Reviving my old SCD player profiles

[Bob Lemke]

With the assistance of current-editor Tom Bartsch I am beginning an effort to republish the 10-12 lengthy player profiles of 1910s-1930s ballplayers that we originally ran in SCD in the early 1990s.

Each of the features will be updated as necessary. I'll be posting the revised articles on my blog (linked below) in the coming months and years.
I think it's a good idea to make these historically oriented pieces available to fans and collectors once again in 21st Century technology.

Many of the profiles deal with baseball's "bad boys" of 75-100 years ago. And, of course, their baseball cards.
I'm starting the reprint project with my four-part series about the Pacific Coast League scandal of 1919. Part 1 is up on the blog now.

Here's the introduction . . .

Bad News Bees art.jpg

Bees' pitcher stung Angels by throwing games


In 1919 Salt Lake City had clean air, clean-living people . . . and dirty ballplayers.

While the attention of baseball fans was focused on revelations of the dirty doings of the Black Sox in Chicago, a parallel scandal was unfolding on the West Coast involving several former major leaguers. Three of them were teammates on the Salt Lake City Bees.

The scandal had its genesis in the 1919 Pacific Coast League pennant race. Like the Black Sox thing, it would not become widely known until August of 1920 when one of the Salt Lake players was observed accepting a $300 pay-off. Before the season was over, a Los Angeles grand jury had begun an investigation into the attempts of gambler Nate Raymond to fix the 1919 season for the benefit of the Vernon Tigers.

Using Vernon first baseman Babe Borton to get to players on other teams, Raymond followed the Tigers up and down the Left Coast fixing ballgames. He later bragged that he had made $50,000 on crooked games.

Vernon won the 1919 PCL pennant, finishing 2-1/2 games ahead of Los Angeles and 18 games in front of third-place Salt Lake City. In winning the championship, the Tigers split a $10,000 bonus pool put up by fans, plus the $8,000 winners’ share of the “Little World Series.”

While the Bees as a team missed out on a similar windfall promised for a pennant win, at least three of the team’s key players had collected personal bonus money amounting to something like two weeks’ salary for the average Coast Leaguer. A year later those private pension programs put the players beyond the pale of Organized Baseball; run out of the game by team and league officials with the wisdom and courage to protect the integrity of the Pacific Coast League.