It has been more than a century since the Chicago Cubs won a World Series — 103 years to be exact. Call it poor management or blame it on the players. Take it out on some goat or a guy wearing headphones who wanted to go home with a souvenir. And if none of those excuses tickle your fancy, you can always convince yourself that the games were fixed. In fact, a small amount of evidence might even support your theory.
A court deposition from 1920 that sheds some light on the situation was recently purchased at an auction by the Chicago History Museum for $100,000. Eddie Cicotte, one of the eight players who became known as the Black Sox after the 1919 World Series fixing scandal, claims within the deposition that the same thing went on during the previous World Series. That series, of course, was won by the Boston Red Sox.
“Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series,” he said. “Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into the Series, to throw the Series.”
Cicotte says $10,000 was left in his hotel room for his role in the 1919 fix, so the fact that he’s pointing fingers and saying, “they did it too!” is not a surprise. The fact of the matter is — as Sean Deveney wrote about in his book “The Original Curse” — baseball players during that time weren’t like players now. By that I mean they weren’t swimming in cash, so it’s almost a certainty that game fixing was a part of life. Whether or not Cubs fans would like to believe their players threw the 1918 World Series or not is up to them. 103 years, 93 years…what’s the difference?
