The "Black Sox" baseball betting scandal was aconspiracy between a group of players and gamblers which led to the Chicago White Sox deliberately losing the 1919 World Series. In September 1920, a Grand Jury was convened to investigate, which resulted in the banning of the eight involved players, and a new commissioner and strict rules prohibiting gambling were introduced
The brains behind this conspiracy were White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil and Joseph "Sport" Sullivan, a professional gambler of his acquaintance. During the 1919 baseball season the Chicago White Sox had shown themselves to be the best team in the leagues and, having clinched the American League pennant, were installed as the bookmaker's favorites to defeat the Cincinnati Reds in the Series. At the time, gambling on baseball was rife and there were many stories about fixed games during the regular season, which were typically ignored by team owners and administrators.
Gandil enlisted seven of his teammates, motivated by a mixture of greed and a dislike of penurious club owner Charles Comiskey, to implement the fix. The seven were the starting pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude "Lefty" Williams, outfielders Shoeless Joe Jackson and Oscar "Happy" Felsch, and infielders Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Fred McMullin. Sullivan and his two associates Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, somewhat out of their depth, approached the wealthy New York gambler Arnold Rothstein to provide the money for the players, who were promised a total of $100,000.
For a complete review of how all the games went down, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_scandal
