ABSTRACT
The 1919 baseball World Series in the USA saw the heavily favored Chicago White Sox fall to the Cincinnati Reds in an improbable 10–5 win in game 8 (of a best of nine series) of the annual game. After the series ended, discussion emerged that gamblers had paid off several White Sox players (termed “Black Sox” thereafter) – including slugger “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and star pitcher Eddie Cicotte. The eight accused big leaguers were indicted by a grand jury, put on trial for conspiracy, admitted to the crime, but were found not guilty on nine counts of conspiracy after the official records of their grand jury confessions mysteriously vanished. Capturing public sentiment about the heartbreaking scandal called the “Big Fix” was an article in the Chicago Daily News with the headline “Say, It Ain’t So, Joe” (Mitchell 2015). One day after the acquittal, Judge Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis, recently appointed as baseball’s first commissioner, permanently banned the accused eight “Black Sox” from baseball for life for “selling out baseball.” 1
