Ep. 001 - Jim Devlin and the Original Cheat
Written and Narrated by: Wyatt Schroeder
Sound Design by: JohnPaul Beattie
Produced by: Anna Ready
Act I
New York City - Jim Devlin walked into the hotel lobby. His head was spinning as he approached the newspaper stand. He reached into his pocket scrounging for enough cash to buy the day’s paper. If he thumbed to the sports section, he would have seen his name. He was a star pitcher, the talk of every sportswriter and spectator during the 1877 baseball season. He was the rock of the Louisville Grays, a star-studded baseball team that was sure to win the pennant of the newly formed National League.
And yet, he wasn’t sure he could rub enough pennies together to buy the paper. It had been weeks since the Louisville Grays had paid their players. Recently, the owners had informed the team that it would no longer cover travel expenses. Jim was paying for today’s paper and for tonight’s lodging. The debt was racking up.
The newspaper boy leaned forward. There was something he would rather sell Jim than a paper. There was a bookie upstairs who had an offer for the star pitcher. Baseball was swelling in popularity. Money was flooding the game and turning it into a cottage industry. Gamblers smelled opportunity and cheating pervaded the game.
If Jim wanted to settle his debts and get back at those corporate owners, all he had to do was say ‘yes.’ All Jim Devlin had to do was agree to throw a game and betray his team . . . If he wanted money, all he had to do was cheat.
A month later, back in Louisville: The vice president of the Louisville Grays, Charles Chase, sat down to eat breakfast at the hotel where he lived.
As Charles Chase ate, he was tapped on the shoulder. He wiped his mouth as a telegram was handed to him. It was from an anonymous sender, someone from Hoboken. The New Jersey town was of ill-repute; it specialized in gambling and was home to numerous baseball betting pools. If there was anyone who knew of a fix, they lived in New Jersey.
The note came with a clear warning. “Watch your men.”
Chase wanted to dismiss the anonymous note and the swirling rumors as Jersey bluster. But it unsettled him when the note’s prediction came true: the Grays lost the next day to Hartford. In the game the team made countless errors on the field, including some notable slips by his star player, Jim Devlin.
Now, time travel with me and see if you can catch the cheat.
It’s August 20th, 1877. It’s a game between the Louisville Grays and the Hartford Dark Blues at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, New York.
Jim Devlin is on the mound, sweating in the flannel uniform. (yes, they played summer games in flannel back then.) He glances at the runner on first base, daring him to stray from the bag. A base ball had more bounce then than the one you know today. Underhanded, he tosses a pitch toward home plate. Smack. The ball bounces to the second baseman. It’s fielded cleanly and tossed to the shortstop waiting on second base. The shortstop, Bill Craver, attempts to catch the ball, but it slicks away from him. Both runners are safe. Two men are on. A few pitches later a runner scores. Devlin gives up 5 runs that day. And then gives up 7 runs the next day.
Craver made an error. He didn’t catch a ball. Is that a sin? Ballplayers didn’t even use a glove in 1877. That’s right, they were catching with their bare hands. There were many errors. But John Haldeman, a journalist and the son of the owner of the Grays, saw something else, he saw something more insidious. “I had followed the club so closely, and was so well acquainted with its inner workings, what it could and what it could not accomplish, that I knew that 'funny business' had been going on."
Another cable reached Charles Chase at his hotel, predicting that the Grays would lose the second game of the next series. They did. It was no longer an accident. The sender was not prescient, Chase concluded; his team was taking money to lose games. And his star pitcher, the greatest pitcher in the game, Jim Devlin, might be at the center of it.
Act II
I was the right age to watch the home run chase of 1998. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were goliaths on the screen for my 11-year old eyes. My love of baseball was solidified with each towering home run. At that age players are larger than life. And so it cut deeply when I learned a new word . . . steroids. The 1998 home run chase had been a lie. I was devastated. I had known something as true and now it was false.
If I was an 11 year-old at the end of the 1800s, I don’t think I would have worn such rose-colored glasses. Gambling was a key part of sports culture and a thriving engine of the American economy. As a magazine said at the time, “there is no sport now in vogue in which so much fraud prevails as in baseball. Any professional baseball club will throw a game if there is money.”
In 1877, baseball was only a few decades old. It had swelled in popularity after the Civil War. The game began to professionalize once boosters realized they could make money off it. Suddenly, the once-ragtag teams had owners and uniforms and a dedicated roster of players. Fans started attending games in droves, each with a pocketful of cash. The gamblers weren’t far behind.
By the 1870s, it became clear that an organization was needed to keep the whole game in line. The National Association was founded in 1871 and quickly gained a reputation as a playground for racketeers and gamblers. It’s a story that’s re-told each generation; if we create a new industry it will fly toward corruption like moth to a flame until regulation clips its wings.
The Association didn’t last long. Grambling won and shuttered the National Association within a few years. And in its wake a new league was formed, a coalition of teams dedicated to purity and clean play. They called it the National League. Almost 150 years later, it’s the same league that you see today.
In the 1870’s, the league was still a grand experiment. It was a struggle over power. Who controlled the game? The National League? The team owners? The gamblers? Or the star players, who were quickly becoming household names? This was the fray that Jim Devlin walked into: man versus temptation; man versus institution; man versus himself.
Jim Devlin was born in 1849 in Philadelphia. There are many things we don’t know about Jim’s upbringing, but we do know that he was born into relative poverty. His education was basic, and it left him with an unsophisticated air for the rest of his life. He was approachable and could charm anyone in the room. He was an antebellum man’s man, well-liked by everyone that met him.
By his 24th birthday, Jim’s strong arm and keen eye attracted the attention of those early teams. In 1873, he played his first season of professional baseball, both for the Philadelphia White Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings. That’s right, in 1873, there were two different teams with the same name.
For the first two seasons with the Chicago White Stockings Jim was a productive hitter and a notable first baseman. But there was something about that arm. It gave the White Stockings an idea. They shoved Jim onto the pitcher’s mound in 1875. It was a revelation. He gave up less than two runs a game in his first season on the rubber. He would never go back to first base.
The next year, 1876, was Jim’s announcement to the country. He started playing for the Grays, the newly formed team out of Louisville. The coach handed Jim the ball on the first inning of the first game and he didn’t hand it back until the end of the season. The Grays played 69 games that year. And Jim pitched 66 complete games. You heard me. Jim pitched 622 innings. He only missed a few innings all year. There is no modern equivalent; nothing comes close. In today’s game, pitching 200 innings is a major feat for a pitcher. Jim did 3x that in his first full year as a pitcher.
And he wasn’t just prolific. He was successful. He held opposing teams to an average of 1.5 runs per game. If Jim held the ball, you didn’t score. It was biblical truth. In that season, he won 30 games and led the league in strikeouts. According to a modern stat called “wins above replacement”, Jim had the 3rd greatest season of all-time.
How could he be so effective? Any poor kid knows that the way off the block comes with a mix of grit and ingenuity. Jim had the perseverance of a Philly scenester. He just needed that creative spark. The inspiration came in the way Jim gripped the ball. Some historians claim that Jim Devlin invented “the sinker”, a deceptive fastball that is still a staple of the pitcher’s arsenal.
Jim Devlin learned that if you apply a certain pressure to the ball while you’re throwing a fastball, that it would sink at the last moment. It could drop 6 to 9 inches and fool the batter. If they did hit it, the batter would likely hit the top of the ball, spinning the ball into the infield dirt and causing a groundball. If a pitcher allows only ground balls for 600 innings a year, then he is destined for a Hall of Fame career. That was Jim Devlin. Deceiving batters, nine innings at a time.
Picture baseball in the 1870’s: the fielders behind you didn’t have any gloves on their hands. Also, they are playing in a literal field, without the curated and even lawns that you see today at the ballpark. It was difficult to field cleanly. Every ball in play was a gamble of bounces. If the pitcher forced the batter into weak contact between bat and ball, then the gloves wouldn’t be needed. The ball would lazily bounce on the ground and quickly find its way into an out.
If you can’t picture what baseball would have been like 140 years ago, search for a modern trend called, “vintage base ball.” There are dozens of teams around the country today that play using the same rules and customs that Jim Devlin would have used. Every year they gather at a farm in Gettysburg, PA for a national vintage base ball tournament. That farm is owned by my family. Come and say hi next July.
Jim was finally secure in his life; he had found a pathway out of poverty. A ball in his hand and money in his pocket. Prior to the 1876 season, Jim Devlin was offered a fantastical salary of $2,000 a year. The average Pennsylvania farmer at that time was earning $350 a year. The average non-farmer labor was earning a buck-fifty each day of work. $2,000 had to be more money than Jim had ever seen.
It was short-lived.
Jim was quickly reminded that he was a cog in a wheel. The Louisville Grays didn’t make money in their first year as a club; owning a baseball team wasn’t big business yet. Halfway through the season, the word came down from the top: the Louisville Grays would stop paying their players to cut costs. And each player would be responsible for buying their own uniform. Humiliated, Jim tried to get a trade to St. Louis. But the new rules of the National League said that he was the property of the Grays, without the right to change employers. He was stuck. The specter of poverty creeped around the corner.
Soon after losing his salary, Jim received a telegram from his teammate, George Bechet. “We can make $500 if you lose the game today.” That’s more money than a farmer would make in a year. All Jim had to do was deliberately lose a game. Just one game; that’s all. Beyond temptation, Jim scrawled his response, “I want you to understand that I am not that sort of a man. I play ball for the interest of those that hire me.” Jim sided with the company, loyal to the stitched team name across the uniform he now had to purchase for himself.
It was a near-miss. George Bechet’s speculation was found out by the team owner and he was promptly suspended. He never played another game.
The 1877 season started with a lot of optimism for the Louisville Grays. They had the game’s best pitcher in Jim Devlin. They had the game’s first home run king in George Hall. (Nowadays, you need to hit 50 home runs a year to turn eyes. That year, George Hall hit five homers. They were using a different baseball than the one you know today, so hitting five a year was a lot.) The Grays also had a cast of characters like Bill Craver, the team’s captain who was a solid ballplayer with a less-than-solid reputation. Craver brought an intensity and a rough-and-tumble style that defined the team. The Louisville faithful had every reason to think that their Grays would win the National League.
The 1877 season started as planned, the Grays performed well into the summer. And then in July, everything clicked into place. With Jim pitching every single inning, the Grays won ten out of eleven games, vaulting them to the top of the National League. They were blooming into a powerhouse. All they had to do was hold their own through August and the pennant would be theirs.
In stories like this, it’s hard not to listen to it with a holier-than-thou attitude. I think we simplify the corrupting force of temptation. We reduce it to one scene, and say, “if only he had been stronger.” There isn’t one moment. Temptation isn’t a rushing tidal wave, it’s a slow trickle on rock. If we don’t intervene, water will erode rock. It wears us all down.
For a while Jim held the water at bay. He turned down George Bechet last season. Somewhere in 1876, he was approached by a Brooklyn bookie named McCloud. If Jim would throw games, then McCloud and his partner would ensure that Jim more than made up for his lost salary. The team wasn’t showing him any money or integrity, why did he owe the Grays anything?
For a second time, though, Jim held his values upright and turned down the cash.
By the summer of the 1877 season, a year later, the Grays owed Jim $500 in expenses. And they were not paying. Jim had been on the mound for every inning. And he was also hitting well. He was performing for his team and seeing next to nothing for it. I can’t imagine how frustrating it was. The labor rights movement was still a generation away. Jim had no rights, only the ball in his fingers. If he wanted to avoid the poverty of his youth, then he had to take matters into his own hands.
On a road trip through New York City, Jim wandered through his hotel, likely fuming that the Grays weren’t paying his travel expenses. He walked up to the newsstand and struck up a conversation with the operator. The operator was happy to offer Jim a newspaper that raved about baseball’s finest pitcher, but he had something else he would rather sell Jim. The newspaper operator asked if he could introduce Jim to a bookie from Brooklyn.
Jim agreed and was quickly face-to-face with McCloud again. The offer was still on the table. If he illegally threw a game then Jim would see an envelope of cash delivered to his room. Jim rolled the offer around in his head. It was too much. The water had etched away his resolve. He needed the money. He resented the owners for caging him. He felt betrayed by the very game that he loved. Being the country’s best pitcher had morphed into its own kind of hell.
He agreed. McCloud should bet against the Grays. They were going to lose their next game. Jim Devlin would make sure of it.
With 20 games to go in the season, the Grays were on top of the National League. The odds makers in New Jersey saw only sunny days ahead for Devlin and the boys. They began a road trip to the East Coast playing in the lucrative locations of New York and Boston, prime real estate for gamblers and swindlers. Word spread that Devlin and a few other Grays were willing to throw games in exchange for cash.
The Grays started losing. On the eight-game road trip, they didn’t win a single game. Devlin took the mound for every inning. They fell out of first place, plummeting to seven games behind the new league leader.
Sure, losing is a part of the sport. Even the great teams lose. But the rumor mills out of Hoboken were loud. A stink wafted in the air. No one in New Jersey is quiet about making a winning. John Halderman took to the Louisville Courier-Journal to accuse the team of cheating. This was a salacious report. Halderman wasn’t just a journalist, he was also the son of the owner of the Grays. The word was out.
Charles Chase, the vice president of the Grays, received two anonymous telegrams telling him to “watch his men.” The losing kept coming and Chase was spurred into action. He contacted one of the players, Al Nichols, who was already a suspected cheat. Did Nichols know anything about the team throwing games? Nichols pleaded ignorance. He said that no one on the team was cheating. But he felt the noose closing around his neck, so he confessed to betting on the games. That’s the same crime that Pete Rose would commit 100 years later and would ban him from baseball. At the end of the 1800’s though, betting was a slap on the wrist compared to outright cheating.
Chase demanded that Nichols become his informant, to sniff out any untoward behavior on his team. Nichols begged to be released from the team, instead of spying on his teammates. Chase refused and forced Nichols to share all of his telegrams with him. If there were illegal actions, it would come across the wire.
Two telegrams came to Nichols. Chase read as a bookie out of Brooklyn, a man named P.A. Williams, pleaded with Nichols to contact him. Nichols hadn’t wired to confirm if the fix was still on. The bookie was furious. There was money to be made, why hadn’t Nichols contacted him?
Chase had the evidence he needed.
The season came to a frustrating end. The Grays, the promise of the National League, finished the year in second place, a disappointing seven games behind Boston in the standings. The Grays owners were livid. How could they lose with so much talent?
Chase committed to getting to the bottom of it. And he knew he had to start at the top. If the team was to lose, it likely had to go through their star. Chase confronted Jim Devlin and demanded to know if he had thrown games. Devlin denied it vehemently. He hadn’t thrown a game. He did confess to having a tired arm on the East Coast road trip that saw them lose seven games. That was all.
Chase’s investigation broke through on the very same day from a different source. George Hall, the game’s first home run king, broke. Hall had confessed about the cheating to his wife. She was furious. She brought all the players’ wives together and shared the truth. The wives threatened to tell the Louisville Grays themselves if the players didn’t come clean. Hall read the writing on the wall and told Chase everything he knew.
“Devlin first made me a proposition in Columbus to throw the game in Cincinnati. We went to the telegraph office and sent a dispatch to a man by the name McCloud saying we would lose the game. Never got a cent from Nichols for the games he and I threw.”
Chase had his charge and his suspects. All he needed was a court. He convened the board of directors of the club to make a ruling. One-by-one the players came before the board and told their story. First Al Nichols. Then George Hall. And then Jim Devlin.
Act III
Jim Devlin came clean. The water was now rushing through the once-impenetrable rock. He told the board, “McCloud sent me $100 in a letter and I gave Hall $25 of it, told him McCloud only sent $50. I never had anything to do with Nichols. Received $300 from McCloud in total, for one Cincinnati and two Indianapolis games.”
The picture was becoming clear. At least three players had cheated and betrayed the team. Yet they hadn’t even been honest with each other. Devlin admitted to robbing Hall of his share of the take. Word came down swiftly. Nichols, Hall, Jim Devlin, and fourth-player Bill Craver were expelled from the Louisville Grays.
It was a calamity of the first rank. Yet the players were not deterred by being expelled from the Grays. Expulsion happened with regularity, but you simply packed your bag and found a new team. Jim Devlin told himself that this was an opportunity. He had always wanted to play for St. Louis. Free from the oppressive owners of the Grays, he could earn a decent salary and build on his reputation as the greatest in the game.
But first he had to see how the new National League would handle the scandal.
William Hulbert, the league president, was a friend of Jim’s. Devlin was likely optimistic that Hulbert and the National League would slap him on the wrist and move on to more pressing matters. The Grays had already served up a punishment; the case could be closed. But Hulbert had the reputation of the league and the financial interests of the team owners on his shoulders. The National League was supposed to bring morality to the new sport. This case offered a chance to announce to the country that a new day had dawned, that bookies would no longer have power over baseball.
Hulbert promised to “strike an effective blow.” He called the press corps to his office to great fanfare. He had made his decision. He had to defend the integrity of the game and make an example of his friend.
The four Louisville Grays players were expelled from the National League. They would never again be allowed to play professional baseball. A lifetime ban.
Jim Devlin was mortified. A Hall of Fame career had died a premature death. He wouldn’t play for St. Louis. He wouldn’t play at all.
The three other players complained, but ultimately moved on and took other jobs. The controversy sunk its talons into Devlin’s heart, never to release. The slow bleed of the lifetime ban took its toll on the Philly kid.
Devlin tried to continue his passion and lifeforce. He pitched a few charity games through the years and linked up with a couple of amateur teams. The newspapers report a game with Forest City of Cleveland, a few games with the San Francisco Athletics. But it wasn’t the spotlight. The National League grew in professionalism and in popularity, and quickly new stars rose to prominence. The legend of Devlin and his devilish sinker began to fade out of sight. He was no longer the greatest pitcher of his generation. He was a cheat.
It was too much for Jim to take. He had to pitch. He started medicating with alcohol to endure the days. He took odd jobs before joining the Philadelphia Police Department.
He wrote painful letters to William Hulbert, begging him to be reinstated. Lift the ban, Bill, he pleaded. He would do anything. He couldn’t live without the game. Letter after letter. Tossing them like so many pitches, each missing its mark.
A while after the scandal, Devlin visited Hulbert to plead his case in person. Also at the office was Albert Spalding, the future creator of Spalding sports goods – if you’ve ever been a Dick’s Sports then you’ve seen Spalding gear on the shelves. Spaulding was shocked and appalled to see the mental and physical state of the game’s finest pitcher. The poverty had taken hold of Devlin, the controversy had consumed him in a terrible mania. Spalding recorded the scene. Let’s let him take it from here.
“The outer door opened and a sorry-looking specimen entered. It was midwinter and very cold, but the poor fellow had no overcoat. His dust covered garments were threadbare and seedy. His shoes were worn through with much tramping, while the red flesh showing in places indicated that if stockings were present they afforded not much protection ... He walked straight to the chair where Mr Hulbert sat, and, dropping to his knees at the big man’s feet, lifted his eyes in prayerful entreaty, while his frame shook with the emotion so long restrained ... The man was Devlin, one of the Louisville players. The situation, as he kneeled there in abject humiliation, was beyond the realm of pathos. It was a scene of heartrending tragedy. Devlin was in tears, Hulbert was in tears, and if the mists of a tearful sympathy filled my eyes I have no excuse.”
Hulbert looked at his friend, kneeling on the floor. Jim was willing to debase himself to ask for help. Hulbert pulled $50 from his pocket and handed it to Jim. Hulbert said, "Devlin, that's what I think of you personally; but, damn you, you have sold a game; you are dishonest and this National League will not stand for it." Hulbert promised Jim that he would never be redeemed. He was banned from baseball for life.
Jim had gone from poverty in Philadelphia to the riches of baseball stardom and then back to poverty in Philadelphia. Throwing a baseball was his ticket off the block. And yet the temptation of throwing a game was too much. And it sunk him right back to where he started. He had tasted another life and it overwhelmed him. His alcoholism grew, as he lived on the streets of Philadelphia, an unrecognizable pauper. A shell of his former self.
He continued to write pleading letters to Hulbert until he died of tuberculosis. He was only 33 years old.
Epilogue
That’s it. That’s the story of Jim Devlin and the Original Cheat. The lifetime ban of Devlin and his three Louisville teammates stood as a proud and consequential moment for the National League. It proved that the League could defend the integrity of the game. It makes me wonder what baseball history would have looked like if Hulbert hadn’t expelled Devlin. Would bookies have continued to control the flow of money through the sport? Would the League have even survived? As we see across all sports, the strength of the league is important to the growth of a sport. The National League stands today.
The handling of the Original Baseball Cheat set the stage for how baseball reacted in 1919 when the White Sox threw the World Series in the Black Sox Scandal. Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other players were banned from the game for life.
And yet cheating still happens. You likely saw the headlines, when the Houston Astros were found to be cheating in 2017. Instead of throwing games like the Grays and the Black Sox, they cheated to win. They created an elaborate system to steal signs from the opposing team, allowing them to know what pitch was coming next. And it worked. Thanks to their dishonesty, they won the 2017 World Series.
The Astros were fined $5 million; they forfeited draft picks for the next two years; and the league suspended the manager and the general manager for the entire next season. No players were punished.
Cheating is still a concern, 140 years after Jim Devlin.
He died in obscurity. His name hasn’t carried into the modern-day conversation. Instead of the fame that he seemed destined for, his name carries infamy if it carries anything at all. Jim Devlin and the Louisville Grays of 1877 were the original cheating scandal in professional baseball. 40 years before the Black Sox Scandal. A century before Pete Rose. Before steroids. 140 years before the Houston Astros.
Jim Devlin is buried in North Philly, an easy drive away from our studios at Fort Belfry. We never will know what could have happened, if he could have become one of the all-time great pitchers. He ended his career with an earned run average of 1.90. That’s good enough to be third all-time for pitchers that threw at least 1,000 innings.
Thanks for listening. We’ll see you at the ballpark.