So are you ready to get Scandalous with this one?, well it's a scandal alright by the title, so we get back into baseball, and talk about The Black Sox Scandal from the Entertainment Category in Story of America Cards.

(What was the Black Sox Scandal?)

The Black Sox Scandal was a Major League Baseball game-fixing scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein.

Despite acquittals in a public trial in 1921, Judge Landis permanently banned all eight men from professional baseball. The punishment was eventually defined by the Baseball Hall of Fame to include banishment from consideration for the Hall. Despite requests for reinstatement in the decades that followed (particularly in the case of Shoeless Joe Jackson), the ban remained.

("Say it ain't so, Joe")

In 1920 a small boy followed a Chicago White Sox baseball player down the steps of a Chicago courthouse and pleaded him to say "Say it ain't so Joe", That famous plea was made after "Shoeless Joe" Jackson had told a jury what he knew about a conspiracy to fix the results of the 1919 World Series.

By his own admission and that of his teammates, Jackson and the rest of the White Sox had conspired to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds and they had been paid well to do so by the crime world.

Suspicions had begun brewing even before the first pitch was thrown. Because of a wealth of pitching, hitting, and fielding talent, the Chicago White Sox were considered clear favorites to win.

But as the games approached, the betting odds shifted inexplicably in favor of Chicinnati. Baseball insiders and the betting world knew immediately something was wrong. The first game began with an incident fairly common in baseball: Chicago's starting pitcher, Eddie Cicotte, hit the Red's leadoff man with a pitched ball.

The White Sox went on to lose the first two games by lopsided margins, and after seven games of the nine-game series, the Reds were ahead, four games to three. Then, just before the eighth game, a known gambler told a Chicago sportswriter that he could look forward to a big first inning for the Reds. True to the prediction, Cincinnati scored four runs in the first inning and soon the Reds had claimed the world championship.

It took almost a year, however, before a grand jury was formed to look into the gambling in baseball. Word then leaked out that Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, had withheld the losers' share of the World Series income from eight of his players. When pressed, Comiskey admitted that he thought his players lost the Series on purpose.

This admission led to an across-the-board admission of a coverup in the fixing of the World Series, and the scandal soon spread to include the president of the National League, along with the players and managements of several major league baseball teams.

Finally, on September 27th 1920, Eddie Cicotte admitted that he had agreed to lose the Series if the gambling world would pay him and his teammates $100,000. He then revealed the names of the six other players who had joined him in the plot.

The players involved were banned from baseball for the rest of their lives, and an angry public branded them the "Black Sox".

(The Scandal in the Fictional World)

This Scandal became so big that it even spread into fiction, Novels and Movies, TV shows, Music and Theatre. Yeah it spread like all big scandals it has to be dramatized...so here are some of the Fictional World where the scandal had spread too.

For the Novels; one called Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof is a best well known description of the scandal there is also a film for this book, The novel; Blue Rain: A Novel of the 1919 World Series by Brendan Boyd tells a first-person narrative of the event from the perspective of Sport Sullivan, a Boston gambler involved in fixing the series.

And last for the Novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Famous well known novel; The Great Gatsby had a minor character named Meyer Wolfsheim who was said to have helped in the Black Sox scandal, though this is purely fictional. In explanatory notes accompanying the novel's 75th-anniversary edition, editor Matthew Bruccoli describes the character as being based on Arnold Rothstein. And the 2013 film makes reference to this fact.

For movies; The Godfather Part II, had a fictional gangster by the name; Hyman Roth who alludes to the scandal when he says, "I've loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919". The 1989 film; Field of Dreams based upon the novel by W. P. Kinsella, discussed the scandal and featured two of the players involved like Joe Jackson played by Ray Liotta who played a large part in the film and Eddie Cicotte played by Steve Eastin. Field of Dreams starred Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan and James Earl Jones.

For Tv; the First season of Boardwalk Empire, along with the second season the scandal was a large subplot involving Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and their associates.

In the fifth season of Mad Men, Roger Sterling tries (LSD) for the first time and hallucinates that he is at the infamous game. The story of the scandal was retold by Katie Nolan in the sixth season of Drunk History.

In Music, Murray Head's 1975 album Say It Ain't So takes its name after an apocryphal question put to Shoeless Joe Jackson during the court case.

And on Jonathan Coulton's album Smoking Monkey, his song "Kenesaw Mountain Landis" greatly fictionalizes the commissioner's quest to ban Jackson from baseball, in the style of a tall tale.

And finally for Theatre; 1919: A Baseball Opera, is a musical by Composer/lyricist Rusty Magee and Rob Barron, which premiered in June 1981 at Yale Repertory Theatre. A sort of Recent one called The Fix is an opera by composer Joel Puckett with libretto by Eric Simonson, which premiered March 16, 2019 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.

(Ending)

And that was the Black Sox Scandal, so I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time bye.