Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded
In revisiting the 1919 World Series scandal, baseball historian Carney argues persuasively that the infamous fix consisted of two conspiracies: the unsuccessful attempt of players, managers and owners to hide the fact that a handful of crooked White Sox had thrown the Series; and the largely successful effort of Charles Comiskey, owner of the team, and Judge Landis, baseball's first Commissioner, to ensure that the expulsion of eight accused Sox would preserve baseball's clean public image despite widespread ties between players, gamblers and officials. He assembles an impressive range of perspectives on each question about the incident, including whether gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein dreamed up the fix, when Shoeless Joe Jackson refused and accepted $5,000 from Lefty Williams and how Comiskey learned that his team was playing to lose. Extensive research and thorough documentation will make this a valuable resource for future scholars of the scandal despite the book's uncomfortable organizational shifts among narration, biography, bibliography and an ill-conceived passage arranged into an Abbott and Costello sketch. Casual readers will be frustrated by Carney's emphasis on accuracy of detail over storytelling drive and his reluctance to commit to any single interpretation of these controversial events; these readers would be better served by Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out. 11 b&w; illustrations.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.