After a century I’m prepared to accept
a small share of the responsibility
for what has become known as the Black Sox Scandal
But not for nonpayment of promised bonuses
or for being cheap with my team’s payroll,
or any other examples of my supposed miserliness;
all those things written long afterward
were concocted to fit a certain narrative
and didn’t bear any relation to the facts
No, my share of the blame came
from a decade-and-a-half earlier:
when Hart accused Taylor of throwing the 1903 city series,
I proclaimed loudly that he had made the charges
out of embarrassment at losing to the upstart league,
and I even wanted the Commission’s report
to censure Hart for making the charges
From this distance I can see Hart was right,
and if baseball had made an example of Taylor
it may very well have prevented the whole mess*
THE POETRY OF THE GAME