An odd harbinger of the Black Sox Scandal
The title of this story references the wonderful Astaire-Rogers film The Gay Divorcee (1934), but my inspiration for posting it comes from Paul Lukas — not the Hungarian actor but the baseball-uniform and sports-aesthetics writer. This morning he posted a great story at the Uni-Watch Research Project: “Saying It with Flowers” (https://goo.gl/fvXVG2), accompanied by many images of horseshoe floral tributes to ballplayers. The one shown above was especially familiar, as I had once written about the lithograph depicted with the horseshoe, which survives at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The “Peerless Leader”? Wasn’t Frank Chance simply the guy on the receiving end of all those twin-killing tosses from Joe Tinker or Johnny Evers? Not exactly. He was a revered figure in baseball in his day, and his Hall of Fame stature is conveyed more by an artifact like this than a mere statistical evaluation or a passing mention in a Franklin P. Adams’s now threadbare ditty. (Once familiar to all fans, the poem now requires quotation:
These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of Bear Cubs and fleeter than birds,
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double,
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
As further gloss, let it be said that “a double” here means a double play, and that “our gonfalon bubble” is the Giants fans’ fantasy that, in 1908 when this poem was first printed in the New York Globe, a pennant would be theirs.
Frank Chance was attending college in California, planning to become a dentist, when Chicago White Stockings star Bill Lange spotted him playing in a summer league, and recommended the team sign him. Originally a catcher and fill-in outfielder, he became a star when he took over at first base in 1903. Two years later he became the Cubs’ manager, and under his leadership they captured National League flags in 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1910. As a player Chance was rugged, but leaning too close to the plate cost him frequent beanings, which led to hearing impairment and terrible headaches.
After a disagreement with the team’s owner, he was let go after the 1912 season. The New York Highlanders snatched him up. This remarkable lithograph, borne by players with “Tammany” on their jersey plackets, which officially welcomes Chance to “the greatest city in the United States,” has a list of names redolent with the history of the city and the nation. There are politicians from Teddy Roosevelt and William Gaynor to Dick Croker; Tammany Hall operatives and baseball magnates like James Gaffney, Charles Murphy, and Bill Devery. The list of entertainment giants reads like a clipping from Variety: George M. Cohan, Flo Ziegfeld, Al Jolson, Honey Boy Evans, David Belasco, DeWolf Hopper, and Harry Frazee (the man who sold Babe Ruth). John McGraw added his name, as did John Montgomery Ward and former world heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett — and there, among those names, some still famous and others only dimly remembered, is a name that fairly leaps to the inquiring eye: Arnold Rothstein.
How could this professional gambler, the evil genius who masterminded the fixing of the 1919 World Series, be so openly linked to men at the apex of celebrity? Because that’s the way the country was back then — politics, sports, theater, and gambling were inextricably intertwined. That was how the Peerless Leader came to be honored by the Peerless Swindler, and such was the soil from which the Black Sox Scandal sprouted.
Chance Is the Fool’s Name for Fate was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.