Sports

Cubs Return To Scene Of Their Alleged Crime

Can't even do curses right

"Say it ain't so. The Chicago White Sox players who tanked the 1919 World Series for money got the idea from the Chicago Cubs, who threw the Series a year earlier and got away with it," the Tribune opines.

"'The ball players were talking about somebody trying to fix the National League ball players or something like that in the World Series of 1918,' said pitcher Eddie Cicotte, the first of the infamous Black Sox to confess, in a 1920 deposition recently posted on the Chicago History Museum's website. 'There was talk that somebody offered this player $10,000 or anyway the bunch of players were offered $10,000 to throw this series.'

"That sounded pretty good to the Sox players, who eventually struck a deal for themselves - and ended up banned from baseball. But the Cubs apparently got a pass. Nobody really dug into that business about somebody offering something to somebody until Sean Deveney's 2009 book, The Original Curse.

"Deveney and others offer plenty of reasons the Cubs players might have been motivated to throw the Series to the Boston Red Sox and scant evidence that they actually did, but, hey, all the witnesses are dead. Play along here."

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Open Town
"Gambling is part of the history of the game and Chicago at the time was very much a gambling town," Deveney told the Boston Globe last year.

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Handicapping The Series

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Comments welcome.

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