Baseball's Darkest Day.

• Author: BROWN, BRYAN
• Position: Six Chicago White Sox players accept bribes from a gambler to lose the 1919 World Series

The 1919 Chicago White Sox were good enough to make big money--by cheating to lose

When the rumors were confirmed, it broke America's heart. The best team in baseball, the Chicago White Sox, had thrown the World Series for money.

Cheating may be on the rise, but its most famous moment in professional sports came in 1919, when six White Sox players took money from gamblers to make sure they lost the championship to the Cincinnati Reds. The scandal threatened to destroy the national game. And it gave us a classic lament of the disillusioned, in the cry supposedly uttered by a boy to his tainted hero, left fielder Joe Jackson: "Say it ain't so, Joe!"

After an 88-52 season, the American League champion White Sox were favored to win the World Series by 5-1 odds. But on September 18, 13 days before the scheduled Series opener, Chicago first baseman Arnold "Chick" Gandil approached Joseph "Sport" Sullivan, a gambling crony, with a startling proposition: an offer to throw the Series for $100,000.

The Sox were a talented but troubled lot, full of dissension and resentful of their owner, Charles Comiskey, a notorious tightwad. The moniker "Black Sox," which would be applied to the scandal, had in fact been coined by the players the year before, after Comiskey had refused to launder their uniforms and they had worn the dirty ones in protest.

Gandil knew just whose participation was needed for the fix to work. Ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte had been promised a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games that year. But as soon as he reached 29 wins, Comiskey had benched him. So Cicotte agreed to the scheme--for a $10,000 advance. Claude "Lefty" Williams, the team's other top pitcher, also signed on.

The money was reportedly put up by Arnold Rothstein, a New York gambler. The night before the first game in Cincinnati, Cicotte checked into his hotel room to find $10,000 in cash under his pillow. When he took the mound the next day, his second pitch landed squarely between the batter's shoulder blades. The Reds had a leadoff runner and the gamblers had a signal: The fix was on.

Losing the first game 9-1, Cicotte didn't even make it look good. The second game was closer, a 4-2 Chicago loss, but Williams gave up six walks. Wrote The New York Times:

He had everything but control, and his control was so hopelessly bad that every Cincinnati runner who scored got to first base on a pass. Williams established himself as the World Series Santa Claus of all times. His philanthropy...