Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyNorm
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the trial a complete sham ???
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The trial was a sham.
3 signed confessions were mysteriously lost.
2 of the confessions were legitimate (Cicotte and Williams) while the 3rd "confession" was not (Joe Jackson) ...... Jackson could not read and write, and was coerced into signing the confession with an X mark. Jackson's "confession" was completely written out for him in advance.
o
Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyNorm
I could definitely see this playing out where Landis saw the Cobb/Speaker game as the tip of the iceberg, so decided it best to keep the punishment in house (Cobb and Speaker were both let go from their respective teams in 1926 and never rehired as managers) and then write into the MLB bylaws the penatlies for gambling on the game. Pure speculation on my part, but IMO not unreasonable at all. And it aligns w/ the final tidbit from the article I posted yesterday as from what I know about Cobb he would definitely be the type that if he's going down he's taking the ship with him.
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This is what make Landis a complete phony, hypocrite, and why he deserves no credit for allegedly "cleaning up baseball."
With the Black Sox, Landis made it abundantly clear, with no wiggle room whatsoever, not even for Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson who both played to the best of their abilities, that any type of fixing and/or gambling would not be tolerated, and that they would never play professional baseball ever again.
But when he had hard evidence of other games being fixed (and gambled on), and with Ty Cobb asserting that if he went down he would tell all and bring many others down with him, Landis conveniently acted like a big pussy, and ignored it ........ Therefore, Landis
DID NOT clean up baseball ...... he carefully and expediently cherry-picked which scandal (and which players) that he would come down hard on, and when an even bigger mess was put on his desk, he ignored it ....... that was nothing short of cowardly and disingenuous, and it absolutely drives home the point that I have been making about him all along. If Ty Cobb had hard evidence of 30 or 40 other players fixing games, and if Landis TRULY wanted to clean up the game and give it credibility, then Landis would have and should have dealt with each and every one of those players and banned them all for life, just like he did with the Black Sox ........ but he didn't do that, therefore her was a complete hypocrite, therefore he did not "clean up" baseball, and he deserves no credit other than coming along after the fact and conveniently dealing with only what he chose to deal with.
o