Today is Tuesday, Sept. 28, the 271st day of 2021.
There are 94 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Sept. 28, 1920, eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. (All were acquitted at trial, but all eight were banned from the game for life.)
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I am not familiar with this one. I am very curious to learn more about it. There must be a related book, documentary or movie, no?
Uh...Eight Men Out. 1988. You didn't see it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Men_Out.
And here I assumed he was being sarcastic.
No, I was dead serious about this one. I guess I am supposed to be embarrassed? Oh well.
No, not embarrassed. It's just fascinating to us that this somehow escaped the cultural literacy of an American man of our age and socioeconomic class. It's clearly possible, it's just fascinating.
The "Black Sox" scandal of 1919 is the reason baseball has a commissioner, Pete Rose got a lifetime ban, and baseball has free agency. The gangster that was behind it - Arnold Rothstein - was a seminal, if peripheral, figure in the formation of the American Mafia. And the journalist who exposed it, Ring Lardner, is a legend of sports journalism and a heavy influence on 20th century American literature.
(Hell, my own writing, even in the way I write here, owes a HUGE amount to Ring Lardner. It was one of my English teachers in college who hipped me to that, and to the fact that the two men who changed journalism, and thence all literature, from the stilted reporting style of American newspapers were Ring Larder and Studs Terkel. Both borrowed heavily from Samuel Clemens, who is essential, but without Lardner and Terkel, Clemens might have become an historical oddity rather than the voice of modern America.)
