The Black Sox Scandal and Sports Betting Today

In October of last year, Portland Trailblazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, along with former coach Damon Jones, were arrested by the FBI in the midst of an investigation into illegal sports betting in collusion with organized crime. The arrests were only the latest in a string of sports gambling incidents since the loosening of restrictions on state-level sports betting in the United States in 2018. Sports betting scandals are not a new development. Let’s use HeinOnline to turn the clock back one hundred years, and dive further into one of the greatest sporting scandals of the twentieth century: the 1919 World Series and the Chicago Black Sox scandal.

The Black Sox

In 1919, the Cincinnati Reds defeated the heavily favored Chicago White Sox in the baseball World Series. One year later, as the Sox were vying for the pennant in the 1920 season, shocking news broke: eight players from the 1919 White Sox were accused of cheating by deliberately throwing the series to the Reds, in exchange for bribes from organized crime syndicates running underground gambling rings. Besmirched by the scandal, the 1919 White Sox were referred to ever after as “The Black Sox.”

Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox at the time, was notoriously cheap and stingy with the salaries of his players. Professional baseball players at the time were subject to reserve clauses, which prohibited players who refused offered contracts from playing for other teams. MLB players did not achieve union representation and collective bargaining powers until 1966, and players in the early twentieth century had little choice but to accept the terms of contracts given to them. Comiskey was infamous for offering even his most famous players low salaries, and for cutting corners to enhance profits. The original meaning of the name “Black Sox” is said to have its origin in Comiskey placing limits on how often players’ uniforms could be laundered.

Most historians agree that, in reality, Comiskey was probably no worse than most other owners at the time. This was little consolation to the players. Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the most famous ballplayers in the country, received a salary of $6,000 for playing on the White Sox, equivalent to a bit over $100,000 in 2025 (by comparison, contemporary MLB players earn around $5 million a year on average). And Shoeless Joe was one of the better-paid players on the White Sox roster. Outside sources of income were a necessity for many ballplayers. And working in cahoots with gamblers promised easy money.

Although gambling was illegal, it was conducted as a sort of open secret, even amongst players. James Crusinberry, a prominent sports journalist who was present for the 1919 World Series, described the scene in a hotel in Cincinnati during the series: “In a hotel in Cincinnati where the White Sox players and many baseball writers and fans were staying, men walked around the lobby with fists full of currency, openly attempting to wager on the Reds to win the first game or to win the series. They weren’t offering to wager ten spots or century notes. The sums were up in the thousands.“

The 1919 World Series

Who initiated the plot—the players or the gamblers—is up for dispute, as witnesses offered disputing testimony throughout the inquiries and trial that followed the revelation of the scandal. What is known is that on September 18, 1919, Chick Gandil, a player with the Sox, met with Joseph “Sport” Sullivan, a well-known Boston gambler with connections to organized crime, in a hotel room overlooking Fenway Park. Gandil agreed to accept $80,000 as a bribe for throwing the World Series to the Reds, and to recruit other players to the scheme.

Gandil initiated a series of secret meetings with other players, ultimately bringing seven with him into the plot, although the number of players who knew about the plot but chose not to participate was greater. By the time the series began, through a series of twist and turns, $80,000 had been reduced to $20,000, to be split eight ways, with vague promises of higher payouts to come.

Despite the reduced payout, the players held up their end of the bargain in Game One. They played abysmal baseball. Perhaps too abysmal. The Reds won the first game 9-1. Immediately, people were suspicious. In fact, rumors that the series was fixed had begun to circulate among the press before the series even began. The evening before opening night, the journalist Hughie Fullerton, who would ultimately break the news, confided to a colleague over drinks: “The thing is a phony…Some of the Sox are in cahoots with gamblers.” After the 9-1 rout in Game One, even Kid Gleason, the manager of the Sox, was convinced that something suspicious was going on. As Crusinberry relates: “The night after the first game in Cincinnati, the Kid broke loose on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Sintin, where the Sox were quartered, charging that anyone who hadn’t seen something wrong with the game was either blind or ignorant.”

After the first game, the conspirators played it a bit more subtle, throwing three of the four subsequent games, but with much closer scores. After Game Five, the Reds led the series 4-1, and were only one game away from winning it all (the World Series at the time ran for nine games). However, the conspirators on the Sox had grown frustrated and distrustful of their counterparts in the mob, who had been stingy with the promised payouts. In Games Five and Six, they double-crossed the gamblers, winning each game handily, to bring the series to game eight. However, before game eight, threats were made against members of the players’ families. Details are contradictory, and somewhat disputed, but nevertheless, the players dutifully threw Game Eight, giving victory in the World Series to the Reds.

“The last game that will be played in any World Series.”

Hugh Fullerton, the journalist who suspected foul play on the eve of Game One, had watched the Series closely, scrutinizing and cataloguing each play he deemed suspicious in nature. He published his allegations in a column in The Evening World. Fullerton predicted a complete shattering of public trust in the game of baseball, predicting, somewhat dramatically: “Yesterday’s, in all probability, is the last game that will be played in any World Series. If the club owners and those who have the interest of the game at heart, have listened during the Series, they will call off the annual interleague contest.”

Somewhat shamed by the column, Charles Comiskey launched an investigation, which he soon called off, quietly rehiring the conspirators, with the exception of Gandil, for the 1920 season. Then, unexpectedly, there was a break in the case. Billy Maharg, a smalltime mobster who had been cut out of the profits of the scheme, came forward with a full confession. A grand jury was convened, and the eight players, along with five gamblers, were indicted on charges of conspiracy. The trial was a media sensation, but ultimately ended with no convictions.

Graphic from newspaper in 1920, showing faces of eight White Sox players accuse of cheating. Text reads: "Fix These Faces In Your Memory/Eight Men Charged With Selling Out Baseball." — A graphic originally printed in The Sporting News in 1920 and widely distributed in the American press. The eight men were widely treated as pariahs after the scandal. With baseball strongly associated with American national identity, their actions were presented as virtually treasonous. Image source: **Wikipedia**.

The impact of the Black Sox scandal on professional baseball in the United States proved to be long lasting. The scandal prompted a reorganization of the professional leagues, previously governed by a three-man commission, under the new authority of a single Commissioner who was invested with “the dictatorial powers of an autocrat.” In 1920, the spectacularly named Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed the first Commissioner of Baseball. One of his first acts as Commissioner was to permanently ban all eight White Sox players from playing professional baseball ever again. Landis’ tenure as Commissioner was long and controversial; he was an opponent of organized labor in the league, and prevented racial integration of the sport until after his death. But, by virtue of his hard stance against gambling, he is widely credited with restoring public trust in the sport which had been so damaged in the wake of the Black Sox scandal.

Pete Rose and the Rise and Fall of PASPA

Seventy years after the Black Sox Scandal, another sports betting scandal shook Major League Baseball when news broke that Pete Rose, a famed former player and the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, had been placing bets on the performance of his own team. As with the Black Sox scandal, rumors had circulated of Pete Rose’s proclivity for less-than-legal gambling for years before news of the scandal broke to the public. In February 1989, Commissioner Peter Uberroth called Rose in for a meeting, and asked him directly about the rumors. Rose admitted to placing bets on horse races and football games, but strenuously denied placing bets on any baseball games.

The Commissioner was unconvinced. Three days later, the MLB hired the attorney John Dowd to conduct an investigation into Rose’s alleged gambling. A month later, news broke that Rose had accumulated almost $500,000 in gambling debts by the end of his tenure as a player with the Cincinnati Reds in 1978. This was followed, in May 1989, by the release of the 225-page Dowd Report, which documented Rose’s illegal betting activities in great detail.

First page of a Statement by Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti on the lifelong ban of Pete Rose from professional baseball. — Statement from the Commissioner of Baseball on Pete Rose’s lifetime ban from professional baseball, following the release of the Dowd Report in 1989. The report and related materials have been reprinted in the ***Mississippi Law Journal*** and are available in full on HeinOnline.

The gambling Rose engaged in was all illegal to begin with. Nevertheless, in the wake of the scandal Congress moved to limit the expansion of what little legalized sports betting remained in the United States. Prior to 1992, sports betting had been legal in Nevada since 1949, and was permitted in more limited forms in a handful of other states. In 1992, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which prohibited the legalization of sports betting in any further states, and placed limitations on the construction of additional betting-related infrastructure in jurisdictions where it was legal.

However, even as Congress moved to place limitations on sports betting, technological innovations gave rise to further avenues for gambling, with the rise of the World Wide Web and largely unregulated online gambling spaces in the 1990s. The rising popularity of fantasy sports leagues in the 1990s and early 2000s carved out a legal grey area somewhere between online gaming and sports betting. Congress made a halfhearted attempt to regulate the burgeoning industry with the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which recognized the reality of fantasy sports, and carved out exceptions to existing regulations to permit the already widespread practice.

The deregulatory floodgates opened in 2018, when the United States Supreme Court struck down PASPA in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, permitting states to legalize and regulate sports betting. The expansion of the sports betting industry in the years since has been astronomical. In 2023, Americans collectively wagered $119.84 billion on sports, an increase of more than 27% from the previous year. Although this has been the source of substantial revenue for states, many experts have expressed concerns about the social impact of readily available betting, citing increased rates of gambling addiction and the indirect social costs associated with it. In the meantime, as anyone who has watched an NFL game in the last five years can attest, DraftKings and other sports betting companies have firmly integrated themselves into the commercial landscape of professional sports.