USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Black Sox’ curse won’t go quietly
Chicago can’t win this World Series. Why? Unpaid karmic debts.
Where it began
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Red Sox were cursed when owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, and the Cubs met the same fate when an overzealous ticket- taker offended somebody’s goat.
But let’s not forget that in 1920, seven crooked members of the Chicago White Sox and one railroaded third baseman — soon to be nicknamed the infamous “ Black Sox” —w ere indicted by a grand jury for throwing the 1919 Fall Classic to the Cincinnati Reds. Chicago’s Sox, too, have remained in the World Series toilet ever since.
Perhaps no two man- made disasters have gripped the American conscience as much as the accidental sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 and the deliberate sinking of the ChicagoWhite Sox seven years later. “ Say it ain’t so, Joe” and “ If you build it, he will come” are but two examples of the iconic legacy left to us by seven uncommon hustlers and one innocent alsoran.
Nonetheless, as every kid learned from Sleeping Beauty, curses are in E icted only so that they might be broken when virtue comes to the rescue. Babe Ruth might have been a man of few principles, but he never held a grudge for long — especially when he noted from his perch above ( or wherever) that the Red Sox refused to roll over, no matter how often they were machinegunned by the odds or by Yankee nemesis Bucky F. Dent. That’s probably why he chose to release the penancewinning Sox from their misery in 2004.
Similarly, though the Cubs have a more dif = cult road to travel — how do you make amends to a dead goat? — th e time will come when even that vindictive pet will bleat, “ What the hell,” and allow October corks to pop in the Wrigley Field clubhouse.
The White Sox, however, are in a league of their own.
If literature hasn’t produced a poem about 1919 club owner Charles Comiskey, that’s only because “ cheap son of a bitch” doesn’t lend itself to iambic pentameter. Comiskey was enough of a pinchpenny to bench 29- game winner Eddie Cicotte for the remainder of the season so that he wouldn’t have to cough up a 30- win bonus. Enough said.
No wonder Sox ringleaders Chick Gandil and Swede Risberg were willing to cut a deal to = x the Series in exchange for a fraction of the loot that Comiskey should have been paying them all along. And it wasn’t just for the cash, either: Frontier justice has always been a peculiarly American source of pride — particularly to those who’ve been routinely shafted for playing it straight.
But not in baseball. Never in baseball. No matter how ripe the grievance, the seven Chicago players dishonored not only themselves, but the rest of us aswell. Suddenly our game was dirty, our morals were soiled, and it was going to take a lot more than a rinse cycle from a grand jury to remove the stain.
The ripples set off by the Black Sox didn’t fade with them: In 1920, baseball’s owners banded together for the = rst time as a formidable enemy to their players in order to tighten the despicable reserve clause — a plantation master’s concept of human property that had been shown the door by the Emancipation Proclamation 58 years earlier, but wouldn’t be squashed by baseball for 55 more.
The Black Sox also introduced the game’s =rst commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a racist and anti- Semite who literally had to die before an AfricanAmerican was admitted to the majors. He also gave permission late in the 1938 season for American League pitchers to walk Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg whenever possible so that the Babe’s home run recordwouldn’t be broken by a Jew.
Landis fostered the kind of morality that rewarded a twisted psychotic like Ty Cobb with the Hall of Fame ( though Cobb was noted for climbing into the stands and beating a disabled heckler senseless), while banning from baseball a company man like Buck Weaver, Chicago’s Eighth Man Out, who ate dirt like it was ground round and whose only crime in 1919 was rejecting any part in the = x— without ratting on his teammates in the process.
These are the spoils that White Sox have inherited.
Breaking the curse
the 2005
Though they are ahead in the Series, they still don’t deserve a postseason; not yet. Too much has been swept under the rug, and whining about not having been world champs since 1917 isn’t the highway to heaven. That takes the kind of teamwork thatwent out of style with carbohydrates, a modest injection of whatever passes for sportsmanship these days, a genuine affection from the front of = ce and the fans for the boys in Chicago uniforms, and at least one anonymous kid on the South Side who wants nothing more than to grow up to be a White Sock. ( It might also help if they changed the current color of their footwear from black to just about anything else.)
Once that happens, they’ll = nd themselves in a World Series that really means something — probably a re- match with the Reds. They’ll lose, of course ( they must), but at least they’ll do it honestly this time. After that, a Series trophy will be theirs for the asking. Know why? Because karmic debts must always be repaid in kind. And in full.
Just ask any goat. Steve Kluger is a novelist and playwright.