The Original Curse (14 page)

Even with their depth problems, the Red Sox shaped up to be the class of the league. Entering the year, the White Sox were expected to defend the AL championship, but Chicago’s roster took an irreparable hit in mid-May when outfielder Joe Jackson was bumped up from Class 4 to Class 1A (after the first draft wave, the government narrowed and simplified its classification system, removing many of the marriage exemptions, and local draft boards pushed previously deferred men into Class 1A). Rather than wait to be called into the army, Jackson accepted an offer to paint ships for the Harlan & Hollingsworth Shipbuilding Company in Delaware, part of the nationalized Emergency Fleet Corporation, which was building a modern American navy. Losing Jackson, who was hitting .354 at the time, was the start of an exodus that pretty much sank the champs’ season, leaving inexperienced upstarts such as Cleveland and the Yankees—neither team had ever won a pennant at that point—as the Red Sox’s main challengers.

Jackson’s move brought attention to a brewing problem. Once he punched in for his shipyard job, Jackson was supposed to paint ships, which qualified him for a draft exemption on the grounds that he was
employed in a field useful to the war effort. It’s unlikely, though, that Jackson so much as fingered a brush. See, it so happened that Harlan & Hollingsworth had a competitive baseball team. In fact, all six of the government’s shipbuilding yards had competitive baseball teams. The shipyards pursued Class 1A big-league players such as Jackson, offering hefty wages to top players, plus exemption from army service. The
Boston American
reported, “As much as $900 a month has been offered to more than one star player, while propositions of $500 are numerous.”
¹³

There was bluster and outrage about the draft-dodging scheme. When Jackson left, Ban Johnson claimed that more than 20 players had been taken by shipyards. Columnist Hugh Fullerton wrote, “The recent movement of the players to the shipyards of private companies, where the majority are to play on ball teams rather than drive rivets, is a sad commentary on the patriotism of the players.”
¹⁴
When two more White Sox players, Claude Williams and Byrd Lynn, jumped to the shipyards the following month, an angry Charles Comiskey said, “I don’t consider them fit to play on my ball club.”
¹⁵
Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets, who lost pitcher Al Mamaux to a shipyard, wrote, in a letter to
Baseball Magazine
, “I would not care to re-employ any of our men who enter such plants.”
¹⁶
These were empty threats. In 1919, Jackson, Williams, and Lynn were back with the White Sox, and Mamaux was pitching for Ebbets.

The shipyard lure was strong. The money was good, the competition tough, and the war distant. That winter, Leonard nearly signed up with a naval yard team, and for all the struggles he was having by the time the Indians were accusing him of giving his fastball a little licorice, he probably wished he had done so. Leonard did pull himself together, throwing a no-hitter on June 2 and pitching better as the weather warmed. But Leonard had to be thinking about getting out all along. Eventually, on June 22, Leonard signed with the Fore River shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Two days later he was moved up to Class 1A. He did not play again in 1918, but neither did he go to war.

Which, perhaps, was selfish and unpatriotic, though consistent with Leonard’s me-first reputation. But Leonard’s choices were difficult. Remember, when Alexander returned from the front, he was a shell-shocked epileptic with an alcohol problem, who died broke.
When Leonard died in 1952, he was a raisin magnate, living on 2,500 acres of lush California land. He left his heirs an estate worth $2.1 million.
¹⁷

Draft dodging and ball doctoring were known problems in 1918, but baseball rarely handled problems head-on. Broad proclamations were quickly ignored (as with the quick re-signing of players who jumped to shipyards), and complicated issues were shrugged off (as with pitchers’ use of freak deliveries). Baseball had risen to American sporting supremacy. It had little competition. Fans were satisfied with the game as it was. Solving problems meant delving into negatives, and why delve into negatives?

Gambling was one of baseball’s great negatives, and the city of Boston was its epicenter. Rumors of crookedness had been cropping up in the city for years, and there was active and open gambling in Boston’s ball parks, but the problem was presented merely as one of too much betting in the stands, not as a problem of gamblers influencing players. Baseball was loath to admit that there was interaction between gamblers and the game itself. Rewind to the summer of 1917, though, and find that baseball’s gambling problem literally spilled onto the field at Fenway Park.

The scene on June 16, 1917, was surreal—a cool, wet day at Fenway, the Red Sox playing an important afternoon game against the White Sox. Boston was in second place, trailing Chicago by 3.5 games. Ninety-four hundred fans were on hand, including several officers from the French army, in town to help train American soldiers. The pitching matchup was a beauty—32-year-old Chicago shine-baller Eddie Cicotte against fire-throwing 22-year-old Babe Ruth. The White Sox took a 2–0 lead in the top of the fourth when rain began to fall, muddying the field. Fans in the right-field bleachers chanted, “Call the game!”

For a game to be official, five innings must be completed. With two out in the fifth and the White Sox winning—just one more out would make the game count in the books—the frustrated chants of “Call the game!” grew louder. Then 300 fans overran the fence and stormed the field. The
Globe
reported, “Sgt. Louis C. Lutz and five patrolmen from the Boylston St. station were powerless against the mob, which drew many recruits from the left-field bleachers.”
¹⁸
In the mayhem, a fight broke out between Red Sox fans and White Sox players.
One fan let out three cheers for the Red Sox and claimed he was attacked by Chicago’s Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin for it. White Sox catcher Ray Schalk got into a scuffle with one of the cops. There was a 45-minute delay to clear the fans. The field was soaked, but play continued. The White Sox won, 7–2. The French officers must have thought baseball a very strange game.

If a game ends before it is official, any wager placed on that game becomes null and void—which is why the “Call the game!” chanters were so persistent. They wanted to rescue their losing bets on the Red Sox. Right field in Fenway was notorious as a gambling hub (gamblers were equally active at the home of the NL’s Boston Braves). With the Red Sox down, 2–0, all bets on Boston officially would be losers if the umpire waited until the next inning to call the game. The gamblers attempted a human rain delay.

In a stern column on the subject, James Crusinberry wrote in the
Tribune
:

Later investigation made it practically certain that the trouble was started by the horde of gamblers that assembles each day in the right field pavilion and carries on operations with as much vigor and vim as one would see in the wheat pit of the Chicago board of trade. The same condition prevails at the National league park, and although gambling may take place more or less in all big league parks, there is no other city in which it is allowed to flourish so openly….

Just why this betting ring is allowed in Boston and not tolerated in other cities never has been explained by the baseball magnates, but it is supposed to carry a political angle which has the hands of the magnates tied. The attention of major league presidents has been called to it in the past and even has brought forth statements from the baseball heads that there was no open gambling. Any one present, however, can see the transactions and hear them plainly.
¹⁹

Boston gambling had been brought to the attention of Ban Johnson years earlier. In August 1915, when stories appeared about betting at the park, Johnson set out to address the problem. “We stopped gambling there a few years ago,” Johnson said at the time. “There is nothing more harmful to baseball than gambling and I think we have it pretty well rooted out. When we started after the gamblers in Boston … we had all kinds of obstacles thrown in our way. Influential
politicians and others tried their best to protect these leeches, but we stopped at nothing and soon had the regulars suppressed.”
²⁰

Evidently not, because two years later gamblers made a farce of the game at Fenway. Outraged and embarrassed, Johnson began an antigambling crusade in August 1917. He hired Pinkerton detectives, and by August 24 nine men had been convicted of gambling at Boston’s two parks, and others were awaiting hearings. Four days later, at Braves Field, police manned the bleacher gates and denied admission to 25 men suspected of being gamblers. The crackdown was swift but utterly lacked teeth. The convicted gamblers had to pay only a small fine, and off they went.

The hubbub around Johnson’s fight against gamblers subsided, and when 1918 opened, not much had changed. Fenway was still infested with gamblers. When the White Sox—with Weaver and McMullin in tow—returned to Boston for a late-May series, Weaver was hounded by Fenway gamblers. “Those money changers who ply their trade brazenly in the face of authority at major-league ball games remembered the incidents of last season—one in particular—when they tried to stop a ball game by force, when they stood to lose some shekels on the series with the White Sox,” one story in the
Daily News
read. “[Weaver] had been booed before in the Hub, but since that incident gamblers who infest the park have paid particular attention to Buck at practically every appearance…. This was the case in the series that ended [May 28].”
²¹

Nothing changed at Braves Field either. During one game in 1918, according to the
Tribune
, “It was so hot the spectators in the open-faced seats were invited into the shade of the grand stand. Most of them belonged to the gambling squad which still maintains headquarters high up in the first base pavilion. The jitney bettors accepted the invitation and established a temporary clearinghouse near the quickest grand stand exit.”
²²
Johnson’s brief crusade, readily abandoned, was typical of baseball’s approach to hard-to-solve problems: talk big, take minimal action, move on. There was talk but no action on shipyard draft dodgers and on freak pitches. This was just how baseball dealt with the tricky issues of the day. It didn’t.

Gambling was the trickiest issue, and the problem was bigger than Boston. Later in 1918,
The Sporting News
charged, “In the St. Louis National League club’s grand stand, with a club operated by a highly
moral set of citizens and officials, for instance, the passages were often blocked by known professional gamblers in such numbers, openly taking bets, that the ordinary patron could scarcely make his way.”
²³
In Pittsburgh, “there is a clique at Forbes Field which operates openly to the amazement of spectators and the management, which provides and pays policemen to prevent this practice…. Why they can’t be stopped is a mystery.”
²⁴

Probably because no one really
wanted
them to stop. The attitude of the game’s magnates was not universally supportive of Johnson’s gambling fight. There was little impetus to root out gamblers. They were, after all, reliable ticket buyers. Besides, loudly conducting an antigambling campaign only made fans aware that there was a gambling problem. Comiskey “sharply suggests that it does the game no good to parade the fact that there is an evil difficult to eliminate.”
²⁵
Maybe Comiskey and the other magnates should have had the foresight to tackle baseball’s gambling issue, but why? Keeping quiet about gambling and keeping baseball profitable were more immediate concerns. (Comiskey stuck to his hush-hush approach even after he found out that his own team threw the 1919 World Series.) Rumors of players fixing games were persistent, but there were no solid cases in which players and gamblers could be linked directly. As long as those connections stayed in the shadows, there seemed to be no danger.

In
Eight Men Out
, Eliot Asinof summed up the thinking of Comiskey and other magnates: “Most likely, the cloak of secrecy was maintained by the power of the owners themselves. They knew, as all baseball men came to know. They knew, but pretended they didn’t. Terrified of exposing dishonest practices in major-league ball games, their solution was no solution at all. It was simply an evasion. Whenever there was talk of some fresh incident, they would combine to hush it up. The probing sportswriter would be instructed—or paid off—to stop his digging. Ballplayers would be thanked for their information—and disregarded. Always, the owners claimed, for the good of baseball. Their greatest fear was that the American fan might suspect there was something crooked about the National Pastime. Who, then, would pay good money to see a game?”
²⁶

In Boston, gamblers and ballplayers had an easy time crossing paths, and the events of June 1917 brandished the city’s claim as the capital of baseball betting. In July 1918, we will see, two players would
cross paths with a well-known Boston gambler at the Oxford Hotel. Bets would be placed, double crosses would be attempted, and one player’s career would end. But not before baseball tried to cover it up, of course.

Leonard’s life did not end in tragedy or destitution, but his baseball career ended in ignominy and embarrassment. Leonard finished his playing days in Detroit, under manager Ty Cobb. Despite an 11–4 record, Cobb released Leonard in July 1925, and Leonard was frustrated to find that no other team would pick him up—not even the Indians, managed by his old Red Sox teammate Tris Speaker. The following spring Leonard went to Ban Johnson, alleging that late in September 1919 he and Cobb had conspired with Speaker and Indians outfielder Joe Wood (another ex-teammate) to have Cleveland lose a game to help Detroit finish in third place. Leonard produced letters that—vaguely—backed his claim.