From Publishers Weekly
In revisiting the 1919 World Series scandal, baseball historian Carney argues persuasively that the infamous fix consisted of two conspiracies: the unsuccessful attempt of players, managers and owners to hide the fact that a handful of crooked White Sox had thrown the Series; and the largely successful effort of Charles Comiskey, owner of the team, and Judge Landis, baseball's first Commissioner, to ensure that the expulsion of eight accused Sox would preserve baseball's clean public image despite widespread ties between players, gamblers and officials. He assembles an impressive range of perspectives on each question about the incident, including whether gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein dreamed up the fix, when Shoeless Joe Jackson refused and accepted $5,000 from Lefty Williams and how Comiskey learned that his team was playing to lose. Extensive research and thorough documentation will make this a valuable resource for future scholars of the scandal despite the book's uncomfortable organizational shifts among narration, biography, bibliography and an ill-conceived passage arranged into an Abbott and Costello sketch. Casual readers will be frustrated by Carney's emphasis on accuracy of detail over storytelling drive and his reluctance to commit to any single interpretation of these controversial events; these readers would be better served by Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out. 11 b&w illustrations.
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Product Description
Most fans today know that gamblers and ballplayers conspired to âfixâ the 1919 World Seriesâthe Black Sox Scandal. It has been touched upon in classic works of sports history such as Eliot Asinofâs
Eight Men Out, referred to in literary classics like W. P. Kinsellaâs
Shoeless Joe, and has been central to two of the best baseball movies ever made, John Saylesâs
Eight Men Outand Phil Robinsonâs
Field of Dreams.
Many, however, would be surprised to learn that it took nearly a year to uncover the fix.
Burying the Black Soxis the first book to focus on the cover-up that kept the fix from the American public until almost another whole baseball season was played, and to examine in detail the way events unfolded as the deception was unraveled. Unlike Eliot Asinof in
Eight Men Out, previously the definitive book on the subject, Carney thoroughly documents his information and brings together evidence from a wide variety of sources, many not available to Asinof or more recent writers.
In
Burying the Black Sox, Gene Carney reveals what else happened and answers the questions that fascinate any baseball fan wondering about baseballâs original dilemma over guilt and innocence. Who else in baseball knew that the fix was in? When did they know? And what did they do about it? Carney explores how Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, and his fellow owners tried to bury the incident and control the damage, how the conspiracy failed, and how âShoelessâ Joe Jackson attempted to clear his name. He uses primary research materials that werenât available when Asinof wrote
Eight Men Out, including the 1920 grand jury statements by Jackson and pitcher Eddie Cicotte, the diary of Comiskeyâs secretary, and the transcripts of Jacksonâs 1924 suit against the Sox for back pay. Where Asinof told the story of the eight âBlack Sox,â Carney explains the baseball industryâs uncertain response to the scandal.