This fall marks the 100th anniversary of the infamous Black Sox scandal, where eight players from the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to deliberately lose the World Series.
A century later, the scandal still has something to teach us.
As Americans, we have for generations used baseball as a metaphor to talk about our hopes and dreams for the country — America as a society of limitless possibility, where any boy can pick up a bat and imagine himself in Fenway Park.
Baseball in 1919 was a pack of tall tales held together by chewing gum, obfuscating inconvenient truths.
The game that Abner Doubleday ostensibly made up to entertain school kids was in fact indelibly linked to gambling and alcohol. In an age of the amateur ideal, that ballplayers made money at all off of playing a game was still controversial.
The standard line about the scandal is that it was about eight players who'd conspired to intentionally lose the series in order to get a payout from gamblers. Those eight players were banned from the game for life, and the story is presented as a cautionary tale about betting on baseball.
But the scandal actually points to something bigger: to an unresolved tension about America. Baseball lays a special claim on our American identity, our aspirations — but it’s also just a business.
There’s an apocryphal story about a kid standing on the courthouse steps and demanding of the most famous of the eight Black Sox players, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Say the game isn’t corrupt, say we weren’t all just taken like a bunch of rubes.
But it was so. The games were thrown. Players did go down for the money. Owners knew about gambling in the sport and would have been happy to look the other way, if not for meddling newspapers. And the gamblers weren’t caught or punished.
One hundred years later, we could stand a little seventh-inning stretch of the soul. We want to believe the game is pure and uncomplicated, but what the Black Sox scandal reminds us is that the game was never quite as pure as we wanted it to be — not now, not when we were kids, and not 100 years ago.
Let's be honest about baseball's contradictions: It's always been complicated and messy, and sometimes the wrong people win.
But baseball survives despite those tensions. And we can still aspire to something good and worthwhile, like the crack of a bat, the ball heading momentarily skyward, and the thrill of possibility.
Andrew Varnon teaches the class "Beer, Baseball and the Bible" at the University of Western New England. He lives and writes in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
