Pete Rose and Ty Cobb are linked by more than their 4,000-plus hits and hell-for-leather styles. It is little remembered that 63 years ago Cobb—like Rose today—was embroiled in a gambling scandal that featured an alleged vendetta and complaints about a commissioner who was slow to act.The difference, Cobb and Speaker are in the Hall of Fame, Rose and Jackson aren't.
In 1926 retired pitcher Dutch Leonard told American League president Ban Johnson that near the end of the 1919 season, Leonard and Tiger teammate Cobb, along with Tris Speaker and Smokey Joe Wood of the Indians, had met beneath the stands in Detroit and reached an understanding that the Indians, who had clinched second place behind the White Sox, would lose to the Tigers the next day so that Detroit could finish third and claim a share of World Series money. Leonard said that to profit on the arrangement Cobb planned to bet $2,000 on the game, Leonard $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each. In the end, Cleveland did lose, 9-5, but Cobb didn't get his money down in time, and only a small portion of the others' money was wagered.
Leonard was said to harbor grudges against both Cobb and Speaker—Cobb, the Tigers' player-manager, had released him in 1926, and Speaker, the Indians' player-manager, had refused to pick him up—but he did possess two incriminating letters from Cobb and Wood. In his letter Wood had written, "If we ever have another chance like this we will know enough to try to get [our bets] down early." Cobb had written, "Wood and myself are considerably disappointed in our business proposition."
The public didn't get wind of Leonard's accusations until Cobb and Speaker both retired unexpectedly after the '26 season. Johnson had allowed them to resign rather than make the affair public. But he gave Leonard's letters to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who crossed Johnson by revealing them to the press. While fans clamored for a decision, Landis spent more than two months looking into the case. He deemed the charges rather old, and sensed the overwhelming public support for Cobb and Speaker. Uncharacteristically brushing off a number of questions that remained unanswered, Landis exonerated everyone involved.
To their dying days, Cobb, Speaker and Wood all denied any wrongdoing. But baseball had been rife with gambling early in their careers. As Woods told baseball historian Mark Alvarez in 1975, when he was asked about the scandal, "Things were so different then."
The fictional Shoeless Joe was right:
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