Accountability mattered in baseball.

In 1921, eight members of the Chicago White Sox were acquitted in criminal court on charges of conspiracy to fix the World Series two years earlier. They were suspected of throwing the games on promises of payouts from various mafiosos; Before the trial, however, at least two players’ signed confessions disappeared, and they then recanted their confessions. None of the players testified in court. Left with nothing, the prosecution failed to impress a jury.

But there’s a world outside of criminal courts, and outside that world – where people have unrestricted use of their eyes, ears, and brains – the players’ crimes were plain as day. Different players involved themselves in the scheme to differing extents, but bookmakers had clearly decided, at least in part, the outcome of the 1919 World Series in advance.

So what do you do with crooks, when they’re clean in the eyes of the law? Kenesaw Mountain Landis had an answer.

Landis – a federal judge who was appointed the first commissioner of baseball in response to the scandal – banned all eight players from baseball for life. His ruling came the day after the jury’s verdict. A few of the banned players puttered around in semi-pro leagues, for a while; but none stepped up to a professional mound again.

Landis, in banning the players, wrote that “regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ballgame; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame; no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

His decision resonated off the field. When some of the banned players announced they’d play exhibition games on Sundays in Chicago, the city council responded by threatening to cancel the licenses of any stadiums that host such games. The games didn’t happen.

The various players went on to own farms; to open liquor stores; to work for Ford; to get married; to have kids. But they were kept away from the people they had lied to one fateful week in 1919.

And, to be clear, that’s what I’m attempting to write about: Lying. I don’t care about sports history any more than the average person. I think maybe there’s reason to support the reinstatements of Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver in particular. But that’s mostly irrelevant.

What I’m writing about is the fact that eight baseball players behaved dishonestly in 1919, and people saw it for what it was. And, to his credit, at least one of the players eventually came to see his actions in the same light.

In 1956, Chick Gandil – the first baseman and ringleader of the scheme – sat down with Sports Illustrated to talk about what he did. His account maintains that he and his fellow players were horrifically underpaid by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey; that the players actually gave up on the scheme and tried their best to win; and that he found Landis’ blanket lifetime ban harsh. But at no point during the nearly-6,000-word account does he shift the blame for his actions.

On Comiskey and underpayment as the motive for the scheme:

“I would like to blame the trouble we got into on Comiskey’s cheapness, but my conscience won’t let me. We had no one to blame but ourselves,” Gandil wrote.

On backing out from the scheme, after rumors circulated about the fix:

“We weighed the risk of public disgrace and going to jail against taking our chances with the gamblers by crossing them up and keeping the $10,000. We were never remorseful enough to want to return the grand to [Arnold] Rothstein [one of the gamblers alleged to have been involved].”

On his statement that the games were ultimately lost fair-and-square:

“Our losing to Cincinnati was an upset all right, but no more than Cleveland’s losing to the New York Giants by four straight in 1954. Mind you, I offer no defense for the thing we conspired to do. It was inexcusable. But I maintain that our actual losing of the Series was pure baseball fortune.”

And finally, on the lifetime ban he received:

“Inasmuch as we were legally freed, I feel Landis’ ruling was unjust, but I truthfully never resented it because, even though the Series wasn’t thrown, we were guilty of a serious offense, and we knew it.”

At no point in Gandil’s account does he intimate that anyone else was accountable for his own actions. He offers explanations, but he doesn’t allow them to turn into excuses.

There’s probably room for baseball history buffs to pick apart his account. I’m not interested here in whether or not his facts are entirely straight, or whether or not he minimized parts of his account. What I’m interested in is the simple fact that he fucked up, got found out, suffered meaningful consequences, and ultimately accepted those consequences.

In other words, the Black Sox were ‘canceled’ and publicly deplatformed a century before people freaked out about ‘cancel culture.’ And baseball became a better sport for it.

Obviously the question of who answers for their own actions – and who gets to dodge their consequences – is one that’s fraught with power, class, and identity politics in any time and place. I’m not trying to push some RETVRN narrative to an era which also saw the likes of William Thompson (the besties-with-Al-Capone Chicago mayor at the time of the Black Sox scandal), Tammany Hall, or Warren Fucking Harding. But we’re living in a time now where it feels like a very, very basic guiding principle – that you are accountable for your own actions – is now seriously being questioned in every avenue of life.

Let’s stick with baseball for a second. Fast forward to 2019, and the Houston Astros have just been implicated in a massive sign-stealing scheme. According to NYT reporting, players and managers would use a video camera in the Astros’ home field to record the opposing team’s catcher. They’d use that video to figure, through catchers’ signals, what pitches were about to be thrown. Then they’d communicate that information to their own batters.

Stealing catcher signs on its own isn’t explicitly against the rules of baseball. But using electronic equipment to steal signs is. The Astros’ scandal was a clear violation of written rules and provided them with an unfair advantage against away teams. But the fallout was nothing like the fallout from 1919.

All players involved were granted immunity in the ensuing investigation. The Astros were allowed to keep their 2017 World Series trophy. Exactly three individual punishments were meted out: Team manager Jeff Luhnow was suspended from league activities for one season, as was manager A. J. Hinch and former infielder Alex Cora.

Of the three, Luhnow now owns CD Léganes, a football club in La Liga. Hinch jumped right back into the MLB when his suspension ended, where he now works as the manager of the Detroit Tigers. Cora had left the Astros by the time the scandal broke and was working as the manager of the Boston Red Sox. He stepped back for his suspension, and jumped right back in with the Red Sox when it ended.

To give credit where credit’s due, Hinch and Cora have repeatedly apologized for their actions. I’m not advocating a specific punishment or a lifetime ban or anything – but the fact that two baseball teams saw fit to give them promotions, less than two years after the revelation that they had conspired for years to break the game’s rules, is crazy to me.

The MLB’s lax response to players emboldened the eternally aggrieved Pete Rose, who cited it in his semifinal application for reinstatement, 31 years after he was banned in 1989 for betting on games he played in. Oh, speaking of, guess who’s one of the most vocal supporters of reinstating Rose?

Of course it’s Donald Trump, who posted last week that the MLB should honor him posthumously, and also said he’s working on a pardon for Rose (who was found guilty of tax evasion after his scandal broke).

I’m done talking about baseball now. And I won’t linger on Trump for much longer – I’m not interested in writing the 3000th whiny essay about the guy’s relationship to the concept of honesty. I’m writing about the wider world I see now, and it’s one where everyone has been emboldened to embrace their own worst evils, to be proud of them, and to ask, with a smirk: “Sure, I did [X thing]. But what are you going to do about it?”

In this Mad Max moral system, you get everyone from billionaire oligarchs to minor politicians throwing public Nazi salutes for the memes. You get Dana White – now on Facebook’s board of directors – proudly shaking hands with sex traffickers on live TV. You get Facebook’s level of discourse in every public arena, and you get elected officials whose entire messaging is just that they’re Winners. No public accountability beyond that.

To be clear, this is a specific form of discourse primarily engineered by an alliance of the American political right and the owners and movers of capital. Anyone who is literate on a basic level is capable of seeing that. We’re out of the age of civil discourse and we’re now in an age of iron, to borrow from Coetzee. And I don’t care to converse with the right.

What I’m really interested in is what’s happened to the idea of accountability in general, not in the particular form of messaging employed by the proudly destructive death cult in power. Thath's why I started with baseball! But it feels like that basic principle I mentioned earlier – that you’re accountable for your own actions – has been eroding everywhere, not just in politics or sports.

I think this erosion is visible in the messaging of (some) organizers. Organizers say to have compassion for others (good!); to include everyone in conversation (also good!); but there are other things, some left unsaid, that probably should be said. I think, for instance, that if you truly believe you have an inherent responsibility to the other members of your community – the basic idea of accountability – then you need to talk about self-discipline in the same sentence where you’re talking about compassion. Add discipline to compassion and you've got something greater than the sum of its parts.

To elaborate, what I mean is that the Idea Of Self-Care As A Public Good is wildly overstated. It doesn’t come at the expense of everything else; and, if it were talked about properly – instead of starting and ending with the concept of mental health days – it would work in conjunction with other principles of community organizing. What I’m saying is that, if you believe yourself accountable to other people, then you have to do things that suck sometimes, because that comes with the territory. Otherwise, compassion is an abstract value, with very little material worth.

Your neighbor might need help moving boxes someday, so you should be exercising sometimes if you're able. We're transitioning an era where your physical ability to defend yourself or others – or the ability to run – might matter more than your ability to craft a compelling argument, so you should take care of your body. You have to accept that part of “keep everybody safe” involves work, and you have to do that work, to the greatest of your abilities.

I’m not perfect about any of this, and I really can’t write publicly about my personal interpretations of any of these ideas or how I pursue them in my own life. But the reason I ramble at such length is simply to say – there has never been a successful form of resistance undergirded by the principle of “everyone is having a really good time because they’re hanging out and they like each other.” If you want to keep you and your neighbors safe, you have to think of it as a real, commutative obligation, one which requires genuine labor on your part. The world we live in revolves around the principle of “I got mine, so fuck you and also I’m going to hurt you” – the exact antithesis of accountability – and fighting back against that should involve some meaningful devotion to self- and community accountability.