World Series 2023 had the lowest television ratings in history. There’s no need to belabor the whys and wherefores. Instead of listening to the ceaseless chatter of announcer John Smoltz, fans would be better off acquainting themselves with the game’s rich history.
A good start: read Dan Taylor’s “Baseball at the Abyss,” which takes a deep dive into the forgotten 1926 scandal that involved Hall of Fame greats Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, as the principal scoundrels.
Baseball has a long, unhappy gambling history that dates back before the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. In baseball’s early days, bookmakers plied their trade in the open, working the ballpark areas inside and outside, taking wagers. The 1919 World Series may have, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, destroyed the faith of 50 million people, about half the U.S. population then, but throwing baseball games was commonplace. As Emil “Happy” Felsch, a White Sox fixer, said, “Playing rotten ain’t that hard to do.”
