Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyNorm
Interesting ...... I'll have to read up on the Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker incident.
And Landis may have been a total asshole and gets too much credit, but I think that he definitely deserves at least some credit for saving baseball. At least from my understanding, the Black Sox had gotten away with the whole thing scott-free until Landis stepped in and laid down the hammer. If he (or perhaps someone else) had not done this, then the flood-gates would have been wide open for fixing games, which IMO would have ended baseball.
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o
Landis was not the reason why the Black Sox avoided getting away with the fix. The story went viral/nationwide in late September of 1920. With only 3 games left to be played in the regular season, Charlie Comiskey suspended all 8 players, pending further investigation. Landis was not in the picture at all until well after that ...... in other words, the genie was already out of the bottle, action had already been taken against the 8 accused players, and Landis had nothing to do with it.
The MLB owners, fearing an extremely damaging blow to baseball because of the fix, hired Landis after the fact (after the fix had been exposed, and action had been taken against the 8 accused players) in order to try to give some credibility to the game. After the 8 accused players were exonerated in a court of law in 1921, Landis banned them all from MLB for life.
Landis' inaction and willful ignorance of the Ty Cobb/Tris Speaker fixing incident completely belies the notion that he banned the 8 Black Sox players to preserve the moral integrity of the game ...... it was nothing more than Landis grandstanding after the fact, and he cared not about the integrity of the game, but rather was doing what was expedient at the time.
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In regard to the possibility of baseball not surviving had the 8 accused White Sox players not been banned, it is highly unlikely that baseball would have met its end had they not been banned ...... basketball survived the Tim Donaghy scandal (a referee who was actively fixing games with his officiating because he bet on them) without blinking. Since then, numerous basketball players and coaches have all been indicted for gambling on games that they were playing in and coaching in as well (Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups, and Damon Jones, etc), and the game is still going strong, and attendance and TV ratings haven't missed a beat ...... Americans love their sports, and gambling, fixing games, and/or other ridiculousness such as the NFL rule changes neutering defenses and vaulting quarterbacks into putting up statistics that resemble a pinball game gone wild won't stop them from coming through the gates by the thousands, and tuning in on their TV sets by the millions.
o