Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyNorm
This is what I was getting at. You obviously are much more knowledgeable on the subject than I am so please correct me if I'm wrong, but since the courts found them not guilty wouldn't the Black Sox players have been allowed to continue playing if Landis had not have banned them ??? Obviously allowing them back on the field would have been extremely detrimental to the game.
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o
Yes, they would have been allowed to continue to play ....... and the game would have survived and even thrived, with or without them.
If you ever saw the movie "Quiz Show" (or read books on the subject) one poignant point of the movie is when Martin Scorsese's character (Martin Rittenhome, top executive of the Geritol company) tells a disillusioned Richard Goodwin that the public has a short memory, but the networks never forget. While Goodwin was trying to assert that the television careers of Dan Enright, Martin Freedman, and Jack Barry were over due to their involvement in the fixing of game shows, Scorsese/Rittenhome was predicting that they would all be back ....... and they were ...... in fact, both Jack Barry and Dan Enright later became multimillionaires in the early 1970's with a game show called
Joker's Wild ...... not only were they back in television, but they were specifically back with (of all things) another game show.
The same is true of baseball, basketball, boxing, or any other major sport regarding scandals ...... if any of those players and/or coaches who are currently accused of wrongdoing/gambling on games ever came back to the NBA based on even the slightest presumption of innocence, the NBA would not cease to exist, or even be huirt at the box office ....... as I said before, the American public loves their sports, and no amount of scandal ...... not even a continuous, ongoing scandal, like what is happening in basketball ...... is going to drive them away.
Pete Rose admitted to betting on Reds games
WHILE he was still playing for and managing the Reds, and there were still millions of fans who were clamoring for him to be inducted into the Hall-of-Fame, right up until the day that he died.
o
Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyNorm
Like Kray I think you're missing some nuance here. Here's a summary I found in this ESPN article:
https://www.espn.com/classic/s/2001/0730/1233060.html
1926 - Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were permitted by Ban Johnson to resign from baseball 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 Johnson, and Johnson thought 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. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis exposed the cover-up and the eventual fallout forced Johnson out his job as president of the league he had created. Cobb and Speaker vehemently denied any wrongdoing, Cobb saying that "There has never been a baseball game in my life that I played in that I knew was fixed,? and that the only games he ever bet on were two series games in 1919, when he lost $150 on games thrown by the Sox. He claimed his letters to Leonard had been misunderstood, that he was merely speaking of business investments. Landis took the case under advisement and eventually let both players remain in baseball because they had not been found guilty of fixing any game themselves. It was after this case, though, that Landis instituted the rule mandating that any player found guilty of betting on baseball would be suspended for a year and that any player found to have bet on his own team would be barred for life. Cobb later claimed that the attorneys representing him and Speaker had brokered their reinstatement by threatening to expose further scandal in baseball if the two were not cleared.
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o
That article is not representing what actually happened.
Of course Cobb would say that he was misunderstood. Pete Rose also denied any wrong-doing along with almost every person that has ever gone to jail.
More significantly, Landis' behavior in regard to his exoneration of/ignoring the Cobb and Speaker game-fixing was completely hypocritical in regard to his treatment of the Black Sox. Landis banned the 8 White Sox players, in spite of them being found not guilty in a court of law ....... essentially saying that the Buck stops here, and nobody, not even a court of law, will transcend what I view to be justice and fairness ...... allowing Cobb and Speaker to remain in the game because they had not been found guilty without he himself (Landis) digging deeper into the case was passing the buck, and copping out. Furthermore, when he was later confronted about his inaction in regard to the Cobb/Speaker incident, he said that that incident occurred before was the commissioner (the Cobb-Speaker fixed games occurred in September of 1919), and so he felt that it was not his territory to act in a judgmental manner ...... which completely belies not only his attitude about the swift and permanent action that he took against the Black Sox (which also occurred before he was the commissioner), but also his entire career as a Federal Judge when he would hand ridiculous down fines and judgements that he knew would be overturned.
If you want to believe that Kenesaw Landis was at all credible in regard to either his career as a Federal Judge or as the Commissioner of MLB, you can ...... I happen to know, through extensive research, that nothing could be further from the truth.
As Benjamin Disraeli once said,
"Innocence is precious, but truth is better." ...... I choose to take solace in the latter.
o