Did Black Sox get idea to throw

191-9 World Series from Cubs?

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hint Boston's win was fixed .~~
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BY DON BABWIN

If Chicago has been willing to believe

that a cow caused the Great Chicago
Fire, maybe it will buy this one: The
White Sox got the idea to throw the 1919
World Series after the Cubs did the same
thing one year earlier.
That's the suggestion from Eddie
Cicotte, one of the infamous Black Sox
banned from baseball after their tainted
World Series against Cincinnati.
In a 1920 court deposition the Chicago
History Museum recently put on its web-
site, Cicotte said "the boys on the club"
talked about how one or more Cubs were
offered $10,000 to throw the 1918Series
they lost 4-2 to the Boston Red Sox.
Cicotte is as vague as vague can be,
failing to name any names or provide any
details about how the players might have
done it or even if he believes the Cubs
threw the Series. But ifwhat he suggests
is true, it means that when it came to fix-
ing ball games in the early 20th century,
Chicago was nobody's Second City.
"It is interesting to me as a Cubs fan
and a historian of Chicago that both
teams-could be involved in back-to-back
years," said Peter Alter, an archivist at
the' museum who examined the docu-
ment and other artifacts that the mu-
seum paid $100,000 for at auction.
If Cicotte's deposition lacks specif-
ics, it does offer a glimpse into the life
of a player when their lives were a lot
more like the working stiffs who rooted
for them than the wealthy owners they
played for.
Players commonly groused about be-
ing underpaid, and there wasn't anyone
in the majors who didn't hear rumors
about fixes. It was impossible not to see
the gamblers at the games, the lobbies
of the hotels where they stayed or in the
taverns where they drank.
And they talked about such rumors
all the time, including, Cicotte said, on a
long train ride from Chicago to the East
Coast.
"The ball players were talking about
In the deposition, Eddie Cicotte (right) is quoted as saying, "... there was some talk
about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series."
1918 WORLD SERIES
The Boston Red Sox, ted by the
pitching of Babe Ruth, defeated
the Cubs 4 games to 2. The Red
Sox scored only 9 runs in the entire
series, the lowest total ever by a
winning team.
Ruth pitched a Game 1 shutout - at
Comiskey Park - before 19,274 fans.
somebody trying to fix the National
League ball players or something like
that," Cicotte is quoted as saying in the
deposition.
"Well anyway there was some talk
about them offering $10,000 or some-
thing to throw the Cubs in the Boston
Series," he said. "Somebody made a
crack about getting money, if we got into
the Series, to throw the Series."
Cicotte said $10,000 also was left in
his hotel room for his role in the fix of the
1919Series. He died in 1969.
Whether any of this is true is un-
known, but an author who wrote about
the 1918Series said not only was such a
fix possible, it was understandable.
''They didn't make much money," said
Sean Deveney, a reporter with .the Sport-
ing News whose book The Original Curse
said a fixby the Cubs was likely."They had
the incentive to do something like that."
Both the Cubs and the Red Sox were
upset that the teams' owners were not
paying their fair share of the World Se-
ries receipts, Deveney said. Before one
Series game, the two squads refused to
take the field until the owners paid them
what they were promised.
"The owners said no," Deveney said.
All six games in the 1918 Cubs-Red
Sox Series were close - Boston never
won a game by more than a run - and it
would only take a dropped ball or a badly
thrown ball to turn victory into defeat.
If there is a record of a baseball official-
asking Cicotte about the 1918World Se-
ries, Deveney doesn't know about it.
"Baseball didn't want to investigate,"
he said. "They wanted to make it all
about the Black Sox and say, 'OK, gam-
bling's gone: " AP