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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  The IPL mess: Fellow cricket fans, the joke is on us
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The IPL mess: Fellow cricket fans, the joke is on us

Major League Baseball was caught in the grip of the betting mafia before it cleaned up its act. Will the IPL be able to do the same?

Photo: Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan TimesPremium
Photo: Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times

It might be a good time, given certain happenings in India last week, to watch the 1988 John Sayles film, Eight Men Out. It tells the nearly century-old story of a great scandal in the game of cri… er, baseball.

Here’s a summary that draws on the film and on a 2010 account of the scandal by Douglas Linder, a law professor at the University of Missouri. In 1919, the best team in professional baseball was, by all accounts, the Chicago White Sox. Those who know baseball—I’m certainly not one—even say it was one of the finest baseball teams of all time. In any case, those who know baseball also say the owner of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey, was a tight-fisted man who severely underpaid the men who played on the team.

How tight-fisted? Comiskey’s best players earned $6,000 a year. In today’s dollars, that’s about $85,000. (To put that in perspective: In 2015, the highest salary in pro baseball is $30 million, about 350 times what Comiskey was paying.) His star pitcher, Eddie Cicotte, had a contract that guaranteed him a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games for the White Sox that year. As he racked up the wins through that summer of ’19, Comiskey actually took him out of the playing line-up so Cicotte wouldn’t reach the mark and earn his bonus.

Now, Comiskey may not have been particularly more stingy than other team owners. But, for whatever reason, at least some of his players resented the way they were being treated (and underpaid). In 1919, it all came together and blew up in what is now known as the Black Sox scandal. Even that sardonic nickname came from something Comiskey thought up—to save money, he cut back on how often he would get player uniforms cleaned.

A few weeks before the end of the season, a few White Sox players started thinking the so far unthinkable: taking money to throw (or, as we might say today, “fix") the upcoming World Series—the nine-game league championship—against the Cincinnati Reds. They met with a gambler (or as we might say today, “bookie") and negotiated a deal. They met among themselves and tried to recruit others on the team into the scheme. They discussed double-crossing the gambler and then actually worked out a more lucrative deal with another gambler, and soon, the best-known gambler in sports, Arnold Rothstein, was in on it all too.

When it finally got under way, the World Series itself was a strange affair. There were games thrown by the White Sox; there was anger among the players because the gamblers were not handing over their agreed payoffs; that anger fired the White Sox briefly into playing instead of faking. They won two games to cut the Reds’ lead to 4-3 going into the eighth game. But the Reds won Game 8 to take the World Series.

It’s now known that the White Sox threw the second and eighth games and possibly the fourth. They won the third even though they tried to throw it. And as early as the second game, other players, journalists and spectators had begun to smell something fishy.

How could all this have been happening in the sport that, even then, was considered America’s game?

You might well ask, how could everything we have been hearing about be happening in what’s clearly India’s game today, cricket? I mean, there have been times when I have felt much like a young baseball fan did in Chicago in that dismal year of trampled myths. Legend has it that the kid ran into the great ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, one of the best White Sox players, on the street. Pulling at Jackson’s sleeve, he pleaded: “Say it ain’t so, Joe!"

Say it ain’t so, enter-name-of-your-favourite-Indian-cricketer. For the tragedy here—as in 1919—is how fans’ faith in a game has been betrayed.

But as dismaying as the World Series fix was, the real story of baseball at the time was the long-time and close connection between the game and gambling syndicates. In December 1919, a journalist from Chicago spelled it out and demanded an investigation. His headline couldn’t have been clearer: “Is Big League Baseball Being Run for Gamblers, With Ballplayers in the Deal?"

Eventually, eight White Sox players were put on trial (thus the book and film, Eight Men Out). Many twists and turns later, the jury exonerated them all. But their hopes of returning to the game crumbled when the commissioner of baseball, judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, told the press: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, 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."

One player, Oscar Felsch, summed things up: “I got $5,000... And now I’m out of baseball—the only profession I know anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us."

You don’t have to look hard to see parallels to India’s own pastime, cricket. Already, wealthy men have been gambling on Indian Premier League (IPL) games, seeking to become even richer. Like Felsch, a few men who probably know little about any other profession but cricket—remember Ajit Chandila, Ankit Chauhan and S. Sreesanth, for example, or Hiken Shah more recently—are out of cricket for good. The irony, if an unsurprising one, is that of the non-cricketers in this sordid mess—owners, administrators, hangers-on—only two have been similarly driven out.

While I’m sure there remain problems, baseball has been largely cleaned up over the last century. Fans can be pretty sure any given game today is legitimately contested. My feeling is that it will be many years—I hope not a century because I may not live that long—before cricket is similarly cleaned up.

Until then, the joke of the IPL is on us. Only, it’s not remotely funny.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

Twitter: @DeathEndsFun

Death Ends Fun: https://dcubed.blogspot.com

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Published: 18 Jul 2015, 11:31 PM IST
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