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Originally Posted by Colts And Orioles
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It's a hobby.
Regarding Landis "cleaning up baseball", that is a fallacy that is greatly exaggerated, and I'll explain why ......
Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were permitted by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to resign from their player-manager posts near the end of the 1926 season after former pitcher Dutch Leonard charged that Cobb, Speaker, and Smoky Joe Wood had joined him just before the 1919 World Series in betting on a game they all knew was fixed. Leonard presented letters and other documents to Commissioner Landis and AL President Ban Johnson, and Johnson thought that they would be so potentially damaging to baseball in the wake of the Black Sox scandal that he paid Leonard $20,000 to have them suppressed. Landis, who proposed to have a "zero tolerance policy" when he was hired as the Commissioner of MLB in direct response to the Black Sox scandal, did everything that he could to cover up and gloss over the Ty Cobb/Tris Speaker/Smoky Joe Wood incident for fear that the American public would be completely disillusioned about the authenticity of the game, because it would have been the second major game-fixing scandal in the same time period of time.
So while Landis is in Baseball Hall-of-Fame for allegedly cleaning up baseball, the fact of the matter was that was a racist, bigoted grandstander who gets far more credit than he actually deserves in regard to his overall legacy in the history of professional baseball.
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You can clean up the game without doing it on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune or the Baltimore Sun. Both Cobb and Speaker were successful managers who, in the prime of their careers, were forced out, never to return to the game.
As far as making the Hall because of his reputation for cleaning up the game, it’s more likely he made it because he was the commish. Four of the first 5 commissioners made it.