The infamous cheating scandal from the 1919 World Series, between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, broke America’s belief in the purity and innocence of baseball. As the story slowly unfolded, it became filled with all the colorful characters you’d expect from 1920s America: baseball players with catchy nicknames, short-tempered gangsters/gamblers immaculately dressed in business pinstripe suits, newspaper reporters and radio broadcasters with flowery descriptions of the trial as if itself was a baseball game, and even New York mob boss Arnold Rothstein, who was alleged (but never proven …) to be the impetus of the scandal.
Unfortunately, the Black Sox trial transcripts were lost long ago, requiring modern-day historians to rely on newspaper reports of trial testimony, which sometimes were sensationalized for their readers and at other times were directly contrary to one another. From this reality, admittedly many of the facts about the scandal we examine in this episode are (true to this show’s title) In Dispute.
LINKS:
SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR VOICE ACTORS:
Todd Berger as Eddie Cicotte
Brandon Harpold as Shoeless Joe Jackson
Adam Lockwood as Carl Victor Little
Alan Chudnow as “Sleepy Bill” Burns
Chad Trudeau as James “Ropes” O’Brien
Dennis Kennedy as David Zelzer
Tom Mighell as Al Spink
Jim Brady as Commissioner Landis
Lily Spader as Newspaper Journalist #1
Nathan Todhunter as Newspaper Journalist #2
Thomas Wolfe as Radio Broadcaster #1
Cari Lockwood as Radio Broadcaster #2
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