win.

Then over the next four games, the White Sox win only one, giving the Reds a four-to-one advantage in the series.

But by the end of game 5, the conspiring White Sox players grow resentful, as the money they were promised by Joe Sullivan as “progress payments” for each loss, do not come through. For his part, Sullivan tells the players there’s nothing he can do; all the money is tied up in the hands of the odds makers. So in retaliation, the conspiring players turn against the gamblers and the White Sox go on to win their next two games against the Reds, giving them 3 games to 4 for the Reds, and a real chance to win the best-of-9 game series.

But the White Sox’s fate is decided in the pivotal 8th game, played in front of 33,000 fans at Chicago's Comiskey Park. During that game, the Reds drive in ten runs to the White Sox’s five, enough to capture the World Series championship.

But despite the loss, it will be an impressive series for Joe, who uses his skills as a player to put up big numbers, despite his teammates’ efforts to lose.

But Joe will have made one big blunder.

While he didn’t participate in throwing the World Series, he will have failed to stay wholly uninvolved in the team’s illicit activity. Though he didn’t take any money from Sullivan, he did eventually accept $5,000 from one of his teammates, a buy-off that allowed the gamblers to prop up the scheme’s credibility and claim that star player Joe Jackson was in on the fix.

So as the White Sox retreat for the off-season, the press will begin publishing rumors about the “fix,” and soon Joe will find himself in the middle of one of baseball’s biggest scandals.

Act Three: Conspiracy

It’s September 28th, 1920 in Chicago, Illinois.

A grand jury has been convened at the Cook County Courthouse to investigate whispers that members of the White Sox baseball team, willingly orchestrated a “fix,” intentionally losing to the Cincinnati Reds in the previous season’s World Series – a ploy that has been coined the Black Sox Scandal.

The players have been battling the rumors all year. But now, the heat is on.

Today, the first to testify is none other than Eddie Cicotte, the pitcher who first signaled to his teammates that the fix was in during the opening game of the Series.

A nervous Eddie takes the stand and proceeds to unravel the entire scheme and his role in it. His eyes filled with tears, Eddie tells the grand jury that he needed the money. He had his wife and kids to think about. But now, he’s lost everything – his job, his reputation, the friends he couldn’t tell not to bet on the White Sox. All of it is gone.

After Eddie decides to talk, so does Joe Jackson, who denies throwing any of the games, but admits to accepting a buy-off from one of his teammates.

A few weeks later, Joe, Eddie, six other White Sox teammates, and five gamblers, including Joe Sullivan, are all implicated on charges of conspiracy to defraud. Charles Comiskey will reward the ten players who did not participate in the scheme, as well as the team’s manager, with bonus checks, while the others will go on to stand trial the following year.

But then, all the paper records of the grand jury confessions mysteriously vanish, and the prosecution’s case begins to crumble. The cause of the documents’ disappearance will remain unknown, though many will suspect that Charles Comiskey and a gambling kingpin were behind it. Regardless, on August 2nd, 1921, all eight players will be found not guilty on all counts.

They will face punishment on the field though. Despite the players’ acquittals, the judge recently appointed as baseball’s first commissioner will ban all eight players from baseball for life.

Joe will eventually settle down in South Carolina with his wife Katie, where he’ll live out the rest of his days running a liquor store. But his talent on the field won’t be forgotten, and his legacy, though tarnished, will be undeniable.

Joe will remain recognized as one of baseball’s greatest players. And to this day, there are ongoing efforts to induct Shoeless Joe Jackson into the Baseball Hall of Fame — even a century after one of sports’ biggest cheating scandals upended his career on September 28th, 1920.

Outro

Next on History Daily. September 29th, 2006. Two planes collide above Brazil, killing 154 people and triggering an aviation crisis.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Katrina Zemrak.

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Weiss.

Executive Producers are Alexandra Currie-Buckner for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.