Ex-Yank McCann teases Gardy over Series pick
How crooks and the ‘Black Sox’ fixed the World Series 100 yrs. ago
HOUSTON — The Astros invited a pair of players from their 2017 championship team, catchers Brian McCann and Evan Gattis, to take part in the ceremonial first pitch before Game 1 of the World Series on Tuesday night. McCann pitched and Gattis caught.
The 35-year-old McCann, a Yankee from 2014 through 2016, said he watched the ALCS and suffered no conflicted feelings.
“I was rooting for the Astros,” he said before Houston’s 5-4 loss to the
Nationals. “Yeah, I mean, when you win a championship somewhere, it’s special. It goes on forever. I have a lot of great friends with the Yankees, lifelong friends. And I met some amazing people there. But I mean, when you win a championship somewhere, it’s forever.”
Asked whether he had informed Brett Gardner, his best friend with the Yankees, where his support stood or if he wanted The Post to notify
Gardner, McCann smiled and replied, “You can let him know.”
➤ Numbers can lie, but there is no denying the team that takes a 2-0 lead in the World Series is in position to win it all. That is what the Nationals will attempt to do in Game 2 in the best-of-seven Series on Wednesday night.
Fifty-five teams have won the first two games in World Series history and 44 of them have won it. The last 11 times a team won the first two games it was crowned World Series champions and in 17 of the last 18 years the winners of Game 2 have won the Series. The exception was the 1996 Braves who took the first two games at Yankee Stadium before dropping the Series in six.
Going back to Sept. 23 the Nationals are 17-2 which, according to Elias Sports Bureau is their best 19-game stretch since the franchise moved from Montreal to Washington in 2005.
➤ The Astros activated righthanded reliever Chris Devenski for the World Series and took righthander Bryan Abreu off the roster. Manager A.J. Hinch cited Devenski’s World Series experience for the move.
➤ Hinch stayed with struggling DH Yordan Alvarez against Nationals starter Max Scherzer in Game 1. Alvarez went 2-for-3 with a walk, but struck out against Daniel Hudson with the bases loaded to end the seventh inning.
E
DDIE Cicotte squinted away the mid-afternoon sun, ready to throw the pitch heard ’round the nation. Sixty feet, 6 inches away squatted his catcher, Ray Schalk. Together, the two men had crafted the season of Cicotte’s life across that summer of 1919: 29 wins against but seven losses, a stingy 1.82 ERA. The statistic WHIP — the average of walks and hits per inning — had yet to be conceived, but if it had, Cicotte’s was 0.995. That’s filthy in any era.
“I put the glove down, ol’ Eddie hits the glove, it’s a good partnership,” Schalk had said a few days earlier, a few days before his Chicago White Sox of the American League would face the National League’s Cincinnati Reds in a best-of-nine series to determine the champions of the world.
This day, Oct. 1, had dawned warm and humid, one final yelp of summer hard by the Ohio River. Cicotte and Schalk both knew that the Reds’ Morrie Rath, leading off the bottom of the first, would take the first pitch no matter where it was thrown. Cicotte’s first pitch was middle-middle, waist-high, over the plate, and Rath never moved his bat.
Schalk thought Cicotte had been a little reckless there. He put down two fingers. Cicotte nodded. That’s precisely the pitch he was looking to throw. Out of his hand, the baseball spun furiously, and it arched on a wide parabola directly for its intended target: between the shoulder blades of Rath’s back. Rath took his base.
It was a purpose pitch. It may, in fact, have been the most purposeful pitch ever thrown in the 150year history of organized baseball, because in a time long before instant communication, it delivered an immediate message to thousands of interested precincts.
In the stands at Redland Field that day, among the massive gathering of 30,511, sat Abe Attell, the onetime worldwide featherweight boxing champion. Dressed to the nines, he sat back in his chair and smiled. Around him came instant derisive chants. There had been some worry that Cicotte’s right arm was lame, a reason why odds on the World Series had in recent days gone from heavily in favor of Chicago to dead even; there had also been some talk that something else was afoot.
“FIX!” a good chunk of the crowd roared. “The fix is in!”
Some 650 miles away, inside the
Ansonia Hotel on Broadway between 73rd and 74th streets, Arnold Rothstein stood on the periphery of a crowd gathered to hear live play-by-play of the Series, relayed from a telegraph to an announcer. “CICOTTE HITS RATH!” the man barked. And Rothstein smiled, put on his bowler hat and headed for the street. There were three men in the world who were certain of what had just happened:
Rothstein, who had masterminded it all.
Attell, who had delivered the first installment of cash — $10,000 — to Cicotte’s room at Cincinnati’s Hotel Sinton, leaving the bundle on the pillow of his bed.
And Cicotte, who’d sewn the 10 large into one of his sports coats for safekeeping, and whose pinpoint control had seen that the baseball arrived safely in the beefy part of Rath’s back.
The fix was, indeed, in. A hundred years ago this month, a small coterie of professional gamblers recruited Cicotte and seven of his teammates to throw the World Series.
It was an audacious stunt made easy because the White Sox, a powerful team that had won the Series two years earlier, were united in their distaste for Charles
Comiskey, the man who owned the club.
Cicotte, for instance, was 35 years old and had only that season broken $5,000 in yearly salary. Comiskey had promised him a bonus if he won 30 games, then directed his manager, Kid Gleason, not to pitch him in any of the season’s final 14 games once he’d gotten to 29. The players saw Comiskey getting fat off their wares, and that rankled; so did the fact that gamblers could make a killing off them.
That was the case across baseball. In New York City, there were two impresarios who took advantage of the New York Giants’ status as the unquestioned rulers of baseball in the city. One was Harry M. Stevens, the vending magnate, who made nine different fortunes hawking Coca-Cola, peanuts, chewing gum, beer and cigarettes.
The other was the gamblers who worked the third-base grandstand at the Polo Grounds. There, working in the open, they would take bets on the game at hand, future series, the pennant or any other prop bets their customers could come up with — in addition to floating crap games and poker games. Their names were bold-boldfaced in the newspapers:pers: Max Blumenthal, Honestst John Kelly, Leo Mayer, Jakeykey Jo-Josephs.
One name stood above bove the others, though. Arnold Rothstein had be-befriended John J. McGraw, manager of the Giants, and to- gether the men had d opened several billiards parlors across New York City. There was little mystery as to how Rothstein made his living — authorities knew w that he was a mentor r to such already-notorious underworld names as Lucky Luuciano and Meyer Lanansky. But the thought pre-prevailed: Gambling wasas a harmless vice. People ople might wind up dead ead broke, but not dead. That was the thinking anyway. way.
And Rothstein thought ught big. That’s what drew rew him to the White Soxx — that, and a willingnessss to
put asas muchmuch as $100,000 of his own momoney on the Reds, who at one point were 44-to-1 underdogs.derdogs. RRothstein knewknew AttellAttell wwell, becausecause boxinboxing, like baseball, wawas like a beer hall ffor gambleblers Attell asked aaround, anand he tartargeted eight White Sox who wwere intriguedtrigued enough to listenl — Cicotte and fellow pitcher Lefty Williams were in. The team’s unrivaled star,st outfielderfielder “Shoeless JoJoe” Jackson — a lifetime .356 hitter, so named because as a kid, playing for the mill team back home, he’d forgone his uncomfortable spikes and promptly hit a triple barefoot — was in.
So was fellow outfielder Happy Felsch, and infielders Buck Weaver, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin and Chick Gandil. In a meeting at the Ansonia on Sept. 21, with the Sox in town to play the Yankees, a few dollars were spread around to prove the gamblers were serious. All but Weaver took a share.
Almost immediately, in the small community of baseball players and sportswriters and gamblers, word leaked out. The possibility of betrayal was an open secret, and the odds reflected that: By the time Cicotte took the mound on Oct. 1, it was almost impossible to get even money on the Sox. And by the time he drilled Rath in the back, there was no other conclusion to draw.
In the press box, famed sportswriter Ring Lardner sat next to Christy Mathewson, the ex-Giant pitching legend who was as famous for his square living as his devastating “fadeaway” pitch (known in modern parlance as a screwball). They took note of an assortment of odd plays and the difference in the quality of Chicago’s overall play in games they lost (Games 1, 2, 4 and 5) and won (Games 3, 6 and 7).
Then, in decisive Game 8, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in front of 32,930 increasingly angry fans, Williams faced five batters, allowed two singles and two runs, was replaced, but was charged with four runs that set up a clinching 10-5 walkover win for the Reds.
By then, there was little question. The 1920 season co-starred a grand jury, which handed out eight indictments late in the season. None of the players was ultimately convicted — this was Chicago in 1919, after all; Al Capone would soon be more powerful than the mayor — but a new commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had been granted unlimited authority by owners fearful that their game might be destroyed by the scandal. He decided to ban them all for life.
Weaver, the one player who never took a dime but attended too many crooked meetings for Landis’ liking, maintained his innocence to the end. Jackson, who to that time was, perhaps, the third-best player who’d ever lived (behind Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner) became an instant footnote, the subject of a decades-long quest to push him into the Hall of Fame and 70 years later a yearnful movie, “Field of Dreams,” in which he was once. again free to roam outfields and smack line drives into cornfields.
But it was Rothstein who gained the largest fame. He was a key character in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” In “The Godfather Part II,” a young protégé of Vito Corleone named Hyman Suchowsky, told he needed to change his name, was asked by Vito: “Who’s the greatest man you know?”
“Arnold Rothstein,” he replied, and thus was Hyman Roth born.
In his own lifetime, three years before he was murdered in a business dispute, Rothstein might have skimmed the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby” and come across a character named Meyer Wolfsheim, a mentor to Jay Gatsby, who, Gatsby tells Nick Carraway, “fixed the World Series back in 1919.” Carraway wonders how he isn’t in jail. “They can’t get him, old sport,” Gatsby replies. “He’s a smart man.” O
N Sept. 30, 1920, as Joe Jackson left the grand-jury room at the Cook County Courthouse, a small boy clutched at his sleeve, sniffed back tears and offered a plaintive question that remains a part of Bartlett’s Famous Quotations, even a century later.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the boy pleaded. “Say it ain’t so.”
“I’m afraid it is, kid,” Shoeless Joe Jackson replied.
To this day, a sign hangs prominently in both clubhouses of all 30 major-league teams. It reads:
“Any player, umpire or club official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year. Any player, umpire or club or league official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”
It is a warning — and a lesson — exactly 100 years in the making.
Say it ain’t a so, Joe. — A boy to “Shoeless Joe” Jackson (left) as he left a courtroom