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WASHINGTON — A century after the Black Sox scandal that tarnished the World Series and ushered in major changes in baseball, the notion that millionaire ballplayers would take money to throw a game — much less the World Series — is all but unthinkable.

But that doesn’t mean cheating in baseball is a thing of the past, and there are still concerns about gambling affecting the integrity of the sport.

Today’s scandals revolve around technology — from teams using Apple Watches or highdefinition cameras to steal signs to rogue “data scouts” giving bookmakers realtime information from ballparks. Players and managers are paranoid about techdriven cheating, with teams hurling accusations at one another as recently as this year’s ALCS.

MLB is doing its best to adapt its rule book to the tech, hoping to keep the sport honest as it failed to do 100 years ago.

The 1919 World Series, in which several Chicago White Sox players were paid by gamblers to lose intentionally to the Cincinnati Reds, was the most egregious gamefixing scandal in history, but it didn’t occur in a vacuum.

“There had been so much corruption going on in the previous two decades, and baseball had always turned a blind eye to all rumors of gambling and players betting on their own games and gamefixing,” said Jacob Pomrenke, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee at the Society for American

Baseball Research. “The Black Sox players saw a low risk and a high reward. They could make a lot of money in one week by losing those games, and they thought baseball would not take it seriously.”

Eight players involved in the scandal were acquitted at trial but were nonetheless banned for life by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

Attempts at gamefixing didn’t end there. In 1924, a Philadelphia Phillies player said he had been offered a bribe to throw a game on the final weekend of the season against the New York Giants, who locked up the NL pennant in that very game. As detailed in Frederic Frommer’s book, “You Gotta Have Heart,” a history of Washington baseball, the AL president called on Landis to cancel the World Series, but Landis refused, and the Washington Senators beat the Giants to win their only championship.

Recent episodes of cheating in baseball are more hightech.

In 2017, the Boston Red Sox used Apple Watches to relay information about the New York Yankees’ pitching signs. Last season, a man associated with the Houston Astros was caught pointing a cellphone into opposing dugouts, and the AL champions have been dogged by allegations of techdriven spying, most recently during this year’s ALCS against the Yankees. Houston players were suspected of whistling in the dugout to communicate pitch selection to batters, an allegation manager AJ Hinch called “ridiculous.”

MLB implemented new, more robust restrictions on surveillance and electronic devices before this season, including a ban on live video of the game anywhere it could be seen by players, managers or coaches.

With sports betting now legal in 18 states, a gamblingrelated scandal would almost certainly be very different. Suspicious bets are quickly flagged by sportsbook operators that don’t want to disrupt their lucrative partnerships with professional leagues.

However, the use of technology to give gamblers an edge is a concern for sports leagues. People sitting in stadiums can in some cases relay ingame data faster than it appears online or on television.

“Any bet that an individual player or umpire can influence himself is higher risk for manipulation,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s senior vice president of league economics and operations. “We’re asking the states for the right to have a say in the types of bets that are offered by sportsbooks, and we think that we’re uniquely positioned to know which bets are riskiest.”

Ben Nuckols is an Associated Press writer.