Author, Ian Kahanowitz, talks about his new book, "Baseball Gods in Scandal" . You'll love the interesting stories from the Dead Ball Era with legends like Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker

Author, Ian Kahanowitz, talks about his new book, "Baseball Gods
in Scandal" .  


On September 25, 1919, a seemingly meaningless game was played
between the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians, a game that
should have faded to a tiny line item on MLB’s historical ledger.


But Herbert "Dutch" Leonard had other ideas, and nearly seven
years later the at-times brilliant and always irratic left-hand
pitcher presented letters written by Ty Cobb and Smoky Joe Wood
to baseball's powers that be, implicating the Baseball Gods in
the fixing of and wagering on that game. Leonard's actions set
off a chain of accusations, denials, resignations, player
transactions, and a power struggle at the top of baseball’s power
hierarchy that would change the game forever.


Baseball Gods in Scandal is three stories in
one, and author Ian Kahanowitz tells them all with the art of a
storyteller and the precision of an historian:


The pervasiveness of gambling and crooked dealings in the
early days of baseball, all the way through to the Black Sox
Scandal

The relationship between the affair’s complex
protagonists—Cobb, Tris Speaker, Smoky Joe Wood, and Dutch
Leonard—with detailed profiles and ample color from baseball’s
rough-and-tumble Dead Ball Era

The epic battle for control of the game between the long-time
Czar of Baseball, Ban Johnson, and the game’s new sheriff in
town, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who cared not to share even a
whiff of power with anyone



Capping off Baseball Gods in Scandal is a
never-before-published interview with Smoky Joe Wood (told to
Lawrence Ritter for The Glory of Their Times) in which Wood
recounts a very different version of the affair from his original
testimony.


It is safe to say that had Wood's original testimony been
consistent with his revised account, the fates of Baseball Gods
Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker may have turned out very differently.





https://www.summergamebooks.com/titles/upcoming/baseball-gods-in-scandal-ty-cobb,-tris-speaker,-and-the-dutch-leonard-affair-detail