Judge Landis takes a different approach: the 1917 fixing scandal between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox.(Kenesaw Mountain Landis)

Nine, March, 2007 by Blaisdell, Lowell L.

The early twenty-first century witnessed the arrival of a new major headache for baseball, namely, evidence that some players had turned to steroids as performance enhancers. Nearly a century earlier, baseball had to deal with scandals concerning the likelihood that games were not fairly contested and had prefabricated winners and losers. (1) Both problems share the difficulty of locating convincing evidence of guilt, and they both also offer insight into baseball's ability to regulate itself. (2) Fixing cases also raise the specter of the game's reduced popularity.

Proving a fix is, obviously, difficult without confessions from the participants. However, exceptionally inept play--out of keeping with the players' or the team's normal performance--arouses...

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