Baseball season starts next week, bringing me memories of my happy childhood in Arlington, Mass. and how I would pass the golden summers there metaphorically glued to my transistor radio for all 162 Red Sox games except for the very few that I attended or saw on TV. My team’s games were broadcast on WHDH 850 AM in those days, with Curt Gowdy doing the play-by-play. Right before each game was a favorite feature on that station: “Warm-up Time,” a 5 minute story from baseball’s rich and often strange history. “It’s Warm-up Time!” each segment began, “Your baseball story before every Red Sox game! Don Gillis reporting for Atlantic Refineries!” Don had a great voice and a rich delivery, and taught me a lot over the years.
Don introduced me to the strange and tragic saga of the 1919 Black Sox, the fixed World Series, the bizarre aftermath, and how baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned for life all eight of the players alleged to have participated in the plot to make the American League champion White Sox to throw the Series to the vastly inferior Cincinnati Reds.
Among the banned: superstar “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, whose supporters argue that he should be allowed into the Hall of Fame to this day. Joe was glamorized in the movie and novel “Field of Dreams.” His defense was that he accepted money from gamblers to throw the Series but still played his best—hardly an ennobling theory, but plausible, since by all accounts “Shoeless” was an illiterate dolt. His familiar story was featured on “Warm-Up Time,” but I was always interested in another one of the banned eight, third baseman George “Buck” Weaver, sympathetically played by John Cusack in the movie “Eight Men Out.”
Weaver was a great fielder (supposedly the only third baseman Ty Cobb wouldn’t try to bunt on) and a team leader. He was popular with fans and fellow players, elected team captain on the White Sox. Like all of his team mates Buck was grossly underpaid by villainous owner Charles Comiskey, but he had a reputation for sportsmanship. As the White Sox were easily gliding to the American League pennant after the Red Sox had sold Babe Ruth and the Yankees had not yet become a juggernaut, some of Buck’s teammates, angry over the shabby treatment they were receiving at the hands of Comiskey, began talking about throwing the World Series for a big pay-off by gamblers. Late in the season Weaver attended two meetings among some of the White Sox stars and interested gamblers regarding a plan. Weaver finally told his teammates and the gamblers to count him out: he felt that throwing the World Series “couldn’t be done.”
So Weaver was left out of further plotting, and never accepted any money like the other seven. He testified later that he had suspicions about the fix going into the World Series, but never asked or received confirmation; he didn’t want to be “a snitch.” Indeed, Weaver had a great Series, batting .324 with four doubles and four runs scored in Chicago’s eight-game loss to the Cincinnati Reds. Chicago sportswriters suspicious of White Sox loss wrote about the erratic play by the seven crooked players, but many made a point of praising Weaver’s efforts. “Though they are hopeless and heartless, the White Sox have a hero,” the Cincinnati Post’s baseball reporter wrote. “He is George Weaver, who plays and fights at third base. Day after day Weaver has done his work and smiled. In spite of the certain fate that closed about the hopes of the Sox, Weaver smiled and scrapped. One by one his mates gave up. Weaver continued to grin and fight harder.”
His grin and fight didn’t help him, however, when the plot to throw the World Series was exposed. Weaver was having the best season of his career in 1920, leading Chicago in its fight for a second consecutive pennant. But on September 28, gambler Billy Maharg revealed to the press that, he said, eight members of the White Sox had thrown the 1919 Series in exchange for money from gamblers like him. The accused players, including Weaver, were suspended pending an investigation.
Weaver went to Comiskey and swore that he was innocent, the only one of the eight players named to do so. The owner reportedly believed him, but said he would abide by the results of the upcoming trial. In the subsequent Cook County trial, Buck tried to get his case separated from that of his team mates but could not, and he was forced to sit with them during the proceedings as “the Eight” became set in the public mind. Judge Hugo Friend said at one point that he would overturn a guilty verdict for Buck from the jury, but all the players accused were acquitted, a result greatly aided by the mysterious disappearance of incriminating evidence, like signed confessions, from the prosecutors’ offices.
Despite the not guilty verdict, Landis banned Weaver and the other seven players for life anyway. One section of his statement was clearly aimed at Weaver: “No player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it will ever play professional baseball.”
For the rest of his life, Buck Weaver proclaimed the injustice of his ban. He regularly petitioned successive Baseball Commissioners to have the stain on his reputation lifted. On January 31, 1956, Weaver died of a heart attack at the age of 65; after that, his family members continued the campaign to clear his name.
The ethics verdict here is that Landis was right, and so is Major League Baseball to keep Weaver’s ban in place. Landis sent a message, crucial to maintaining the integrity of the game, that any player who learnsof a plans to fix a baseball game will be judged guilty of complicity unless he immediately reports it. Several plots after the 1919 scandal were foiled because players did not want to suffer Weaver’s fate.
I would like to have seen the same principle applied to players who knew team mates were using steroids.
ADDED: It’s now 10:16 am on the day after this was posted, and the results are historic: never before has an Ethics Alarms post had over 100 views without a single comment!
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, your baseball posts have a decided tendency to speak for themselves. Res ipsa loquitor.
People love to argue that Pete Rose deserves reinstatement, but no love for poor Buck? At least Buck was an honorable man who just fell for the “don’t snitch on colleagues” fallacy. I wouldn’t trust Pete to mail my water bill check.
Are you kidding? I bet most contemporary sportswriters would argue in favor of the entire Black Sox team being put into the Hall of Fame. That’s how screwed up things have gotten. They were just marginalized people and noble social justice warriors sticking it to The Man.
Here is the problem that I have. Buck Weaver appears to be an ethical and honorable man. But part of his honor code was that you never snitch on your friends or mates. So Buck was in an ethics bind, and he chose loyalty to his team mates above the integrity of the game. So he resolved this ethics bind wrongly, but not in a way that it impugns his character.
Maybe we need to delve deeper in which snitching is mandated, and in when snitching is wrong. The lesson that snitching is wrong is ingrained in us from the time that we were little children. Your parents do not appreciate it when you tattle on your siblings. And when you tell on your class mates, you will face ostracism and bullying. So we are socially conditioned from early childhood on to believe that snitching is dishonorable and wrong.
My understanding is that lawyers are ethically required to report violation of ethics codes by colleagues. Also military honor seem to require that violations of honor are reported, e.g. have knowledge of cheating at exams and not reporting it may result in expulsion from a military academy. But seeing ethics and honor in a professional way requires training; including unlearning our social conditioning from childhood.