![]() There is no doubt, however, that once a fix had been arranged between eight of the White Sox players and a group of gamblers, it was one of the worst-kept secrets of all time. In 1956, a third player, Chick Gandil, told his version of the inside story in a sports magazine, admitting a guilty part but only further confusing an already confused picture. After the case was closed, Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammate, George “Buck” Weaver, spoke openly about their roles -to insist that they were innocent as the lilies of the field. Those involved in the conspiracy were understandably reticent at the time, and have remained so ever since. In contrast to the enormous publicity of the scandal, exact documentation of it is slight, and based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence. The notion that it is a big business, run for profit, is now widely embraced. ![]() Though baseball is still our national pastime, it is regarded with a diminished sense of reverence. It is unlikely that the public reaction would be so emotionally charged as in 1920. The proprietors of baseball have watchfully guarded the integrity of the game ever since the Black Sox scandal that a similar conspiracy could take place today seems quite improbable. It has come down to us, one of the most pitiful fragments of the American idiom: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” In the Philadelphia Bulletin, for example, the disgraced players were compared with “the soldier or sailor who would sell out his country and its flag in time of war.” More poignant was the plea of one or more small boys to their idol, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, as he left the building where the grand jury met. Newspaper editorials thundered imprecations. The outcry at this revelation was universal. The grand jury had exposed what soon came to be celebrated as the “Black Sox” scandal-in the public mind, the most bra/en conspiracy in the annals of American sports. Only five weeks before, this same jury had disclosed that the 1919 World Series had been fixed eight players of the Chicago White Sox team of the American League had been indicted for accepting bribes. In spite of the jury’s recent disclosures, the game of baseball was “clean.” On November 6, 1920, a grand jury in Cook County, Illinois, issued to an aroused public a statement of reassurance on a question that seemed to eclipse in significance even the landslide presidential victory of Warren Gamaliel Harding just four days earlier.
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