Ben_Hecht said:
Steak Snabler said:
Also, I think I remember reading that the "no gambling" rule wasn't "printed in bright black ink on the wall of every clubhouse" until after the Black Sox scandal.
There were "no betting" stencils on the walls of multiple major-league ballparks years before 1919, and I'm pretty sure Buck W. could and would concur.
Absolutely -- and they weren't hidden, either. Here's a prime example at West Side Park, the Cubs' home before Wrigley: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.ndlpcoop/ichicdn.s056839 (hope that link works; if it doesn't,
go here and search for "Gowdy betting" instead.) That sign is massive.
Problem was, despite these ballpark warnings and despite Ban Johnson's public "we will stop at nothing" pronouncements and despite Taylor Spink's heavy-handed editorials in TSN, betting on baseball was tacitly encouraged by the baseball powers-that-be before 1920 in the same way that the use of steroids was ignored in the 1990s. It generated a TON of popularity and interest, like fantasy football does for the NFL today. In fact, I'm not sure why fantasy football gets a pass other than the fact that most people in money leagues chip in to a season-long pot rather than cash exchanging hands every week like the old baseball pools used to do.
I have no doubt there were dozens of games fixed in that era ... almost certainly including other World Series games. And we know for a fact that players bet on their own teams in the exact same way that Rose did decades later. This not only wasn't illegal then (mostly because many of baseball's rules weren't codified until 1950; for instance, "home teams batting last", which had been the custom since the early 1890s but wasn't actually written down anywhere official until 1950 ... amazing), few players even thought twice about laying down a small sum on their own games. It was just another way to earn some extra cash. "Oh, we got Walter Johnson going today ... put me down for $25."
Rose, of course, faced a much different attitude in his day. It's impossible to compare eras here and say the same behavior was just as wrong in both. Baseball and betting have never truly been far apart, but the culture was far, far different in the 1910s.