Two distinct periods of gambling

1865: Officially, "professional baseball" hadn't yet been invented. But in this, the last year of the War Between the States, baseball in something like its modern form had been played for a couple of decades, and for some number of those years players had been paid under the table.

In 1865, a gambler named Kane McLaughlin paid a New York Mutuals player named William Wansley $100 to ensure that the next day's game against the Brooklyn Eckfords would be won by the Eckfords. Wansley, in turn, paid two teammates $30 apiece to facilitate the fix.

The plan "worked," with the Eckfords winning 23-11 and Wansley doing more than his share. He was a bit too obvious about it, though -- in five innings behind the plate, he was charged with six passed balls -- and shortly afterward an investigation revealed the plot. All three players were suspended by the National Association of Base Ball Players (eventually, all three were reinstated).

1877: In this, the second year of the National League, teams often played exhibition games, and in 1877 four players on the Louisville club were paid by gamblers to lose at least two of these exhibition games (and they might well have fixed some "league games" as well). The four players -- utility man Al Nichols, second baseman Bill Craver, star outfielder George Hall, and ace pitcher Jim Devlin -- weren't particularly subtle, and it wasn't long before all four were investigated and wound up admitting their guilt.

There was nothing particularly novel about their plot; suspicion of wrongdoing was widespread in the new league, and just a year earlier another Louisville player had been suspended for fixing games. But with the permanent suspension of the four players -- Devlin applied for reinstatement many times, to no avail -- the National League did send a message that some things simply wouldn't be tolerated.

At this point, it's worth noting that baseball's scandals weren't related to players betting on baseball games, but rather to players being paid to lose by gamblers betting on baseball games. In fact, in the 19th century there was little or no stigma attached to betting on games, assuming of course that the player was betting on his own team.

Howard Rosenberg, a researcher and author, has discovered 162 instances of players and team officials betting on baseball during the 19th century. Specifically, Rosenburg writes, "As my 2004 book will show, Cap Anson, baseball's all-time hit leader from the 1890s until the 1910s, bet on his team in the regular season at least 57 times. And he was widely viewed as a symbol of baseball's honesty." These bets were not made secretly; Rosenburg found accounts in the newspapers of the day, and nobody seemed particularly concerned about these bets. It was, at the time, considered perfectly natural to bet on yourself to win. In fact, considering how many times players were paid to lose in the game's early days, it must have been somewhat reassuring when a player went the other way.

(Brief editorial aside ... It's fashionable to suggest, when discussing the various crimes of Pete Rose, that betting on your own team is just as heinous and insidious as betting against your own team, but isn't this obviously a ridiculous position? Aren't there various shades of insidiousness?)

1918: On August 26, then-Reds first baseman Hal Chase was formally charged by the National League with attempting to "fix" games. This should not have particularly surprised anybody, as Chase had been considered for many years to be perhaps the most crooked player in the major leagues. However, he also was considered one of the game's best players -- Babe Ruth later named Chase as the best first baseman he ever saw -- and anyway it wasn't like other players weren't throwing games, too.

Despite a wealth of evidence against him, Chase was acquitted by National League President John Heydler in January of 1919, and signed with the New York Giants. Finally, after the season Chase (along with National Leaguers Heinie Zimmerman and Lee Magee) was "quietly pushed out of the game for crooked play."

1919: You know the story. Or at least you know the story as told in a couple of movies, both of which ignored any facts that got in the way of a good story. The best evidence suggests that eight Chicago White Sox knew about the World Series fix, and that seven of them -- Buck Weaver (or John Cusack, if you're watching at home) being the exception -- profited to various degrees. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte, for example, received $10,000 from the gamblers who financed the fix, and Shoeless Joe Jackson received $5,000 (about which he was mighty unhappy, seeing as before the Series he had been promised four times that amount).