What’s your point? Are you suggesting Ty Cobb was caught betting on baseball while he played or managed....on his own team none the less?
http://www.si.com/vault/1989/06/12/120042/the-cobb-gambling-scandal
“In 1926 retired pitcher Dutch Leonard told American League
president Ban Johnson that near the end of the 1919 season, Leonard
and Tiger teammate Cobb, along with Tris Speaker and Smokey Joe Wood
of the Indians, had met beneath the stands in Detroit and reached an
understanding that the Indians, who had clinched second place behind
the White Sox, would lose to the Tigers the next day so that Detroit
could finish third and claim a share of World Series money. Leonard
said that to profit on the arrangement Cobb planned to bet $2,000 on
the game, Leonard $1,500 and Speaker and Wood $1,000 each. In the
end, Cleveland did lose, 9-5, but Cobb didn’t get his money down in
time, and only a small portion of the others’ money was wagered.
Leonard was said to harbor grudges against both Cobb and Speaker
— Cobb, the Tigers’ player-manager, had released him in 1926, and
Speaker, the Indians’ player-manager, had refused to pick him up —
but he did possess two incriminating letters from Cobb and Wood. In
his letter Wood had written, ‘’If we ever have another chance like
this we will know enough to try to get ((our bets)) down early.’’
Cobb had written, ‘’Wood and myself are considerably disappointed in
our business proposition.’’
The public didn’t get wind of Leonard’s accusations until Cobb and
Speaker both retired unexpectedly after the ‘26 season. Johnson had
allowed them to resign rather than make the affair public. But he
gave Leonard’s letters to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who
crossed Johnson by revealing them to the press.”
What’s amazing is that MLB had two guys called Dutch Leonard. One a right handed pitcher, the Tiger, who has the lowest modern ERA ever at .96 with 224 innings in 1914 and a right handed Knuckleball pitcher who pitched 20 years from 1933-1953.
Freegards
Wow, never heard about this one before. But whether Cobb bet on games we’ll never really know for sure. And if it can be proven that he did, he should be removed from the Hall. If this is true, I don’t know why Landis wouldn’t have banned Cobb for life too. Shoeless Joe Jackson was just as good a player and probably a little better hitter than Cobb was at the time he was banned for life in the 1919 Black Sox scandal. But one thing is for sure, we definitely know Rose bet on games he was involved in. As Rose once said “I bet on my team every night, not just four days a week, I bet on them every night. I was wrong”