A century after Black Sox, baseball cheating goes high-tech

WASHINGTON (AP) — A century after the Black Sox scandal that tarnished the World Series and ushered in major changes in baseball, the notion that millionaire ballplayers would take money to throw a game — much less the World Series — is all but unthinkable.

But that doesn't mean cheating in baseball is a thing of the past, and there are still concerns about gambling affecting the integrity of the sport.

Today's scandals revolve around technology — from teams using Apple Watches or high-definition cameras to steal signs to rogue "data scouts" giving bookmakers real-time information from ballparks. It's hard to gauge how widespread these practices are, but players and managers are paranoid about tech-driven cheating, with teams hurling accusations at one another as recently as this year's American League Championship Series.

MLB is doing its best to adapt its rulebook to the tech, hoping to keep the sport honest as it failed to do 100 years ago.

HISTORY LESSON

The 1919 World Series, in which several Chicago White Sox players were paid by gamblers to lose intentionally to the Cincinnati Reds, was the most egregious game-fixing scandal in baseball history, but it didn't occur in a vacuum.

"There had been so much corruption going on in the previous two decades, and baseball had always turned a blind eye to all rumors of gambling and players betting on their own games and game-fixing," said Jacob Pomrenke, chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee at the Society for American Baseball Research. "The Black Sox players saw a low risk and a high reward. They could make a lot of money in one week by losing those games, and they thought baseball would not take it seriously."

Although the White Sox had salaries commensurate with players on other teams, the payout...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/A-century-after-Black-Sox-baseball-cheating-goes-14560076.php