The Black Sox Scandal of 1919: What Happened and What It Changed

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 12 min read

How eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, what the 1921 trial decided, why Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them anyway, and how the scandal reshaped baseball.

In October 1919 the Chicago White Sox, the best team in the American League, lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds five games to three. A year later, a grand jury in Chicago heard evidence that some of the White Sox had lost on purpose, in exchange for money from gamblers. In 1921 eight players stood trial and were acquitted by a jury, and the next day the new commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight for life. The ban was never lifted in their lifetimes.

That sequence is the Black Sox scandal, and it is the most important integrity crisis in the history of the sport. It ended an era in which owners and a three-man National Commission ran baseball with little outside authority, and it created the office of the commissioner, whose power to punish conduct harmful to the game still defines how the game polices itself. This article sets out what happened, what is documented and what is disputed, and what changed afterward.

A note on method: the record of 1919 is full of contradictions. Confessions were given and later withdrawn, key documents disappeared, and the participants told different stories at different times. Where this article states something as fact, it is something that is documented and not seriously contested. Where it says "alleged" or "reportedly," the matter is still argued.

The 1919 season and the favorites

The numbers explain why the Series looked like a mismatch. The historical record shows the White Sox finishing 88-52 and winning the American League pennant, ahead of Cleveland at 84-55, the Yankees at 80-59 and Detroit at 80-60. In the National League, the Reds were even better at 96-44, nine games clear of the Giants' 87-53. Both leagues played a 140-game schedule that year, shortened from the usual 154.

Despite the Reds' better record, the White Sox were widely regarded as the favorites. Their roster was stocked with stars, including outfielder Joe Jackson, who had 181 hits and 96 RBI that season, and pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who led the American League with 29 wins and posted a 1.82 earned run average, second only to Walter Johnson's 1.49. A heavy favorite matters to this story, because a fixer's profit comes from betting on the underdog at long odds.

The 1919 season is also notable for another reason. Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs, a record at the time, with 114 RBI, and the league as a whole scored 3.87 runs per team game while hitting just 0.20 home runs per team game, according to the historical record. Baseball was still a game of singles, bunts, stolen bases and pitching. The home run was about to change that, and the scandal would arrive just as the sport needed to rebuild its public image.

Baseball and gambling before 1919

Gambling around baseball was not new in 1919. Bettors had been a feature of ballparks since the 1860s and 1870s, and players had been accused of fixing or throwing games at many points in the sport's early history. Reports of players taking money to lose were common enough that the owners knew the sport had a problem, and rumors had followed first baseman Hal Chase for years. What was missing was an authority with the will and the power to act.

The sport was governed by the National Commission, which was made up of the two league presidents and a third member chosen by them. By 1919 it was weak, and the owners, who were often at odds with each other, had little interest in strengthening it. The players, meanwhile, were bound to their clubs by the reserve clause, which tied a player to a team indefinitely, and by salaries that were set by the owners. Historians usually cite the White Sox owner, Charles Comiskey, as a particularly tight-fisted employer, and the resentment of underpaid players is the motive most often given for the fix. It is a plausible motive but not a proven one for each individual player.

The fix, as alleged

The accounts that survive describe an arrangement worked out in the weeks before the Series. Chick Gandil, the first baseman, is generally described as the central figure on the playing side. He is said to have approached gamblers or been approached by them, and to have recruited teammates. The gamblers named in the stories include Joseph "Sport" Sullivan, a Boston bookmaker; Abe Attell, a former boxing champion; and Bill Burns, a former pitcher. The New York gambler Arnold Rothstein was widely alleged to have supplied the money; he denied it, and he was not convicted of anything in connection with the Series.

The eight men banned by Landis were:

1. Eddie Cicotte, pitcher
2. Claude "Lefty" Williams, pitcher
3. Joe Jackson, outfielder
4. Oscar "Happy" Felsch, outfielder
5. Chick Gandil, first baseman
6. Charles "Swede" Risberg, shortstop
7. Fred McMullin, utility player
8. George "Buck" Weaver, third baseman

The documents show that not all eight were equally involved. Gandil, Risberg, Cicotte, Williams, Felsch and McMullin were generally named as active participants. Jackson's role has been argued ever since. Weaver, by his own account and the evidence, knew about the plan, attended meetings and took no money; he was banned for what he knew and did not report.

What happened in the Series

The Series was played as a best of nine, a format used from 1919 to 1921, and the Reds won it five games to three. Two pitchers, Cicotte and Williams, accounted for most of the White Sox' losses. According to the commonly told account, Cicotte hit the first batter he faced in Game 1, which was supposed to be a signal to the gamblers that the fix was on. He lost that game, and he lost Game 4. Williams lost Games 2, 5 and 8, three defeats in a single World Series.

Those facts are checkable, and the pattern looks suspicious. Cicotte had won 29 games that season. Williams was a regular starter. A third pitcher who was not part of the fix, Dickie Kerr, won two games for the White Sox. That is a part of the story that is sometimes forgotten: the White Sox did win three of the eight games, and Jackson is generally said to have hit well in the Series. Defenders of Jackson in particular point to his batting and fielding statistics in the Series as evidence that he was trying. Critics answer that a player can accept money and still hit when the game is lost, or in meaningless spots.

This is where the limits of statistics are clearest. A box score cannot show that a ball was played softly, that a throw was a half-second late, or that a pitcher left a ball over the plate on purpose. The case was built from confessions, not from the numbers, and the confessions were later contradicted. Anyone who tells you that a player's Series statistics prove his guilt or his innocence is claiming more than the data allows.

Suspicion and the grand jury

Rumors spread during the Series. Reporters had noticed odd betting movements before it began, and some sportswriters, notably Hugh Fullerton, wrote that they had seen plays that did not look right. The White Sox owner and the league's officials heard the talk and did nothing public. Comiskey is reported to have offered a reward for information, which does not establish whether he believed it. For almost a year, nothing happened and the players returned to their clubs.

The inquiry that broke the case began in 1920, in an unrelated matter. A Cook County grand jury was investigating allegations that a regular-season game between the Cubs and the Phillies had been fixed, and the questioning widened to include the previous Series. In September 1920, Cicotte told the grand jury that he had taken money to throw the Series. Jackson and Williams also gave statements. The Chicago club suspended seven of the eight players immediately, in the middle of a pennant race; Gandil had already left the team. Chicago finished second in the American League that year, and the pennant went to Cleveland.

The grand jury indicted the eight players and several gamblers. The confessions, which were the key evidence against the players, were later disowned, and the players said they had been misled or pressured. The signed statements of Cicotte, Jackson and Williams disappeared from the prosecutor's files before the trial and were not available to the jury. How they went missing has never been settled, and copies of the testimony surfaced only years afterward.

The 1921 trial

The trial began in Chicago in the summer of 1921. By that time the key confessions were out of evidence. The prosecution called other witnesses, including some of the gamblers, but its case was thin without the players' own words. The defense argued that the players had not conspired to defraud the public, and that the prosecution could not show that any act of theirs had harmed anyone in a legal sense.

The jury deliberated for a short time, about two to three hours by most accounts, and returned a not-guilty verdict on all counts on August 2, 1921. The players and the jurors celebrated together afterward, which strongly suggests that the jury was sympathetic to the players, and may have regarded the case as a matter for baseball rather than the courts. The legal question was settled. The question of whether the men could ever play major-league baseball again was not.

Landis steps in

Kenesaw Mountain Landis had been a federal judge in Chicago. He was known in baseball for the Federal League antitrust case of 1915, which he declined to rule on quickly and which helped end the Federal League's challenge to the major leagues. In 1920 the owners, alarmed by the scandal and the weakness of the National Commission, offered him the new post of commissioner, with sweeping authority over the game. He accepted, and the owners agreed that his decisions would be final.

The day after the acquittal, Landis issued a statement banning all eight men for life. The reasoning, in paraphrase, was that whatever a jury decided about the law, a player who throws a game, or who knows of a plan to throw one and says nothing, cannot be allowed to play. The verdict in the criminal court had no bearing on the question of whether baseball should tolerate it. It was a clear statement of the principle that baseball's own rules, enforced by baseball's own officer, stood above the legal outcome.

None of the eight played again in organized baseball. Several of them played for years in semi-professional and barnstorming teams under other names. Weaver in particular petitioned for reinstatement repeatedly and was refused each time. Landis served as commissioner until his death in 1944, and he was a powerful and often autocratic figure, but his authority in this case was never successfully challenged.

Is Joe Jackson innocent?

The question that keeps the scandal alive is whether Joe Jackson belonged on the list. The case against him is that he signed a statement admitting that he received money. The case for him is that he later said he had not agreed to throw anything, that he hit well in the Series, and that, by his own account, he tried to tell the club's owner about the matter before the Series began. The popular image of a boy outside the courthouse saying "Say it ain't so, Joe" is widely believed to be a legend, and Jackson himself denied that any such scene took place.

A responsible summary is that the evidence is mixed. Jackson was banned under the rule that a player who knew of a fix and did nothing is guilty. He remains the sympathetic figure of the story, in part because of his statistics. The historical record shows him with 181 hits and 96 RBI in 1919. Whether the Series performance was a sign of innocence or irrelevant to guilt cannot be resolved by the numbers.

The same logic applies to Weaver, whose guilt was one of knowledge and silence, not of throwing games. His case, that he refused money and played to win, is regarded by many historians as the strongest argument for a lighter sentence. Landis did not make that distinction, and the rule against any association with a fix is deliberately strict.

What the scandal changed

The most direct change was institutional. The owners replaced the National Commission with a single commissioner with broad powers, and for decades Landis used them. The commissioner's authority to ban a player or an official for conduct harmful to the game became the model for similar offices in other American sports.

The second change was a fixed rule against gambling. Baseball's Rule 21 now provides that a player or official who bets on a game in which he has a duty to perform is permanently ineligible. That rule governed the case of Pete Rose, who was placed on the permanently ineligible list in 1989 after an investigation into his betting. In 2024 the league also banned a player, Tucupita Marcano, permanently for betting on baseball, including on games involving his own club. The consequences of the Black Sox are still being applied.

The third change was reputational. The scandal damaged baseball's image just as the sport was entering its most lucrative period, and the sport recovered quickly. Ruth, sold to the Yankees after 1919, began hitting home runs at a rate no one had seen, and the public's attention turned to the new style of play. Historians debate how much credit Ruth deserves for "saving" the sport, because the sport was already popular and attendance was rising. But the contrast is fair. The season after the trial belonged to the sluggers, and by 1927 the Yankees' lineup, described in the article on the 1927 Yankees, had become a symbol of a different age.

The scandal in memory and culture

The story has been retold many times. Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out is the standard popular account, and it was made into a 1988 film. The 1989 film Field of Dreams, based on a novel, put Jackson on screen as a ghost on an Iowa baseball field. Both works dramatize events, invent dialogue and compress the timeline, so they should be read as stories rather than as history.

For anyone who wants the plain sequence, it is this:

1. The White Sox, favorites, lose the 1919 World Series to the Reds, five games to three.
2. Rumors circulate for a year.
3. In September 1920 a Chicago grand jury hears confessions, and the eight players are suspended and indicted.
4. In August 1921 a jury acquits them.
5. The next day Landis bans all eight for life.

Why it still matters

Every league that takes bets has the same problem that baseball had in 1919: the integrity of the contest is the product, and anyone who can influence an outcome in secret is a threat. Modern rule changes such as the pitch clock and the testing of automated ball-strike systems have different goals, pace and accuracy, but they rest on the principle this era established: the sport's own authorities write and enforce its rules.

It also matters for readers who follow betting markets. Odds are an aggregate of public information and opinion, and a sharp, unexplained move in the market was one of the first signs of trouble in 1919. The explanation of moneylines, run lines and totals covers how those prices are read. Gambling carries risk, is for adults of legal age where it is legal, and anyone who needs help can call 1-800-GAMBLER.

Common questions

Who won the 1919 World Series? The Cincinnati Reds, five games to three, over the Chicago White Sox in a best-of-nine series.

Which players were banned? Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin and Buck Weaver.

Were they convicted? No. A Chicago jury found all of the defendants not guilty in August 1921. Landis banned the eight players the next day regardless.

Why were they called the Black Sox? The nickname refers to the stain on the club's reputation. A popular story ties it to dirty uniforms in a dispute over laundry costs, but that origin is disputed.

Did anyone confess? Cicotte, Jackson and Williams gave statements to the grand jury in 1920. They later repudiated them, and the original documents went missing before the trial.

Could they have been reinstated? Landis never reinstated any of the eight, and the ban stood for the rest of their lives. In May 2025 Commissioner Rob Manfred ruled that a person's time on the permanently ineligible list ends at death, which removed the eight men, and Pete Rose, from the list. For any later change in how the commissioner's office treats the list, check its official announcements.

Where to go next

For the sport that came after the scandal, read the 1927 Yankees and the first modern World Series of 1903, which shows how the championship began. You can also browse history and the Hall of Fame, the league standings, and the Hall of Fame's own site at baseballhall.org.