Der Schvartzer Zoks

It’s amazing how the Black Sox scandal lives on.

Ninety years after the fact, baseball scholars are still coming out with books and articles, vindicating some (especially Shoeless Joe Jackson) and demonizing others (Charles Comiskey, the penurious owner of the Chicago White Sox).

Long story short: The White Sox were the New York Yankees of their era, hard-fighting, dominating, and perennially in contention for the American league Pennant. Comiskey stiffed them on their bonus when they won in 1919, trying to pass of the celebratory champagne as their reward for a job well done. In retaliation, a group of malcontents led by first baseman Chick Gandil and shortstop Swede Risberg brokered meetings with gamblers and conspired to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

The Sox did indeed lose the Series, raising a lot of suspicions along the way which ultimately led to indictments and a trial. Although the eight players were acquitted — key evidence mysteriously disappeared — Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was hired as baseball’s first commissioner to clean up the game, banished them all from organized ball.

Hence the title of the classic book Eight Men Out by the late Eliot Asinof (later a credible feature film by John Sayles in 1988). Many volumes followed Asinof’s initial offering, including biographies on some of the key figures involved. (Asinof — who played minor league baseball for a few years –  also wrote the novel Man on Spikes, basing his protagonist on real-life Jewish Major Leaguer Mickey Rutner.)

I bring this up in part because I saw the name Abe Attell as an inductee to the San Francisco Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Attell, a champion featherweight boxer known as The Little Hebrew, was one of the gamblers involved in the scandal, an associate of the notorious Arnold Rothstein. (Seems like an odd honor for such a character, but Attell is also an inductee at the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel.)

I bring this up to recommend Rothstein: The Life and Times and Murder of The Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series, by David Pietrusza (Carroll & Graf, 2003). This massive volume portrays “A.R.” as typical of his generation when it comes to Judaism. He grew up in an Orthodox household, and his brother kept the faith pretty well. But that stuff wasn’t for Rothstein; he wanted to slough off the old ways and become a “real” American. Although he did attend the local cheder, he could often be found hanging out with other rebellious boys, smoking cigarettes on the steps of the shul and generally causing tzouris for their folks. It’s no surprise that he met such a grisly end.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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