Black Sox Banned: Eight Players Expelled from Baseball

Eight men who had been acquitted in a courtroom were convicted again the very next day by a far more powerful judge. On August 3, 1921, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis permanently banned the eight Chicago White Sox players implicated in fixing the 1919 World Series, overruling the jury verdict with a single devastating declaration: "Regardless of the verdicts of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball." The scandal had erupted when eight members of the heavily favored White Sox conspired with gamblers, including the notorious Arnold Rothstein, to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The players involved — including "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the most gifted hitters in the game — were motivated partly by resentment toward club owner Charles Comiskey, whose notoriously cheap treatment of his players made them receptive to outside money. The fix was poorly executed and poorly concealed, with suspicious betting patterns alerting sportswriters almost immediately. The criminal trial in Chicago ended in acquittals on August 2, partly because key confessions mysteriously disappeared from the prosecution's files. Landis, who had been installed as baseball's first commissioner specifically to clean up the sport's gambling problem, was unmoved by the legal technicality. The bans held for the rest of all eight players' lives and beyond. Jackson's case has generated the most enduring debate, since he batted .375 in the Series and committed no errors, leading supporters to argue he never actually participated in the fix. More than a century later, his exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame remains one of the sport's most contested decisions.