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The edict effectively destroyed the careers of the eight Black Sox. Some of them later tried to win reinstatement to the league, but Commissioner Landis ensured that none of the disgraced ballplayers ever set foot in a big league diamond again. The decision was especially harsh toward Buck Weaver, who was banned even though he supposedly dropped out of the plot before it started. Joe Jackson, meanwhile, had admitted to accepting money from the Black Sox, but later claimed that he was an unwilling participant and had tried to tip Comiskey to the scheme. “Shoeless Joe’s” true level of involvement remains unclear, but his series best batting average of .375 suggests he took no active role in throwing the 1919 championship.

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The ballplayers’ vindication would not last long. Only a day after the acquittal, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, recently appointed as baseball’s first commissioner, decreed that all eight players were permanently banned from organized baseball. “Regardless of the verdict of juries,” Landis wrote, “no player who 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 a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

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As Gandil recruited his conspirators, Sullivan and a tangled web of crooks that may have included “Sleepy” Bill Burns, Bill Maharg and Abe Attell began raising the bribe money. New York mob leader Arnold Rothstein may have been a major player, but his involvement has never been proven, and evidence suggests that Gandil and his co-conspirators may have hatched multiple deals with different syndicates. “They not only sold [the series]” Abe Attell later claimed, “but they sold it wherever they could get a buck.” Bookies had previously had the Sox winning the World Series over the underdog Cincinnati Reds by as much as three-to-one, but the odds shifted after those in the know began betting heaps of cash on the Reds. As the championship drew near, the streets buzzed with rumors that several White Sox players were in the pocket of high stakes gamblers.

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On October 9, 1919, the Cincinnati Reds defeated the heavily favored Chicago White Sox 10-5 to clinch an unlikely World Series win. Rumors of a fix had swirled around the championship matchup before the first pitch was ever thrown, and in the months after the upset, it came to light that gamblers had paid several White Sox players to intentionally lose games.

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It was crooked from the start. In the bottom of the first inning of Game 1, White Sox ace Eddie Cicotte's pitch struck leadoff man Morrie Rath. This signaled a consortium of gamblers that "the fix was in," as various Chicago players had agreed to throw the World Series in exchange for various sums of money. Worst of all, two of the crooked White Sox were Cicotte and the club's No. 2 starter, Claude "Lefty" Williams. The former was hammered in Game 1, 9-1, and the latter followed up with a 4-2 loss in Game 2.

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Eight so-called “Black Sox”—including the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson—were later put on trial for conspiracy and banned from baseball for life.

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Although the 1919 Black Sox scandal has been portrayed as a unique event, baseball history indicates that throwing games likely happened a lot more than once. In the 1919 scandal, eight members of the Chicago White Sox were found to have accepted money from gamblers to throw the World Series. Historians and journalists who have studied the scandal say that it didn’t happen in a vacuum–the culture of major league baseball and how the players were paid helped to shape the problem.

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Just how the “Big Fix” of 1919 played out remains a subject of considerable debate among baseball historians. Accounts differ, but the scheme may have first materialized a few weeks before the World Series, when White Sox first baseman C. Arnold “Chick” Gandil and a gambler named Joseph “Sport” Sullivan met to discuss the possibility of Sox players throwing the championship. Gamblers had long been greasing the palms of disgruntled ballplayers in exchange for inside tips, but attempting to rig an entire World Series was a rare and perhaps even unprecedented proposition. Gandil later claimed he was initially skeptical that it could work, but he eventually agreed that he and a few co-conspirators would throw the series in exchange for a hefty payout of around $100,000. He soon enlisted White Sox pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams, shortstop Charles “Swede” Risberg and outfielder Oscar “Happy” Felsch into the scheme. Third baseman Buck Weaver was in on the early stages of the plot before pulling out, and utility infielder Fred McMullin was cut in after he overheard the players talking about the deal. Power hitter “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was also approached.

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“I don’t know why I did it… I needed the money. I had the wife and kids,” White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte confessed to the jury, prompting a series of confessions from other players. In total, eight men were indicted for conspiracy. They were ultimately found not guilty–though their careers were over and they would now be known in popular media as the “Black Sox,” writes Andrews.