Throwback Thursday: The Death Of Buck Weaver, Baseball's Hungry Ghost

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

In Buddhism there is a concept known as hungry ghosts. These are disquieted, resentful spirits who exited life with such deeply unmet needs that they cannot move on to the next level of existence. In a sense, these are ghosts who haunt themselves. If there has been a theme to this offseason's series of Vice Throwback baseball pieces—from Sam Crane, the clumsy shortstop and all-too-agile murderer to Monte Irvin and his bigotry-delayed arrival in the major leagues to Curt Flood and his doomed fight for professional self-determination—it's that these hungry ghosts exist whether you believe in an afterlife or not. Their lives became monumental works of art which serve as powerful reminders of how easily all our best efforts can go unrewarded. We are, all of us, always one bitterness away from becoming hungry ghosts.

This week in 1956, Buck Weaver, former standout shortstop and third baseman for the Chicago White Sox, was found dead on the street in Chicago, a massive heart attack having brought to an end both his life and the decades-long quest that came to define it—his pursuit of reinstatement after the ambiguous role he played in the selling-out of the 1919 World Series resulted in his lifetime expulsion from baseball. "I never threw a ballgame in my life," he said again and again during his 36 years out of the game. "All I knew was win." He is the ultimate hungry ghost. Nearly 100 years after the decisions that commenced his undergoing, in the words of his teammate Ray Schalk, "the torments of hell," you can still hear him screaming.

By his own testimony, Weaver first heard of the World Series fix when he was approached by pitcher Eddie Cicotte in August, 1919. He scoffed, thinking that it wasn't even possible. Imagine his amazement, then, when he soon found himself in two key meetings with the gamblers organizing the conspiracy. Attending was not the same as signing up: Weaver hit .324 in the eight-game series and didn't make a single error. He always loudly proclaimed his innocence, demanding (but not getting) a separate trial from the seven other accused players. He insisted he never took a dime, and there is no evidence to contradict him.

Like all the players, Weaver was acquitted in a legal proceeding that was in some ways as cooked as the Series it was investigating. But being acquitted didn't earn Weaver points with baseball's new commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The judge banned all eight of the them, providing a rationale for Weaver's excommunication along the way:

[N]o 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 his club about it will ever play professional baseball.

Is guilty knowledge the same as guilt? Legally, it can be: If you know a crime is to be committed and do not report it, you could be an accessory before the fact. Weaver's reply to this argument was that he did not have anything like guilty knowledge. He had heard vague discussions which provided little clarity about who was actually participating. A single speculative conversation initiated by Cicotte hardly rose to the level of conspiracy. The subsequent meetings didn't involve explicit commitments by anyone. "The only doubt in my mind," Weaver said years later, "was whether I should keep quiet about it or tell [White Sox owner Charles] Comiskey. I was not certain just what men, if any, had received propositions or whether they had accepted."

This sounds like a finely parsed excuse, a bit of Clintonesque "it depends what the meaning of is is" rationalizing. After all, Weaver was there in the room with the organizers of the fix. Yet, all you have to do is look at Shoeless Joe Jackson to see there was a real basis for Weaver's uncertainty. He was not at the meetings Weaver attended, but his teammates, knowing his participation was essential, told the gamblers he was in. He hit .375 with the only home run of the Series, did not make an error, and said he played to win. He was definitely passed $5,000 by pitcher Lefty Williams, but it's not clear when he received the money—at different times he testified that he received it following Game 4 or after the Series had ended altogether—or that he had had any expectation of receiving it.

Jackson also tried to tell Comiskey what he knew. Whereas the guilt of other participants, including Cicotte, Williams, shortstop Swede Risberg, and first baseman Chick Gandil (the fix's originator and a kind of Second City Hal Chase), is clear, the ambiguous position of Jackson does add poignancy to Weaver's ambivalence about his own knowledge or lack thereof. "Landis wanted me to tell him something that I didn't know," he told the novelist James T. Farrell toward the end of his life. "I didn't have any evidence."

George Weaver was a good player, but a weird one. A jugheaded guy with big ears and a wide grin, he reached the big leagues at 21, an escapee from western Pennsylvania mining country who was well aware of his good fortune. At first it seemed he would be headed back quickly. He hit only .224 his first year, drew just nine walks in 147 games, and made an astonishing 71 errors at short (even in that era of small gloves and dented baseballs, that was a high total). He took up switch-hitting, slowly tamed the errors before moving to third, and ultimately became a solid hitter and by reputation an excellent defender. Over the last four years of his career he hit .305/.336/.388. Some of that high average is an illusion created by the arrival of the lively ball in 1920 (Weaver hit .331 that year), but there was also legitimate improvement. Weaver hit third in the Sox' World Series lineup, right ahead of Jackson.

He never did learn to take a walk, though; his theory of hitting was that if you go down in the count 0-2 you should swing at the inevitable waste pitch because that's not something the pitcher and fielders will expect. The insight is psychologically astute, but it pretty much prohibits working the kind of deep counts that lead to receiving ball four. There just haven't been many players with his profile; he was Alfredo Griffin with a higher batting average or Shawon Dunston with better defense.

No one ever said Weaver was less than a wholehearted gamer, and various actors in the fix later made statements intended to exculpate him. Landis always treated him in a friendly way, hearing out his petitions for reinstatement, but he also always denied them. Although this has incensed Weaver partisans ever since (the excellent writers Farrell and Nelson Algren among them), not to mention fans of fairness and proportionality, in retrospect it is clear why Landis made the decision he did, fair or not.

On one level, there was nothing special or unique about the Eight Men Out. Game-fixing had been a problem in baseball going back to the Civil War. Baseball's owners and operators had failed to confront it with anything like consistency because to do so seemed to cut against their self-interest. Acknowledging that games weren't on the level might hurt attendance in more ways than one—fans might stay home because they perceived the contests as inauthentic or because curing the game of cheaters would require the loss of crowd-drawing but corrupt stars.

New York Highlanders first baseman Hal Chase was the most prominent of these, a well-known cheat who was nonetheless the main attraction for what was then a struggling team trying to establish a foothold in New York Giants territory. In definitively removing the Black Sox, Landis stigmatized game-throwing. In eliminating Weaver, he took a further, likely necessary step. As Gene Carney wrote in Burying the Black Sox, Landis "raised having 'guilty knowledge' of fixes to the level of fixing itself." The idea was that a conspiracy will have a difficult time getting off the ground if it's too dangerous even to talk about, and it's not wrong.

It's impossible to imagine anyone considering the Black Sox for longer than a nanosecond and not coming away with strong feelings about Buck Weaver. He could be a martyr, his career dying for baseball's earlier sin of tolerating gambling and game-fixing, or perhaps his tragedy was being caught in what one writer called "a moral dilemma," that of whether or not to "squeal" on his ostensible friends. "I couldn't bring myself to tell on them even had I known for certain," he said. "I decided to keep quiet and play my best." Weaver need not have worried; informed of the fix at several turns, Comiskey did everything but put his hands over his years and shout, "La la la I can't hear you!" The tragic truth was, Weaver was doomed from the moment he agreed to hear what the gamblers had to say.

Algren remembered him as an especially pathetic figure:

Don't bring up Buck Weaver
Or how he looked that last time you saw him
Begging a reporter six months out of high school
To clear his name so he could play again
"I'll play for nothing, tell 'em,
Just one season, tell 'em!"

H.L. Mencken wrote that injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. Buck Weaver wasn't guilty, but he wasn't innocent. Whether you see what he received as justice or not depends on if you consider a sport's integrity so worthy a goal as to be worth depriving a man of his livelihood merely for his failure to speak out. People are still arguing about this.

Weaver has been dead exactly 60 years now, but he still walks West 71st Street on the South Side of Chicago, seconds from his heart locking up on him, forever on the verge of not being saved from a series of poor decisions he made when he was just 29, back in the autumn of 1919. That autumn, too, still survives; he carries it with him like mist. Observe his staggering steps and mind your own path: One day you may find yourself falling in beside him, always moments from a forgiveness that will never arrive.