This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The 1919 World Series produced the deepest scandal in the event's history when eight players on the Chicago White Sox conspired with professional gamblers to deliberately lose the series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for payoffs. Resentment over the notoriously low salaries paid by team owner Charles Comiskey is widely cited among the plot's underlying causes, though the players' own motives varied. Suspicious errors and uncharacteristically poor play during the series itself drew scrutiny from sportswriters even before the conspiracy became public.
A grand jury investigation opened in 1920, producing confessions from several players, but all eight were acquitted at trial in 1921 after key evidence, including some of those confessions, went missing before the proceedings. The outcome did not save the players' careers: Kenesaw Mountain Landis, hired as the sport's first Commissioner in the scandal's aftermath specifically to restore public confidence, banned all eight men from professional baseball for life regardless of the trial's result, asserting an authority over the sport's integrity that has defined the commissioner's office ever since. The role of Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose batting statistics during the series were among the best of either team, remains genuinely debated by historians, keeping his banishment a recurring subject of reconsideration in baseball writing and popular culture, including the film Field of Dreams.