Clear Buck Weaver News

Source: MLB ineligible list ends at death for banned players

By Don Van Natta Jr., ESPN Senior Writer

Major League Baseball has shifted its view of deceased players who have been banned for life, a group that includes “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the seven other Chicago White Sox players prohibited from playing professional baseball in 1921 for fixing the 1919 World Series.

A senior MLB source told ESPN that the league has no hold on banned players after they die because the ineligible list bars players from privileges that include a job with a major league club.

“From our perspective, the purpose of the ineligible list is a practical matter,” the source told ESPN. “It’s used to prevent someone from working in the game. When a person on the ineligible list passes away, he’s unable to work in the game. And so for all practical purposes, we don’t consider a review of the status of anyone who has passed away.”

The previously unreported change is potentially significant when it comes to the consideration of Jackson’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame. He has not been considered for decades despite numerous public and petition-writing campaigns to get him removed from baseball’s ineligible list.

In 1991, the Hall of Fame passed a rule declaring that any player ruled ineligible by Major League Baseball could not appear on a Hall of Fame ballot…

The shift in MLB’s view raises the question of whether the Hall of Fame’s Early Baseball committee would consider Jackson, Buck Weaver and Eddie Cicotte, all of whom were banned from playing professional baseball by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1921 despite being acquitted by a Chicago jury of fixing the 1919 World Series. A subcommittee will determine the 10 individuals who played or were involved in the game prior to 1950 who will appear on this year’s ballot, to be considered by the full Early Baseball committee this December.

Read the full story at www.ESPN.com…

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100th Black Sox Centennial News Articles

100 years later, historians still debate baseball’s darkest moment

By Alex Butler, United Press International, Oct 9, 2019

Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of the end of that best-of-nine World Series, which the Cincinnati Reds won amid accusations of White Sox players taking bribes from gamblers in exchange for poor play. White Sox players Eddie Cicotte, Claude “Lefty” Williams, Arnold “Chick” Gandil, Charles “Swede” Risberg, George “Buck” Weaver, Oscar “Happy” Felsch, Fred McMullin and Joe “Shoeless Joe” Jackson were permanently banned from baseball for their roles in the fixing incident.

“It’s an American story that’s more than just baseball,” said Dr. David Fletcher, co-founder of the Chicago Baseball Museum. “It’s a story of redemption. Cheaters cheat cheaters. It’s just a part of Americana.”

The players were acquitted of charges of conspiring with gamblers, but the first commissioner of baseball Major League Baseball — appointed as a result of the scandal — banned them for life a day after the verdict in 1921. [White Sox owner Charles] Comiskey first backed his players despite reporters investigating the bribes, offering a cash reward for information about the alleged fix. The White Sox owner later admitted to knowing about the scheme before the first game of the series.

Fletcher leads a reinstatement campaign for Weaver, who has never admitted to taking money, but only meeting with his teammates to talk about the bribes. Weaver hit .324 and did not make any errors in the 1919 World Series. “It’s definitely a major piece of U.S. history that’s more than just sports,” Fletcher said. “It has so much there, as far as the romance about baseball … sort of the theme of Field of Dreams, [that maybe] there is some redemption out there. These players basically got banished to the phantom zone.”

Read the full story at www.upi.com…

 


 

Clearing the Black Sox

By Patrick M. O’Connell, Chicago Tribune

One hundred years after the Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the Series — a result quickly shrouded by allegations that several members of American League champion Sox had “thrown” the Series, intentionally playing poorly because they had been promised money from gamblers if they lost — [Debra] Ebert and [Sandy] Schley remain committed to clearing the name of their great-uncle, Sox third baseman Buck Weaver, who was one of the eight players permanently banned from baseball in the aftermath of the Series.

With the help of advocate David C. Fletcher, a baseball fan from downstate Illinois who is founder of the Chicago Baseball Museum, the family staged a protest at the 2003 All-Star Game at Sox Park and again penned letters to the commissioner asking that baseball consider clearing Weaver’s name.

“We’ve done what we’ve done, but MLB was not interested in acting and they refused to meet with his family,” Fletcher said. “He never had due process.”

While many of the specifics of the scandal are murky and steeped in debunked myths popularized by books and movies like “Eight Men Out” and “Field of Dreams,” it is generally believed that Weaver attended at least one meeting about fixing the Series but never took money from gamblers or intentionally played poorly in the field that autumn.

With the Sox set to play the New York Yankees next August in Dyersville, Iowa, at the farm that was used to film the famous ballfield-in-the-cornfield scenes in “Field of Dreams,” the Weaver descendants sense a new opportunity on the horizon.

“We may have to dust off the 2003 plan,” Fletcher said.

The 1919 World Series began Oct. 1 in Cincinnati, 100 years ago Tuesday. The next high-profile opportunity to revisit the reinstatement or Hall of Fame push will be next summer in Iowa.

“For the family, this was about restoring his honor,” Fletcher said. Weaver lost more than his reputation in the fallout from the Black Sox scandal, he said, suffering “tremendous financial loss” from lost wages. Ebert said he spent the rest of his life bouncing from job to job, working as a painter, at a drugstore and at a horse track.

Read the full story at ChicagoTribune.com…

 


 

~~ By the historian for Major League Baseball,

A century ago this week, eight players from the Chicago White Sox conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the World Series, enabling the underdog Cincinnati Reds — and bettors in the know — to win. The scandal, which was uncovered almost a year later, has come to be seen as baseball’s “loss of innocence,” the cause of fans’ diminished feelings for the game they once adored and a mortal blow to the nation’s confidence as it entered the 1920s, a decade of disrespect for elders, contempt for institutions and worship of the fast life and the fast buck.

The “eight men out” included the stars Joe Jackson, whose lifetime batting average of .356 was second at that time only to that of Detroit’s legendary Ty Cobb, and pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who had won 29 games in 1919 and 28 two years before. Both men confessed their role in the plot to Comiskey, and then to grand jurors, who indicted them for conspiracy to defraud.

Four other Chicago players were indicted: Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, reserve infielder Fred McMullin and third baseman Buck Weaver, who claimed to his dying day that while he had sat in on the deliberations, he took no money and played to win. Baseball fans were stunned and heartsick, and scribes predicted a swift end to the nation’s long love affair with the game.

Only in recent years, thanks largely to investigative efforts by members of the Society for American Baseball Research, has the truth about the Fix begun to come out. It is indeed a twisty tale, in some measure beyond perfect reconstruction, but neatly encapsulated by SABR’s Black Sox research group as “Eight Myths Out.”

Perhaps the single most important outcome of the Black Sox scandal was the way Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis went about cleaning house. Following the acquittal at trial of the eight Black Sox on Aug. 2, 1921, largely through jury nullification, Landis declared, to the enduring benefit of the game:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever again play professional baseball.

This last description of unforgivable behavior was surely directed at Buck Weaver. Still, he applied six times for reinstatement to baseball, beginning in 1922. His final petition came in 1953, when he requested reinstatement from one of Landis’s successors as commissioner, Ford Frick.

“A murderer even serves his sentence and is let out,” Weaver observed at that time. “I got life.”

The petition for redress was rejected; because Major League Baseball removes players from the ineligible list when they die, and because the Baseball Hall of Fame aligns its balloting procedures with Major League policy, theoretically there is no barrier to Jackson’s induction, or Weaver’s.

Jackson died in 1951, Weaver in 1956, each offering a cautionary tale for the major leaguers who followed. A wager by a fan is one thing, maybe as mild as having a beer at the game; a gambling involvement by one who may affect the game’s outcome is another matter entirely. Fans of Weaver and Jackson continue to seek exoneration. It seems, now, beside the point; we forgave the Black Sox long ago.

Read the full story at the NYTimes.com…

 

 

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Pat Anderson, niece who crusaded to lift ‘Black Sox’ ban on Buck Weaver, dies

By Maureen O’Donnell
Originally posted in the Chicago Sun-Times on April 16, 2019

Pat Anderson, who crusaded unsuccessfully to get her “Uncle Buck” Weaver of the Chicago White Sox reinstated by Major League Baseball, has died almost a century after the “Black Sox” bribery scandal tarnished his legacy.

“She was the last person living who lived with him, knew him well,” said David J. Fletcher, who heads the petition drive www.clearbuck.com, which he launched with Mrs. Anderson and her cousin Marjorie Follett, who died in 2003.

“He was a surrogate father to her,” her daughter Debbie Ebert said of Weaver.

Mrs. Anderson, 92, died Sunday at Tablerock HealthCare Center in Kimberling City, Missouri, according to her family. She had renal failure, Fletcher said.

Mrs. Anderson pushed for years to clear her uncle’s name. She, Fletcher and baseball historians have argued his lifetime ban was too harsh.

Read the full obituary at Chicago.SunTimes.com…

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Pat Anderson – niece who led cause to clear Buck Weaver dead at age 92

Pat Anderson, one of the last living direct links to the banned Buck Weaver of the 1919 #BlackSox100 scandal, has died at  age 92.

Her family will continue the fight to #ClearBuck @WhiteSox 3rd baseman. She spoke @SABR 43 in 2013 about her cause.

Read the story at https://chicagobaseballmuseum.org/chicago-baseball-history-news/chicago-baseball-history-feature/niece-led-cause-clear-buck-weaver-dead-age-92/

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2013

The SABR Black Sox Scandal Committee will host a panel discussion to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Eight Men Out,” which was written by Eliot Asinof and first published in 1963, at the SABR 43 Convention in August. We’ve learned a great deal about the Black Sox Scandal in the last half-century, and we’ll go over some of that new information and how it affects our understanding of the story popularized by Asinof’s landmark book, which introduced so many of us to the fixed 1919 World Series.

The panelists will include:

  • Dr. David Fletcher, founder and president of the Chicago Baseball Museum
  • Bill Lamb, a retired New Jersey prosecutor and author of “Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation”
  • Moderator: Jacob Pomrenke, chair of the SABR Black Sox Scandal Committee
  • And our special guest of honor: Patricia Anderson, niece and surrogate daughter of Buck Weaver. She and her sister, the late Bette Scanlon, were raised by Buck and Helen Weaver in Chicago for 16 years after their father died in 1931.

The panel will be August 2 in Philadelphia, PA. Any baseball fan is welcome to attend by registering for SABR 43 at SABR.org/convention.

2010

While contemplating the qualities that make a great leader and specific leaders in general, several people began to come to mind. Many of the great leaders of all time were not necessarily “positive leaders.” Some were famous; others were infamous. Leaders come in all shapes in sizes: Some are loud and aggressive; others say very little and let their actions be their example. Although level of fame does not necessarily dictate the effectiveness of a leader, it does help in making them more universal—thus having the greatest impact on the masses. The lesser known leaders have to make their impact on a much smaller, but no less important scale. Some leaders we know through history’s recollections; others we may have known personally. George “Buck” Weaver is not a household word and may never get the credit he truly deserves, yet nonetheless exhibited some of the most important qualities of leadership.

STORY >>

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Niece, doctor try to clear name of ‘Black Sox’ Buck Weaver

By TARA BURGHART

CHICAGO (AP) – For years, George (Buck) Weaver tried to get reinstated to baseball following a scandal in which Chicago White Sox players agreed to throw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

Now, nearly 50 years after his death, Weaver’s niece is leading the effort to clear his name. “It’s time to be fair and give the man his due,” Patricia Anderson said about the man she considered her surrogate father. “I feel he got such a raw deal.” Weaver, who grew up in Pennsylvania, made his major league debut with the White Sox in 1912. He became one of the most popular players on the South Side, known for his smile and the dirty uniform that accompanied his energetic play.

In the 1919 World Series, he batted .324 with no errors at third base.

The gambling scandal wasn’t exposed until almost a year after the Series. Then in 1921, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned eight White Sox players, including Weaver, from baseball although a jury acquitted them.

“No player who entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed and does not promptly tell the club about it will ever play professional baseball,” Landis said.

Anderson, her sister and cousin started pushing for Weaver’s reinstatement in the 1970s. The campaign got a renewed boost last year when a devoted baseball fan, David Fletcher, bankrolled an Internet site – www.clearbuck.com – and the hiring of a public relations firm.

Supporters of the “Clear Buck” campaign – who include Eliot Asinof, author of Eight Men Out, a book about the scandal – say he was guilty only of hearing about the scheme and not speaking out.

“He kept his integrity and character and refused to rat on his teammates. He was true to his teammates – that’s what he was guilty of,” said Fletcher, an occupational medicine specialist and professor at the University of Illinois. “And he didn’t think they were going to go through with the plot.”

In addition to sending baseball commissioner Bud Selig 10,000 signatures on petitions calling for Weaver’s reinstatement, the “Clear Buck” campaign pitched its cause at the all-star game, Cubs and White Sox fan festivals, an event at the Hall of Fame and the winter baseball meetings in New Orleans.

Anderson, now a 77-year-old retiree living in Kimberling City, Mo., worries that the way Pete Rose has handled his efforts to get reinstated could hurt her uncle’s cause.

She believes Weaver’s case should be considered along with that of (Shoeless) Joe Jackson, who led all hitters in the 1919 World Series with a .375 average. Supporters say Jackson tried to return the money.

“They certainly didn’t do anything that would hurt baseball,” Anderson said.

Weaver and his wife took Anderson, her older sister and the girls’ mother into their Chicago home after their father died in 1931. Anderson was only four.

It was the Depression, and Weaver took whatever jobs he could to support the
household.

“Years later, I thought he worked so hard to raise what he considered his family. And I don’t suppose we ever could have been grateful enough for what he did for us,” Anderson said.

Anderson said her uncle never talked to her about his banishment from baseball as a member of the infamous Black Sox. He taught her and her sister how to catch and throw, and he gave baseball tips to neighbourhood boys.

After he died in 1956 at age 65, Anderson heard from Weaver’s widow, her aunt, how much he had missed the game.

According to Fletcher, Weaver continually pushed for reinstatement – as soon as one year after he was banned and as late as 1953. He wanted to manage a team or serve as a scout, but Landis and his successor as commissioner, Albert “Happy” Chandler, turned him down.

“Landis wanted me to tell him something that I didn’t know,” Weaver said in a 1954 interview with author James T. Farrell. “I didn’t have any evidence.”

Whether the “Clear Buck” campaign has any hope of getting Weaver reinstated isn’t clear. He isn’t eligible for the Hall of Fame because he only played nine seasons – one short of the requirement.

“He never gave up the fight, which is why it’s good that other people have taken up the fight for him,” said Gabriel Schechter, a research associate in the library of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “It would just be speculation on whether anything will happen with it.”

Selig did not answer repeated requests for comment by The Associated Press for this story. But last month, he sent Fletcher a letter.

“As you know this is a very sensitive matter that none of my predecessors have seen fit to overturn,” Selig wrote, “but certainly at the very least we ought to thoroughly review it, and that’s what we are doing.”

Jerome Holtzman, the official historian for Major League Baseball, said of the more than a dozen players who have been banned from baseball, he considers Weaver the only one who “has a chance to be reinstated, or at least should be considered for reinstatement.”

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Pete Rose: now he’s a liar and a gambler

By: Barry Benintende

About the writer: “Barry Benintende is editor of the South County Mail, located in Rogersville, Mo. He is a lifelong San Diego Padres fan and will not rest until the good names of Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson are cleared.”

Pete Rose finally came clean. Or did he? On Thursday night, baseball’s all-time hits leader finally owned up to betting on baseball, after only a shade under a decade and a half. Nice.

Rose’s half-hearted admission has his fans sobbing, then screaming “let him in the Hall of Fame.” I think not.

Rose was banned for betting on baseball. The fact that he’s admitted it does not make it better. The fact that he was banned for life did not go away.

The fact that he lied, and made John Dowd’s life miserable all these years has not changed.

Dowd was the unfortunate man that compiled evidence on Rose’s gambling and issued a report. All that Dowd got for doing his job was years of slander from Rose and death threats from his fans.

John Dowd, if there is nobody else willing to say it, baseball owes you more than Rose’s feeble apology. You are an honorable man. Rose is not.

Rose broke baseball’s cardinal rule, and has to pay for that. Plain and simple, the rules need to apply to Rose like they would apply to a guy who hit .200 for a last place team.

Many of Rose’s fans say he has paid his debt to the sport he so loves. They say everyone is a fan of the way he played the game.

Wrong on both counts.

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Pete Rose: Yes or No?

Chicago Tribune
By: Paul Sullivan
Paul Sullivan covers the Cubs

When Major League Baseball began investigating allegations that Pete Rose was gambling on baseball, a bookie named Ron Peters testified he’d stopped taking Rose’s bets three years earlier because the all-time hits king refused to pay him $34,000 he was owed.

Not only was Rose a liar and a tax cheat, it appeared that he also was the kind of lowlife who would stiff a bet.
But with a new book to sell and a deadline to get on the Hall of Fame ballot, Rose finally has admitted he lied all alongwhen he said he never broke baseball’s cardinal rule.

Now he’s supposed to get his proverbial second chance, be absolved of all his sins and earn reinstatement in time for the Baseball Writers Association of America to finally vote him into Cooperstown.

“You can’t keep a guy from making a living,” Rose told the Associated Press in 1999. “It’s not the American way.”

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Jackson, Weaver backers buoyed: Hopeful ban may be lifted for pair of 1919 Black Sox

Chicago Tribune
By Michael Hirsley

Now that the truth about Pete Rose’s betting on baseball is coming out, does a Rose by any other name smell as sweet?

If Rose gets past his past, can “Shoeless” Joe Jackson have his ban from baseball lifted posthumously?

Author Eliot Asinof says Rose’s high-profile case has eased the climate on bans and that Rose, Jackson and Buck Weaver, Jackson’s 1919 White Sox teammate, “should all definitely be reinstated into baseball.”

Asinof’s book “Eight Men Out” chronicles the Black Sox Scandal in which Jackson and seven teammates allegedly conspired to fix the 1919 World Series they lost.

Ray Allen, co-founder of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Historical Society, is encouraged by the prospect of Rose applying for reinstatement and initiating “a process with Major League Baseball that will at least create guidelines and a forum for us.”

The society has been seeking to have Jackson’s case revisited for more than two decades.

Chicago attorney Louis Hegeman, who drafted a petition to Commissioner Bud Selig on behalf of Jackson’s advocates, is less optimistic about a trickle-down from Rose’s case to Jackson’s.

“If baseball does anything for Pete Rose, it will be out of a calculated weighing of what they think the public reaction will be,” Hegeman said.

Jackson died in 1951 without complaining publicly about his punishment.

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Marge Follett, ‘Black Sox’ niece, dies at 89

By M.K. Guetersloh
Pontiac bureau chief – An article from The Pantagraph – Bloomington-Normal, Illinois

PONTIAC — Marjorie Follett has died, but her life’s work trying to clear her uncle of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal will go on, according to fellow supporters of the cause.
Follett, 89, of Pontiac died early Thursday morning at OSF Saint James-John W. Albrecht Medical Center.

“The torch has been passed. We are saddened by her death, but the campaign continues,” Dr. David Fletcher of Champaign said. Fletcher had been working with her on trying to clear George “Buck” Weaver, who was banned from baseball after the “Black Sox” scandal.

Earlier this summer, Follett and her cousin Pat Anderson attended the All-Star Game at U.S Cellular Field in Chicago, or the new Comisky Park, to lobby for their uncle.

She was optimistic that her 30-year effort to reverse the ban would pay off because Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig was looking into reinstating former Cincinnati Reds Manager Pete Rose.

Selig appointed Chicago sports historian Jerome Holtzman to investigate the Weaver case a few years ago, but no decision has been made.

Fletcher said Follett was instrumental in helping launch the ClearBuck.com campaign during the 2003 All-Star Game in Chicago.

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