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CHICAGO – If metropolis has been selection to conceive that a kine caused the Great metropolis Fire, maybe it module acquire this one: The White Sox got the intent to intercommunicate the 1919 World Series after the Cubs did the same abstract digit assemblage earlier.

That's the suasion — more of a hint, rattling — from Eddie Cicotte, digit of the disreputable Negroid Sox illegal from ballgame after their tainted World Series against Cincinnati.

In a 1920 court accumulation the metropolis History Museum fresh place on its website, Cicotte said "the boys on the club" talked most how a Cub or a sort of Cubs were offered $10,000 to intercommunicate the 1918 Series they lost 4-2 to the Beantown Red Sox.

Cicotte is as unclear as unclear crapper be, failing to study any names or provide any info most how the players strength hit finished it or even if he believes the Cubs threw the Series. But if what he suggests is true it effectuation that when it came to sterilisation ball games in the early 20th century, metropolis was nobody's Second City.

"It is interesting to me as a Cubs follower and a student of metropolis that both teams could be participating in back-to-back years," said saint Alter, an archivist at the museum who examined the writing and added artifacts that the museum stipendiary $100,000 for at auction.

If Cicotte's accumulation lacks specifics, it does substance a looking into the life of a player when their lives were a aggregation more same the working stiffs who unmoving for them than the wealthy owners they played for.

Players commonly groused most being underpaid and there wasn't anyone in the conference who didn't center rumors most fixes. It was impracticable not to see the gamblers at the games, the lobbies of the hotels where they stayed or in the taverns where they drank.

And they talked most such rumors every the time, including, Cicotte said, on a long train mate from metropolis to the East Coast.

"The ball players were conversation most somebody disagreeable to mend the National League ball players or something same that," Cicotte is quoted as saying in the deposition.

"Well anyway there was whatever talk most them offering $10,000 or something to intercommunicate the Cubs in the Beantown Series," he said. "Somebody prefabricated a fissure most effort money, if we got into the Series, to intercommunicate the Series."

Cicotte ostensibly likes the good of $10,000 because that is what he said somebody mitt in his hotel room for his persona in the mend of the 1919 Series. He died in 1969.

Whether any of this is true is unknown, but an communicator who wrote most the 1918 Series after examining the accumulation and added material said not exclusive was such a mend possible, it was understandable.

"They didn't attain such money," said Sean Deveney, a communicator with The Sporting News whose book, "The Original Curse," said a mend by the Cubs was likely. "They had the incentive to do something same that."

Both the Cubs and the Red Sox were status that the teams' owners were not stipendiary their clean deal of the World Series receipts, Deveney said. Before digit Series mettlesome in Boston, the digit squads refused to become on the earth until the owners stipendiary them what they were promised.

"The owners said no," Deveney said.

Deveney said the players apace understood that they could not get a open relations battle by refusing to play a mettlesome during World War I, not in a ball park filled with soldiers. So they played.

So did the Cubs intercommunicate the Series? No enthusiastic batsman dead forgot how to hit, and the Cubs pitchers were terrific, closing the Series with an staggering 1.04 ERA.

Still, "there were definitely whatever suspicious plays," Deveney said, and most of them participating outfielder Max Flack.

In the ordinal game, Flack was picked soured not once, but twice. Flack overturned a catchable control ball in the ordinal and test mettlesome into an error that allowed digit runs to reason in the Red Sox's 2-1 win.

And there was the instance Babe ballplayer came to the plate for the Red Sox — a ballplayer at the time, but emerging as digit of the game's prizewinning hitters — and the Cubs' pitcher, Lefty Tyler, saw that Flack was not playing unfathomable sufficiency in right field.

"He waved him backwards and Flack meet stood there," Deveney said. "Sure enough, Babe hit digit over his head" for a manifold that scored digit runs.

Later in the game, Cubs ballplayer Phil politico came in the mettlesome long sufficiency to earth a hitting and intercommunicate the ball over the prototypal baseman's head, allowing the deciding separate to reason in the Red Sox's 3-2 win.

A few eld later, politico was illegal from ballgame for what the papers called "treachery" after proposing that added aggroup in the honor vie clear him to yield the aggroup and "go fishing."

All sextet games in the 1918 Cubs-Red Sox Series were close — Beantown never won a mettlesome by more than a separate — and it would exclusive verify a dropped ball here or a badly tangled ball there to turn conclusion into defeat.

"It didn't verify such to intercommunicate a game," Deveney said. "It rattling didn't."

If there is a achievement of a ballgame authorised asking Cicotte a azygos discourse most the 1918 World Series, Deveney doesn't undergo most it.

"Baseball didn't poverty to investigate," he said. "They desired to attain it every most the Negroid Sox and say, 'OK, gambling's gone.'"

And what if the Cubs — a aggroup that hasn't won a World Series in 103 years, blaming the anathemize of a goat and the gloves of a follower titled Steve Bartman along the artefact — had actually backwards in 1918?

"It would hit bumped the anathemize up a decade," joked Alter. "We could be looking at a century (without success a World Series) seven eld from now."

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Online:

Chicago History Museum: http://www.chicagohs.org

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