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SAY IT AIN'T SO, TY frank pidgeon Root Root Rooted
Say It Ain't So, Ty
"As the Pete Rose saga continues to run its bizarre course, it's interesting to take a look back at a similarly convoluted scandal of over 70 years ago that involved even greater players being accused of gambling on the game."
If you were like me a few years ago, you kept track of the sad and squalid ruin of Pete Rose more by osmosis than by an eager reading of the depressing daily articles charting his fall. Even so, you probably came across, as I did, occasional references to the so-called “Cobb-Speaker Scandal” of 1926–27. Sportswriters trying to put the Rose matter in context, or searching for an historical perspective, tended to drop a few lines on the ancient scandal into their ruminations on the current one. But none of them seemed to know what he was talking about. The event is pretty hard to pin down for certain six decades later, but the story and its main players are immeasurably more dramatic than the creeps surrounding Rose and the sordid facts that sealed his fate.
The matter hit the headlines—hard—in late December, 1926, seven years after the thrown World Series of 1919, and more than five years since the suspension of the players involved. Since then, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had been busy weeding out undesirables, forcing players and owners to break off their associations with gamblers, and trying, with considerable success, to reestablish baseball's image as “the clean sport.” But now here he was, announcing that two of the greatest players in baseball history were being thrown out of the game because the American League accused them not just of betting, but of betting on a game they had fixed. “ Baseball Scandal Up Again ,” the tabloids screamed, but what must really have ruined appetites at breakfast tables around the country was what followed: “ With Cobb and Speaker Named .”
Adding to Landis' frustration was the fact that the alleged fixing had taken place in that same awful year of 1919—before he had taken office, and so long ago that it seemed idiotic to bring it up now that the game was back on an even keel.
The charges—Ty Cobb, who was later to call this period “a year of agony,” had been for years the most hated and feared man in baseball. The drive and combativeness that had brought him over 90 records and credit for 12 batting championships had also made him abrasive, unbending and nearly impossible to get along with. Nonetheless, he was recognized as the game's greatest player, and in 1926, as the 39-year-old playing manager of the Detroit Tigers, he had hit .339. A month after the season ended, he not only resigned his managerial position, but told the Associated Press: “I have swung my last bat in a competitive baseball game.”
Tris Speaker had played his entire career in the shadow of Cobb. If it hadn't been for the Georgia Peach, Texan Speaker would have been the dominant player in the American League in the years before 1920. Known in the sporting press as “the world's greatest outfielder,” he consistently challenged Cobb's offensive domination, too, finally topping him with a .386 average in 1916. In 1926, as playing manager of the Cleveland Indians, he had batted .304 and had led his team to a strong second place finish behind Babe Ruth's Yankees. Unlike Cobb, he was considered an effective manager, but less than a month after the Georgian's resignation, Speaker, too, quit his post, the reasons for his leaving “a profound mystery,” according to The New York Times.
The mystery had been engineered by Ban Johnson, President of the American League, who had obtained evidence of the fix from Dutch Leonard, a former pitcher whose 1.01 Earned Run Average for the 1914 Boston Red Sox is still a major league record. Johnson had allowed the two players to resign rather than make the affair public. The evidence had been turned over to Landis merely “as a courtesy,” according to Johnson, who professed himself shocked at the Commissioner's betrayal of trust and the resulting headlines. The rumor and speculation that seemed to prompt Landis' publication of the charges turned to outrage when fans learned that their heroes had been forced out of the game for crookedness. They simply didn't believe it.
Newspapers ran editorials criticizing Landis and Johnson. Groups and individuals took out advertisements in support of Cobb and Speaker. The suspicion and cynicism that had been spawned by the Black Sox scandal had dissipated over the years, and it never had extended to players like these two, whose fierce competitiveness had been something for disillusioned fans to hold onto.
Nineteen-nineteen had been baseball's nadir. It had been the year of the Black Sox World Series, the year that two other famous players, Hal Chase and Heinie immerman, had left the game under clouds of accusation. It had been a year in which amblers—flushed from their natural habitat by the wartime closing of the racetracks—could boast that they controlled ball games through bribes and even regular salaries paid to players. And now, if Johnson and Landis could be believed, it had been the year in which Cobb and Speaker, the two biggest names in the game, got together to throw a game between their teams.
The core of Johnson's case against the two players was the testimony and letters he had received from Leonard. The pitcher claimed that he had met under the stands in Detroit with Cobb, Speaker and former pitching great Smoky Joe Wood, who by then was a part-time Indian outfielder. According to Leonard, the Tiger players mentioned that they wanted badly to finish the season in third place, behind the Indians, who had already clinched second, and Chicago, eight of whose players would soon achieve infamy in the upcoming World Series. Leonard (often called “Hub” because of his first name, Hubert, and no relation to the knuckleballing Emil “Dutch” Leonard of the following generation) told Johnson that Speaker had assured the two Detroit players that the Tigers would win the game the next day, and with it a shot at third place money. At that, according to Leonard, they all decided that they might as well profit from the arrangement. According to Leonard, Cobb was to put up $2,000, Speaker and Wood $1,000 each, and he himself $1,500.
The evidence—These two letters, one from Cobb and the other from Wood, were considered conclusive by Ban Johnson. Wood's was the more damaging:
Cleveland, Ohio, Friday
Dear Friend Dutch:
Enclosed please find certified check for sixteen hundred and thirty dollars ($1,630.00).
The only bet West could get down was $600 against $420 (10 to 7). Cobb did not get up a cent. He told us that and I believe him. Could have put up some at 5 to 2 on Detroit, but did not, as that would make us put up $1,000 to win $400.
We won the $420. I gave West $30, leaving $390, or $130 for each of us. Would not have cashed your check at all, but West thought he could get it up at 10 to 7, and I was going to put it all up at those odds. We would have won $1,750 for the $2,500 if we could have placed it.
If we ever have another chance like this we will know enough to try to get down early.
Let me hear from you, Dutch. With all good wishes to Mrs. Leonard and yourself,
I am.
JOE WOOD
Wood's calculations indicate that he, Leonard and an unnamed third party shared in the meager profits of the wager. If “Cobb did not get up a cent,” and West simply ran the errand, who was the third bettor? Leonard said Speaker was. Wood claimed that it was not Speaker, but another, unnamed, “friend of mine from Cleveland.”
Cobb's letter doesn't clarify this point. It does make clear that Cobb knew about the wagering, and that he was involved in trying to place the bet:
Augusta, Ga., Oct. 23, 1919.
Dear Dutch:
Well, old boy, guess you are out in old California by this time and enjoying life.
I arrived home and found Mrs. Cobb only fair, but the baby girl was fine and at this time Mrs. Cobb is very well, but I have been very busy getting acquainted with my family and have not tried to do any correspondence, hence my delay.
Wood and myself were considerably disappointed in our business proposition, as we had $2,000 to put into it and the other side quoted us $1,400, and when we finally secured that much money it was about 2 o'clock and they refused to deal with us as they had men in Chicago to take up the matter with and they had no time, so we completely fell down and of course we felt badly over it. Everything was open to Wood and he can tell you about it when we get together. It was quite a responsibility and I don't care for it again, I can tell you. Well, I hope you found everything in fine shape at home and all your troubles will be little ones. I made a this year's share of world series in cotton since I came home and expect to make more. I thought the White Sox should have won, but I am satisfied they were too overconfident. Well, old scout, drop me a line when you can. We have had some dandy fishing since I arrived home.
With kindest regards to Mrs. Leonard, I remain,
Sincerely,
TY
Speaker is mentioned nowhere in either letter, and only Leonard's oral testimony casts him as a conspirator. Unfortunately for both the league president and the former pitcher, Leonard's testimony was considered suspect by many baseball people and journalists, who knew he carried a grudge against Cobb, his manager at Detroit, for releasing him in 1926. Many thought he might also be bitter toward Speaker, an old Boston teammate who had not claimed him for Cleveland when Cobb put him on waivers and let him go. His motives were further questioned when Henry Killilea, attorney for the American League, revealed that he paid Leonard to hand over the letters. Killilea refused to name the purchase price, but it was variously reported in the press to have been $15,000 or $20,000. Leonard denied selling the letters at any price, saying that he had turned them over “for the good of the game,” and that whatever money he had received had been in settlement of a dispute with the Detroit club.
Bill Evans, an American League umpire who, it was well known, had once mixed it up under the stands with Cobb, minced no words in making it clear that he doubted Leonard was acting from such noble motives: “Only a miserable thirst for vengeance actuated Leonard's attack on Cobb and Speaker…As a pitcher he was gutless…we umpires had no respect for Leonard, for he whined on every pitch called against him…It is a crime that men of the stature of Ty and Tris should be blackened by a man of this caliber with charges that every baseballer knows to be utterly false.”
Cobb maintained that the whole affair was “a vile plot” hatched by his enemies, and denied betting on the game of September 25. He claimed that he had just done a favor for Leonard, whom he now labeled “a cur dog,” by finding out from Wood after the game how much money had been bet. Speaker denied knowing anything at all about the wager.
All three men—Cobb, Speaker and Wood—angrily denied that the game had been thrown by the Indians. The public, outraged by the suggestion that players like Cobb and Speaker could be involved in such a tawdry affair, backed them up with protests to Landis, telegrams to congressmen and petitions to club owners. Humorist Will Rogers spoke for millions when he said that if Cobb and Speaker had “been selling out all these years I would like to have seen them when they wasn't selling.” In a matter of days, Senators were threatening official investigations, and the halls of the Capitol began to echo with sympathetic congressional rumbles of “anti-trust.”
Public reaction—Sportswriters mostly stuck to the Rogers theme, and didn't—publicly, at least—ask the two questions that were begging for answers. First, if Cobb and Speaker weren't guilty, why had they resigned so quietly in the fall? Initially, the public was told that their resignations had nothing to do with Leonard's allegations. Then the story was that they had resigned in order to spare their clubs embarrassment and expense when the charges became known. Next, they had wanted to shield their families from the stress of scandal. Eventually, the fans were told that, since Leonard had refused to face them at a hearing, Cobb and Speaker had been afraid that an acquittal based on their stories alone would be labeled a whitewash and effectively ruin their reputations. Speaker was also said to have been concerned over what harm publicity might do to his friend and old roommate Joe Wood, who had left the Indians in 1922 to become baseball coach at Yale. The scandal was finally made public because a newspaper had uncovered the story and was threatening to publish what facts it had. At that point, Cobb and Speaker were supposed to have decided that they had no choice but to fight.
Today's skeptical press has learned that this kind of waffling rarely accompanies candor. But the reporters of 1926 were not inclined to hold the feet of a pair of genuine American heroes to the fire.
The second—and far more serious—question was this: if there was no arrangement about the game, just what did Wood mean when he wrote to Leonard, “If we ever get another chance like this, we will know enough to try to get down early.”?
Reporters covering the story didn't pursue this issue either. Nor, as we shall see, did the Commissioner of Baseball ever publicly address it.
The defense—Predictably, Cobb didn't wait around to see what questions would be asked. He went on the offensive. While in the autobiography he wrote 35 years later with Al Stump, he mentioned neither the fact that he resigned nor the existence of the two letters, he repeated two “common sense” points that he had made over and over during the crises. First, “For any trio of men [he was including Wood, who, like Leonard, didn't play that day, so couldn't have participated in any game-throwing] to
attempt to rig a ball game is ridiculous on the face of it.”
As awkward—and even dangerous—as it may have been to contradict an angry Ty Cobb, it hardly takes a baseball genius to point out that it's not ridiculous to think of three men—or even two—throwing a game if one of them controls the pitching of the team that's supposed to lose. Leonard's version of the meeting under the stands had Indian manager Speaker telling the Tiger players that Detroit would win even if he had to take the mound himself. As it turned out, the Indians used only one pitcher, Elmer Myers, who gave up 18 hits and nine runs. (It was a hitter's day all around, though. Tiger pitcher Bernie Boland yielded five runs on 13 hits.)
Cobb's second common sense argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny, either. “Funny thing about it,” he said as soon as the accusations were made public, “was that Speaker got three hits and I got one.” This argument was accepted as final, even though every fan of the era must have been all too aware that Shoeless Joe Jackson, the most famous of the Black Sox, had batted .375 in the 1919 Series. It turns out, as the public was soon to learn in another stunning turn of events, that ballplayers who are so inclined throw games in the field.
Despite good reason to be at least a little skeptical of the players' stories, by the time the scandal was a few days old most fans and journalists had lined up behind the two great players, unconvinced either by Leonard's testimony, the letters he produced or the assurances of Ban Johnson, a man Cobb called “an aging, two-faced incompetent,” that the game of September 25, 1919 had been thrown and that Cobb and Speaker had helped throw it.
Everyone expected Commissioner Landis to live up to his reputation for tough, decisive action and settle the case quickly. He didn't. In fact, after making the elements of the case public, he said not another official word about it for more than a month, and by then another bizarre incident had intervened.
Return of the Black Sox—At the end of December, about a week after the scandal broke, Swede Risberg, the banned shortstop of the 1919 Black Sox, let it be known that in his opinion this Cobb-Speaker business was nothing. He could name twenty players, he said, some of them stars and many of them still active in baseball in 1926, who were crooked. Landis immediately invited Risberg to Chicago, where he told his story on New Year's Day, 1927. He told the Commissioner that in 1917, the whole White Sox team had paid the Tigers to “slough” (throw) four games to Chicago. Players like second-baseman Eddie Collins and catcher Ray Schalk (both now in the Hall of Fame) were involved, he said, along with manager Clarence “Pants” Rowland and other “Clean Sox,” as well as most of the Detroit team. “They pushed Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker out on a piker bet,” said Risberg. “I think it's only fair that the white lilies get the same treatment.” He went on to say that it was common during the 1917-1919 period for teams to slough games, and he told Landis that it was usually accomplished by the players playing out of position. (Interestingly, Risberg told a reporter that he doubted that Cobb had been involved in this 1917 sloughing. “There never was a better or straighter baseball player than Cobb, or Speaker, either, to my way of thinking,” he said.) Landis wired some forty players on the teams involved, giving them the opportunity to travel to Chicago, face Risberg and answer his charges.
Risberg's bitter allegations let loose a deluge of accusations, denials and poison reminiscences. Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, dredged up an old charge against the Giants of John McGraw, whom he hated. Chick Gandil, another of the Black Sox, announced that not only did he know Risberg's story to be true, but he knew a lot more, besides. There was noise about an incident in which the St. Louis Browns were supposed to have thrown games to Detroit in order to hurt Cleveland. Joe Jackson told the press that he could put a lot of things straight if Landis would give him the chance. Baseball was washing its dirty linen in public with a vengeance, and the prestige of the game, on the mend since Landis' stern treatment of Risberg, Gandil, Jackson and the other Black Sox, was on the line along with it. The public, shocked by the steady tattoo of revelation, waited to see what would happen.
The confrontation between Risberg and the men he had accused of dishonesty was held four days after his meeting with Landis. James R. Harrison, who covered it for the Times , called it “the most extraordinary hearing that baseball had ever seen,” and went on to recount melodramatically that “while Risberg lolled in a near-by chair, a cigarette burning in his fingers, his face sometimes lighted up with a cynical smile,” every one of the eighteen accused players who had come to Chicago denied that the games had been thrown.
Eddie Collins and others admitted that money had been paid to members of the Detroit team, but only as a reward for the Tigers' having beaten Boston in some games that were critical to Chicago's drive for the pennant. Collins claimed that the money hadn't even been collected from the White Sox until a month after the season had ended, and that the rewarding of the players of a second team for doing an especially good job against a third had been common in baseball before 1920.
The meeting was a tense and angry one. At one point, Donie Bush, onetime Detroit shortstop, leapt from his chair and shook his fist angrily at Risberg, a truly rough character whom Joe Jackson called “a hard guy.” Later, pitcher Bernie Boland snarled at his accuser, “You're still a pig!” Buck Weaver, the third baseman of the Black Sox, and a player many people feel was wrongly banished from the game by Landis, testified that he knew nothing about the alleged fix, then stepped down from the witness' chair and confronted the Commissioner. “Judge, I don't feel that I owe baseball anything, but baseball does owe me something. I ask you for reinstatement.” Landis, taken by surprise, told the former infielder to “drop me a line,” and that he would take the matter up. Weaver died in 1956, still trying to clear his name.
The next day, Gandil took the stand in support of his old teammate, Risberg. He denied that the payments to the Tigers had been a reward for their play against the Red Sox. After the session, Harrison of the Times voiced the attitude of most of those who had observed the two-day hearing: “It will take more than the sworn testimony of all the eight Black Sox to convict Eddie Collins, and Schalk and Faber and Rowland, as well as Cobb, Veach, Heilmann, Dauss and others of the 1917 Tigers. If the only evidence against these men is the word of the Black Sox of 1919 then the former never will be found guilty.”
Landis, though, was known to be puzzled over why Risberg and Gandil would have faced so many hostile men unless their charges were truthful. It was reported that “Judge Landis never does the ordinary thing, and if he thinks there is anything to the Risberg and Gandil charges he will punish mercilessly.”
Risberg, in a smarmy statement to the press, said that he was hoping for “a whitewash” because he didn't want to see the players he'd accused expelled from the game.
On Wednesday, January 12, five days after the hearing, Landis cleared the 40 players of Risberg's charges, while scolding them for rewarding players on another team for good play. Paying the Tigers, he said in typical style, “was an act of impropriety, reprehensible and censurable, but not an act of criminality.” More important, the Commissioner recommended that four new rules be adopted by baseball to cover the kind of situation that now seemed to be cropping up.
“1. A statute of limitations with respect to alleged baseball offenses, as in our State and national statutes with regard to criminal offenses.
“2. Ineligibility for one year for offering or giving any gift or reward by the players or management of one club to the players or management of another club for services rendered or supposed to have been rendered in defeating a competing club.
“3. Ineligibility for one year for betting any sum whatsoever upon any ball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform.
“4. Permanent ineligibility for betting any sum whatsoever upon any ball game in connection with which the bettor has any duty to perform.”
Although the last two recommendations addressed issues raised by the accusations against Cobb and Speaker, whose case had been pushed to the back burner by Risberg's sensational charges, they were simply codifications of what Landis already had the power to do. It was the first proposal that seemed to have important implications for the two great players. Many of the matters that had been plaguing the Judge for the past few months had sprung from the period before he had become Commissioner, and he knew that a more unsavory atmosphere had permeated the game until the Black Sox had shown the owners the dangers of running too lax a ship. He didn't want to deal with any more cases from the old days.
Many observers interested in the fates of Cobb and Speaker felt that the acquittal of the players accused by Risberg made Landis' decision in the case of their heroes a foregone conclusion. Some looked at the Commissioner's list of recommendations and thought they could see which way the wind was blowing. Landis, not wanting to face the issue squarely, might just refuse to sanction the dismissal of the two players from the game on the grounds that the alleged offense had occurred too many years before.
Behind the scenes—There was, however, another aspect to the case, one that even the most rabid fans were unaware of. Ban Johnson, the founder and president of the American League, had been the dominant voice in baseball since the turn of the century, when he had jammed his circuit's major-league status down the National League's throat and forced the game into maturity. He deeply resented the Commissioner and the power the owners had given him.
From the day that Landis had made the Cobb-Speaker case public, Johnson had been sniping at him, first for having given the facts to the newspapers, and then for not immediately having sanctioned the action of the American League. Now, in the guise of “one of Organized Baseball's leaders,” he blasted Landis in the press on the very day that the Judge's decision in the Risberg matter hit the sports pages. He told the world that regardless of whatever action the Commissioner might take, neither Cobb nor Speaker would ever perform in the American League again. He implied that Landis had been handling the matter poorly, that it was none of his business anyway, and that there was more damaging evidence in the case than had as yet been made public.
Three days later, Landis, knowing full well who was out for his scalp, retaliated. Noting in fine magisterial style that “ordinarily such anonymous assertions do not merit serious consideration,” he went on to say that since Cobb and Speaker were “vitally concerned” in the effects of such assertions, he was making his first public statement on the case. He said that he had been aware of the investigation since June, and that Johnson had indicated in November that all of the American League's evidence had been turned over. The Commissioner's office, he said, had no evidence other than that which had been made public. Then, in an attempt to force Johnson's hand, the Judge summoned him and the eight American League owners to meet with him in Chicago on January 24 to “bare all the facts” connected with the case.
On January 18, two days after Landis' statement, Johnson responded, this time openly. As the Times had it, “It's a contest now with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, High Commissioner of Baseball, in this corner, and Ban Johnson, President of the American League, in the other.” Johnson announced that he did indeed have evidence, in the form of detective reports, that had not been handed over to the Judge, and that Landis would never get them “unless we go to court.”
He went on to speak of the players: “I love Ty Cobb…I have had to strap him as a father straps an unruly boy…I know Ty Cobb's not a crooked ball player. We let him go because he had written a peculiar letter about a betting deal that he couldn't explain and because I felt he had violated a position of trust. Tris Speaker is a different type of fellow. For want of a better word I'd call Tris cute. He knows why he was forced out of the managership of the Cleveland club. If he wants me to tell him I'll meet him in a court of law and tell the facts under oath.”
He then described the situation as he saw it: “The American League is a business. When our directors found two employees whom they didn't think were serving them right they had a right to let them go. Now isn't that enough? As long as I'm President of the American League neither one of them will manage or play on our teams.”
Johnson didn't stop there. He accused Landis of not having cooperated in the American League's prosecution of the Black Sox in 1920–1921. He questioned the Commissioner's handling of the Risberg case, specifically his spending of $25,000 without the consent of the Advisory Council. He blamed the Judge for the “cloud of rumor” hovering over the names of Cobb and Speaker, and again expressed amazement that Landis had made the matter public: “The only motive I could see behind that move was a desire for personal publicity.” As the Times said, “it is a showdown between the Commissioner and Ban Johnson, the settlement for all time of their seven-year feud that began when Johnson so bitterly fought the appointment of Landis.”
The battle between the two executives was coming to a head as Johnson maneuvered for leverage and Landis watched for an opening. On Thursday, January 20, Johnson, sensing that many fans and most of his club owners felt that his earlier statement had been too harsh and had done Cobb and Speaker an injustice, tried to soften his position. The two players, he announced, had not been ousted for crookedness, but for incompetence. Cobb had been too violent to be a good manager. Many of his players, poor fellows, had complained. Speaker had been too fond of horse races and too tolerant of similar proclivities among his players. As a result, neither of the player-managers was getting the best out of his team, and the league had decided to let both of them go. Leonard's charges had nothing to do with the league's decision. They had been “inconsequential.”
As sportswriter John Kieran wrote at the time: “To anyone who knows baseball, such an excuse for the removal of a club manager by a league President is nothing short of laughable. On that basis the last half dozen managers of the Phillies were in danger of hanging.” The once masterful Johnson was clearly not himself. After years of sparring with a man he considering an interloper, suffering defeat after humiliating defeat and watching the league he had founded and nurtured being wrenched from his control, he had become an exhausted, heavy-drinking, and increasingly frantic man. He thrashed and floundered in his desperate attempt to stave off the personal disaster that the press was openly predicting for him.
Landis, holding the whip hand and aware of his rival's inconsistent behavior, had only to sit tight. He didn't have long to wait. The day before the scheduled meeting in Chicago, the American League owners, at a session called by Johnson to organize support for his position, relieved their president of his duties and repudiated his criticism of the Commissioner. They also announced that all of the evidence pertaining to the Cobb-Speaker matter had indeed been turned over to Landis and made public. Johnson, near collapse and in the care of a doctor who certified that he should take “a much needed rest,” was replaced temporarily by Detroit owner Frank Navin. “The American League owners tried a muzzle on Johnson [during another dispute in 1924],” Kieran had written prophetically the day before. “This time they may try a catapult.”
The Commissioner's decision—If the Judge's dismissal of the Risberg charges and recommendation of a statute of limitations had made a similar decision in the Cobb-Speaker case likely, his victory over Ban Johnson made it inevitable. Pronouncing himself “perfectly satisfied” with the most recent action of the American League, Landis announced that he would “take up” the matter and render a decision “very soon.” He indicated to the press “that the case had simmered down to the question of whether the two athletes had thrown a ball game or had merely bet on a ball game,” he went on to hint “that he would not expel them” for having bet on a game in which they played. This was an astonishing position for the draconian Commissioner to take, especially in light of his proposed regulations, but it went largely unremarked.
On January 27, more than a month after the scandal had first been made public, and two months after Speaker's resignation had really started the rumors flying, the Judge cleared the two players of the fixing charges and returned them to the reserve lists of their respective teams. In his statement, he merely traced the chronology of the affair, noted that Leonard had refused to come to Chicago to face the men he had accused, and then announced, “These players have not been, nor are they now, found guilty of fixing a ball game. By no decent standard of justice could such a finding be made.”
There was no weighing of testimony, no mention of betting, and no explanation of why it had taken so long to arrive at this simple decision. The reasons for Ban Johnson's original finding of guilt were never detailed or specifically refuted by the Commissioner's office.
W.O. McGeehan of the New York Herald Tribune suggested gently that other considerations might have obscured the Commissioner's stated passion for “a decent standard of justice.”
“Landis made the best of an unfortunate situation” because, McGeehan wrote delicately, the “charges were calculated to do great injury to professional baseball.”
The decision was immensely popular, and the players, who early on had claimed to fear a whitewash, declared victory.
Afterwards—Joe Wood, who had been given a clean bill of health by Yale three weeks before, wasn't mentioned in the decision because he had left professional baseball in 1922. Smoky Joe coached at Yale until 1942. Some 25 years later, his chats with Lawrence S. Ritter made up one of the most poignant and inspiring sections of that best of all baseball books, The Glory of Their Times .
Dutch Leonard, the villain of the piece in the eyes of most fans, was “too ill” to talk to reporters after Landis' decision was announced. He had steadfastly refused to come to Chicago to confront Cobb and Speaker—even claiming at one point that it was a city in which people had been known to be “bumped off”—and both the Commissioner and the public made the most of his reticence.
Cobb himself, along with Speaker, was officially returned to his club by the decision. Neither of their owners, however, seemed enthusiastic to welcome them back, either as players or as managers. They were both made free agents and given the right to negotiate with any interested American League team. Cobb eventually signed with the Philadelphia Athletics, where he ended his career with what he called “the two happiest years I spent in baseball,” batting .357 and .323 for Connie Mack, “the man I most admired in baseball.” Speaker moved over to the Washington Senators, where he hit .327 in 1927, before joining his old rival to play his final year in the majors with the A's.
Ban Johnson, of whom Branch Rickey was later to say, “His contribution to the game…is not closely equaled by any other single person or group of persons,” amazed everyone by returning from enforced exile and once again taking over the helm of the league he had founded. He was finally forced out, sick and exhausted, a few months later. He lived five more lonely years. His plaque at Cooperstown is only a half-dozen steps away from that of Landis, whom he once called “a wild eyed nut.”
Johnson wasn't alone in his estimation of the Commissioner. In 1923, J.G. Taylor Spink, the editor of The Sporting News , had called the Commissioner an “erratic and irresponsible despot.” The Judge had responded characteristically by calling Spink a “swine,” but that didn't stop other writers from occasionally criticizing what baseball historian Dr. Harold Seymour called Landis' “sanctimonious posture.” Nonetheless, the Judge remained Commissioner until he died in 1944, and his legend still serves the game.
These two great executives dominated baseball in succession. Johnson is credited by many with creating modern big league baseball. Landis presided over the game's growth from a mere business toward what modern magnates are pleased to call an industry. The dispute between them that was catalyzed by the Cobb-Speaker affair sprang from the different perspectives their separate roles forced them to take. Johnson, who had battled the established order to create and sustain his new league, had defined “the good of the game” narrowly—combatants slugging it out in the trenches can't often afford the luxury of standing back and taking the larger view.
Landis, behind his fearsome reputation, tended to treat baseball less as a personal feifdom and more as a stage upon which he had the great pleasure of playing a role. Despite the dictatorial powers the panicky owners had given him when they signed him on, he displayed over the years a canny flexibility in determining where “the good of the game” lay.
Landis' strong early actions as Commissioner had created for him a valuable reputation as a strict and merciless disciplinarian. Now the game was healthy again, and the drastic treatment that had helped effect the cure could be discontinued. The Judge could afford to be lenient—especially since leniency simultaneously salved public opinion and confounded his old antagonist.
But this much is virtually certain: if Cobb and Speaker had been named Smith and Jones, or if the affair had arisen earlier in Landis' tenure as Commissioner, they would have joined the Black Sox, Phil Douglas, Benny Kauff, Cozy Dolan, Jimmy O'Connell, et al. in forced retirement. They probably would have done so anyway, if Landis and Johnson hadn't been at each others throats. The retirement of two aging but still competent ballplayers would have remained a small mystery rather than a great scandal if it hadn't been for the struggle between the Commissioner and the League President.
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Sidebar
DID THEY DO IT?
What really happened on that September day in 1919? The tough questions weren't asked at the time, so we'll never know for sure. But with the benefit of hindsight we can draw some reasonable conclusions.
First, it's safe to say that players like Cobb, Speaker, and Wood would not have been likely to fix a game they thought meant something. But given the atmosphere surrounding the sport during the teens, it's also easy to believe that there was an agreement—which the players probably considered harmless, if not downright normal in the circumstances—for the Indians, their place secure in the standings, to ease up on the Tigers.
Second, there can be no reasonable doubt that Wood, Leonard and Cobb were involved in betting on the game. And Wood's letter—especially the “If we ever get another chance like this” comment—strongly implies that they were getting their money down on inside information.
It's likely, then, that it dawned on one or more of the group assembled under the stands that they were in a position, at the end of a long season, to make a little extra money before heading home for the winter.
Did they do it? Probably. Not a fix in the classic sense of conspiring in advance to throw a game for money, but an impromptu arrangement that would clearly have been beyond the pale anytime after the Black Sox Scandal.
I had a chance to ask Joe Wood about all this one day in 1975. He was 85, a marvelous, proud and tough old man who had long outlived the other principals. The scandal had been one of the great traumas of his life, and he believed that it had unjustly kept him out of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He would say only two things about the affair. “I didn't do anything wrong,” he told me, and paused with an old scrapbook open on his lap. “Things were so different then.”
—M.A.