1919: After 50 years of baseball,
Cincinnati wins a
Tainted World title

SCOTT MacGREGOR
The Cincinnati Enquirer

To the rest of the baseball world, they are footnotes.

To Cincinnati, the Reds of 1919 were its first champions.

History has frowned on the 1919 World Series with the disdain of an entire nation and the looking glass of curiosity. After all, the Black Sox scandal -- in which eight members of the heavily-favored Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the Series -- nearly ruined baseball and remains a cultural phenomenon to this day.

But lost in all the well-told stories of the fix is the fact that a team of underdogs provided Cincinnati its first professional baseball championship, beating the Sox five games to three in a best-of-nine series.

"We could have beat them no matter what the circumstances," Reds great and 1919 star Edd Roush later claimed. "The 1919 Cincinnati Reds were better."

That argument seemed laughable in 1919 and dubious today. But we'll never know.

Chicago's Shano Collins gets the first hit of the 1919 World Series off Cincinnati's Dutch Ruether at Redland Field. (Enquirer file)

Inauspicious beginnings

What we do know is that whether they had won or lost the Series, the '19 Reds would still have been the best team Cincinnati had produced since Harry Wright started the first professional baseball club in 1869. The 1919 team's .686 winning percentage (96-44) still stands as the best in club history -- even better than 1975's .667 mark -- and the club's star of the age, center fielder Roush, remains one of the brightest in the Reds' storied history.

In the 35 seasons previous to 1919, the Reds had gone through 20 managers, had never captured a pennant and had finished second only twice. Most years, the city that gave birth to professional baseball resided in the National League's second division.

Things were changing, however, as the century's second decade came to a close. Under manager Christy Mathewson, the retired New York Giants pitching great, the Reds showed improvement in 1917 and '18, finishing third in '18. But expectations were low for the 1919 club -- despite being near-broke, club president Garry Herrmann traded for first baseman Jake Daubert (one of baseball's most consistent hitters, who had hit .308 in 1918) to give third baseman Heinie Groh help in the infield.

Things would get worse before they got better, especially when Mathewson, who had shipped out to France for World War I in the fall of 1918, didn't respond to several telegrams from Herrmann and was thought to be missing.

As it turned out, Mathewson was in a hospital recovering from a gas attack that eventually caused his death in 1925. Herrmann instead hired ex-Phillies manager Pat Moran, a hard-drinking Massachusetts Irishman and former major-league catcher, who had managed the Phillies to a pennant in 1915.

There were still problems, though. As usual, Roush, one of the National League's best center fielders, was holding out in a contract dispute, but so were teammates Lee Magee -- who would leave -- and pitcher Jimmy Ring. The book Cincinnati Reds Scrapbook by Bob Rathgeber notes that others, like Rube Bressler, were just returning from World War I.

The team headed to spring training in Texas with only 13 players, none of them a shortstop. And when the Reds got to Texas, two weeks of rain scuttled most practices and sent the team north with precious little time for the club's many new players to jell.

Moran had the team practice in vacant lots, a cow pasture, railroad yards and a local cemetery because the fields were so flooded. There was no infield practice and little batting practice. Workouts basically consisted of running and throwing.

One morning, outfielder Sherry Magee got on the hotel telephone at 5 a.m. and proclaimed to his teammates, "Get up, you louts. Moran is taking us out in the boats this morning."

Reds Manager Pat Moran was featured on the cover of the 1919 World Series program. (Enquirer file)

Fast start

What a surprise it must have been, then, when Cincinnati won its first seven games and found itself leading the National League pack out of the gate. Roush had signed his new contract before the season began and was on his way to leading the National League with a .321 batting average. Second baseman Morrie Rath -- who hadn't played in the majors in six years -- was playing above expectations, and the pitching was stellar.

On May 11, veteran pitcher Hod Eller -- whose "shine ball" (he doctored the ball with some kind of foreign substance, perhaps talcum) would go on to help him win 20 games -- threw a no-hitter against the Cardinals. Suddenly, the city that hadn't had a first-place club since joining the National League as a charter member in 1876 was the hottest place in baseball.

It was no fluke or one-week wonder, though Cincinnati did trail the Giants by five games entering June. But the Reds were for real, and went on to prove it when they beat the Giants four times in a three-day, six-game series in August in New York and took command of the race.

The Reds went on to win the pennant by a comfortable nine games over the mighty Giants -- who, in a strange foreshadowing, slumped when manager John McGraw dumped stars Hal Chase and Heinie Zimmerman after he suspected they'd been throwing games.

The players

Perhaps the biggest secret of the Reds' success was the career years unexpectedly turned in by their dominant pitching staff.

Left-hander Slim Sallee went 21-7 with a 2.06 ERA -- though he only struck out 24 in 227 2/3 innings -- and would never win more than six games in a season again. Eller, a right-hander, went 20-9 with a 2.39 ERA but won only 15 games the next two years before rule changes designed to bolster offense outlawed his shine ball and made him ineffective.

Left-hander Dutch Ruether went 19-6 with a 1.82 ERA in just his third of 11 big-league seasons, but won that many games only once more. Right-hander Ray Fisher was 14-5 with a 2.17 ERA in his second-to-last season.

Pitching carried this club, as it did most teams in an era when home runs were rare. The offense was effective but approached only the pedestrian -- perhaps the biggest reason the White Sox were favored so heavily in the World Series.

Groh hit .310 and drove in 63 runs and Roush had a stellar season as usual, winning his second batting title in three years by hitting .321 with 79 RBI. Hard-hitting Daubert hit only .276 -- down 42 points from the previous year and the third-worst season of his 15-year career -- but added punch the Reds hadn't had the season before.

Rath hit credibly at .264 and shortstop Larry Kopf, who had been with the club since 1916, hit .270 and drove in 58 runs. Outfielder Greasy Neale, who would be the star of the World Series, hit .242 with 54 RBI.

Reds statistics
Player	r	hr	rbi	sb	avg.
Roush	73	3	71	20	.321
Allen	7	0	5	0	.320
Groh	79	5	63	21	.310
Daubert	79	2	44	11	.276
Wingo	30	0	27	4	.273
Kopf	51	0	58	18	.270
Rath	77	1	29	17	.264
Cueto	10	0	4	5	.250
Duncan	9	2	17	2	.244
Neale	57	1	54	28	.242
Schreiber	5	0	4	0	.224
Rariden	16	1	24	4	.216
Magee	11	0	21	4	.215
Totals	577	19	421	143	.263
Pitcher	w	l	so	bb	era
Reuther	19	6	78	83	1.81
Sallee	21	7	24	20	2.05
Fisher	14	5	41	38	2.17
Ring	10	9	61	51	2.26
Eller	19	9	137	50	2.39
Luque	10	3	40	36	2.63
Bressler	2	4	13	8	3.43
Totals	96	44	407	298	2.23

The World Series

Maybe Roush was right. Maybe the Reds were a better club than the White Sox; their regular season record was eight games better than Chicago's. But that mattered little. The Sox, who had won the 1917 World Series over the Giants with essentially the same lineup, were a powerhouse, and were expected to romp all over the upstarts from Cincinnati.

The Reds may have had Roush, but the Sox had many more established stars, like Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose .351 average that season bettered Roush by 30 points. Writers of the time said the 26-year-old Roush was the only Red who could have started for Chicago.

Eventually, what mattered most were the rumors flying before the Series began that a fix was in -- especially when gamblers started betting huge sums of money on the underdog Reds. But the city of Cincinnati didn't care about odds or predictions or rumors. All these loyal fans cared about was that their team was finally in a World Series for the first time. They jammed hotels and trains, newspapers printed extra editions and revelers partied up and down the riverfront. The mayor had to ban cars on some downtown streets so streetcars could operate to carry fans to the games.

Demand for tickets was so great for the first two games, the Reds had to build temporary bleachers behind the left field wall at Redland Field, providing an odd backdrop of fans that were just feet from the field, a sight seen only once before. Downtown, places like the Sinton Hotel set up bleachers in the lobby and charged fans 50 cents to follow the action on scoreboards.

And the Reds didn't disappoint. They trounced the mighty Sox in Game 1 at Redland 9-1 with Ruether pitching a complete game and adding three hits, including two doubles. They then won 4-2 in Game 2, with Sallee going the distance for the win and Kopf's two-run triple in the fourth capping a three-run rally.

At the time, it may have appeared to many the Reds were clearly the better team, especially by roughing up Chicago's two best pitchers, Eddie Cicotte in Game 1 and Lefty Williams in Game 2. But history later proved that both pitchers were part of the eight Sox involved in the fix.

Games 3, 4 and 5 were played in Chicago, with the Reds winning two -- Game 4 behind Ring's complete game and Neale's RBI double, and Game 5 thanks to Roush's two-run triple (two of his seven RBI, though he hit only .214) in a 5-0 victory. They returned to Cincinnati with a four games-to-one lead and needing just one victory to clinch, but lost in Game 6 and again the following day.

In Game 8, Eller returned to the mound for Cincinnati and threw his second complete game, and a 16-hit barrage from the Reds' bats -- including three from Neale, who hit .357 (10-for-28) in the Series -- lifted them to a 10-5 win to clinch the title.

At long last, the first city of professional baseball was its champion.

"We were better," Roush said as retold in the book "Crosley Field," by John Erardi and Greg Rhodes. "I'll believe that to my dying day."

Soon the details of the fix came to light, and less than a year after the Reds' triumph, it was tainted forever by the guilty admissions of the gamblers and seven of the players who had conspired to throw the Series.

And from that moment, the 1919 Reds slipped into the footnotes.

SOURCES: Cincinnati Reds Scrapbook, by Bob Rathgeber; The Cincinnati Reds: Memories and Memorabilia of the Big Red Machine, by Bruce Chadwick and David M. Spindel; Crosley Field, by Greg Rhodes and John Erardi; The Cincinnati Game, by Lonnie Wheeler and John Baskin.