Only God can be entirely certain, but my guess is that either there would have been no fix, or it would have befallen at another time, another place, with a different cast of characters. Professional gamblers tend to be conservative, and the chances of getting away with murder are not the kind of odds they favor. Intelligent people wouldn't have tried to fix a World Series in the first place, but a man can be stupid enough to try and still have sense enough to know that for that to work you need at least one pitcher on the take. Of four pitchers on the Chicago staff who might have been worth considering, Red Faber was unavailable because of illness, and Dickie Kerr was a rookie who might not have appeared in the Series at all if Faber had been healthy. In the event, both Cicotte and Williams were embroiled in the fix.
Greed knows no law but the survival of the strongest.
And with Cicotte on the take, there was no turning back. Jim Hamilton writes a weekly baseball column for The Daily Star. The Daily Star. All rights reserved.