Baseball’s 10 Biggest Scandals

Baseball is both a business and a kid’s game, the latter a testament to every son and daughter who’s tugged at their father’s shirt and asked to play catch in the backyard. But sometimes the business side, and the money that surrounds and pollutes it, takes center stage—and usually not for the most positive of reasons.

Alas, the sport has been touched by scandals of all kinds, with bribery, cheating, drugs, blacklisting, the digging up of dirt and many other forms of drama both on the field and off it. In our opinion, no baseball scandal is worse than the 10 listed below. Let us know if you agree or disagree.

The 1910 Chalmers Car Scandal

The American League’s two biggest stars in 1910 were Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie, and they both entered the season’s final weekend not just in a battle for the league’s batting title but its spoils—in this case, a fancy new Chalmers automobile. Cobb started the weekend six points ahead of Lajoie, and took the Detroit Tigers’ final three games off to protect his lead. Lajoie and his Cleveland Naps, meanwhile, were in St. Louis taking on the woebegone (47-107) Browns—who, like most everyone else in baseball, would rather see him win the title and car as opposed to the highly disliked Cobb. 

In his final two games, a Sunday doubleheader, Lajoie tripled in his first at-bat, then in his second noticed Browns third baseman Red Corriden positioned so far back that he laid down an easy bunt hit. Lajoie expected a Pavlovian response by Corriden to play closer in for his next at-bat, but Corriden assumed the same deep position, again and again, for the rest of the twinbill. Result: Eight hits, seven by bunt, for Lajoie to catapult him ahead of the idle Cobb for the batting title. 

Turns out, Corriden was acting on orders from Browns manager Jack O’Connor to stand back and let Lajoie bunt his way to the title. As an insurance policy, O’Connor enlisted coach Harry Howell to bribe game scorer E.V. Parish with a three-piece suit in an attempt to change a Lajoie sacrifice bunt into a hit. The scandal broke into the public, O’Connor and Howell were kicked out of Baseball, and Harry Chalmers graciously gave both Lajoie and Cobb each a car. Over the next three years, Chalmers autos were given not to the league’s batting champ but, instead, the best player as voted on by sportswriters—laying birth to the Most Valuable Player concept.

George Steinbrenner vs. Dave Winfield

The New York Yankees’ boss, seeking a complement for Reggie Jackson in the early 1980s, found one in Winfield, one of the majors’ biggest all-around talents of his time. But things immediately got off on the wrong foot when Steinbrenner naively misunderstood an escalator clause in Winfield’s contract that raised the value of the 10-year contract from the $16 million Steinbrenner envisioned, to $23 million. Though Winfield all but met expectations with the Yankees, earning eight All-Star roster spots, five outfielding Gold Gloves and numerous top-10 finishes in the MVP vote, a scorned Steinbrenner would take every opportunity to bash him. Most memorably, he derisively called Winfield “Mr. May,” a sarcastic counterpoint to Jackson’s “Mr. October” sobriquet as a way of criticizing Winfield’s inability in the clutch. 

Meanwhile, Winfield’s presence as both a star ballplayer and head of a foundation to help poor children attracted, among others, a young, persistently pesty groupie named Howard Spira. Winfield initially tolerated Spira, but soon realized the man was trouble. Spira was a heavy gambler who spiraled into debt; worse, local mobsters were the ones trying to collect. Desperate, Spira went to Winfield for money, but the star Yankee wanted nothing to do with him anymore. So Spira next called on Steinbrenner, saying he had dirt on Winfield—but wanted $150,000 and a plush residence in exchange. Steinbrenner eventually talked him down to $40,000, which was $40,000 too much for MLB investigators. 

When commissioner Fay Vincent and those investigators discovered the plot, they called Steinbrenner on the carpet. Steinbrenner argued that the money wasn’t so much to get info on Winfield as it was to make the annoying Spira go away. That narrative failed to impress Vincent, who suspended Steinbrenner for three years.

The 1877 Louisville Grays

Gambling has been an issue for Baseball from its ancestral days as a recreation-only sport to the present, with players surrounded by legalized sports betting. But the first major scandal involving gambling took place in the National League’s second season. 

The Louisville Grays of 1877 were cruising along, comfortably leading the six-team circuit by four games on August 13. Then, they won only one of their next 12, knocking themselves out of first place. About the same time, team owner Charles Chase began hearing reports of his players actively receiving and sending telegrams with known gambling interests. Chase eventually called in all of his players and demanded to read all of their telegrams; failure to do so would be an admission of guilt. Only one player refused: Shortstop Bill Craver, previously booted from a team for throwing games. 

Three other members of the Grays bowed to Chase’s pressure tactics and confessed. They included pitcher Jim Devlin, who in 1877 became the first and only major leaguer to throw every inning for his team in one season; outfielder George Hall, one of the game’s premier hitters; and Al Nichols, a utility player who joined the Grays in the middle of the season. All three, along with Craver, were dismissed from the team; shortly afterward, the NL banned them all, never again to play in another major league game.

The Pittsburgh Drug Trials

An illicit drug culture spilling into the 1980s led to First Lady Nancy Reagan, worried that the trend was heading in a mainstream direction, to tell people to “Just say no.” Alas, a whole group of star major leaguers kept saying “yes.” 

Strangely, the middleman that hooked up Dave Parker, Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, Vida Blue and numerous other players with Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse caterer/cocaine distributor Curtis Strong during the early 1980s was Kevin Koch, the first guy to wear the mascot suit of the Pirate Parrot—Pittsburgh’s answer to the Phillie Phanatic. The players’ drug usage provided a logical explanation for their decline during the early 1980s—particularly Parker and Hernandez, who during this time should have seen their careers peak. 

In 1985, the so-called “Pittsburgh Drug Trials” exposed everything to the general public and gave baseball a black eye. Strong received a 12-year sentence while six other drug dealers were given equal or lighter sentences. Eleven players were suspended by commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who later watered down the penalties to fines and community service.

Pete Rose’s Gambling Habits

The signs speak loudly and clearly in baseball clubhouses: “Gambling prohibited. Betting on baseball games is positively forbidden…Violators will be prosecuted.” 

Pete Rose didn’t get the message. Or maybe he did and just didn’t care. As Spring Training began in 1989, the story broke that MLB, under new commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, was investigating the all-time hit king and current Cincinnati Reds manager for betting on his own team. Special investigator Robert Dowd dug up evidence that Rose bet on the Reds from 1985-87, typically plunking down as much as $10,000 per bet. 

Surrounded by reporters on a daily basis at Reds camp, Rose vigorously denied the accusations, and engaged in a season-long legal fight with Giamatti/Dowd. In late August, despite not admitting any wrongdoing, Rose nevertheless accepted a permanent ban from the game. 

The denouement ultimately served no one well. Eight days after the announcement of Rose’s ban, an exhausted Giamatti died of a heart attack. Rose, meanwhile, was declared ineligible for Hall-of-Fame enshrinement, was locked up for five months on income tax evasion, and repeatedly denied reinstatement in baseball—hoping so much for a reversal that he finally confessed while hawking a new book. But the ban remained in place when Rose passed away in 2024.

Biogenesis

As infamous as the titanic stars of the steroid era became—may they have been Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa—they never received a hand slap from MLB because, until 2005, steroids weren’t technically illegal within baseball circles. When laws were finally drawn up prohibiting PED use, the game cleaned up—but a few still dared to take the risk and juice up. Which brings us to the Biogenesis scandal. 

In the winter of 2013, an alternative Miami newspaper uncovered an investigation into Anthony Bosch, a local doctor working out of a strip mall providing steroids to major league players. Within a few weeks, over 10 of his clients were revealed—and the wrath of fury came rightfully down hard on two of those: Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun. 

Just four years earlier, Rodriguez was outed as a life-long steroid user in a new book; the New York Yankees slugger partially confirmed the allegations, stating he only did PEDs while under pressure to perform during his brief but very productive tenure with the Texas Rangers. One would have thought that Rodriguez’s confession should have sobered him up from future steroid use—but just a year later, he hooked up with Bosch and got back on the wagon. As Rodriguez became the central figure in the Biogenesis scandal, both the Yankees and MLB were incensed; the team wanted to nullify the $114 million left on his contract, while MLB looked at suspending him for a whopping 211 games. 

Braun engendered similar anger upon him. Less than two years earlier, the Milwaukee slugger was celebrating a NL MVP award when word came that he tested positive for a PED test. Braun fired back, saying the tester had all but framed him, even insinuating that he did so in an antisemitic fashion against Braun, who was Jewish. But when his name became connected with Biogenesis, Braun had no convenient excuse to fall back on. 

Rodriguez lashed out against the 211-game ban and sued everyone in sight—even his own players’ union—and ultimately had the suspension reduced to 162 games. But the Biogenesis episode crippled his legacy and already-teetering chances of making the Hall of Fame. As for Braun, MLB docked him with a 65-game ban—50 for Biogenesis and 15 as an “a**hole tax” (as punned by sportswriter Jeff Passan) for shamefully slandering the tester in 2011. His popularity evaporated with Brewers fans, many of whom booed him once he returned to the field.

The 2017 Houston Astros

The Astros will regret the day they left pitcher Mike Fiers, who collapsed down the stretch of the 2017 season, off the team’s postseason roster that won the World Series. It took Fiers two years, but after completing a comeback season with the Oakland A’s in 2019 he decided to spill the beans—that the Astros had cheated their way to the world title by using a dugout hall monitor, trash can and massage gun to bang it on to communicate to their batters what type of pitch was coming next. 

Fiers’ claim evolved into an investigation that led to MLB’s earthshaking announcement in mid-January 2020 that he was right. Houston manager A.J. Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow was suspended a year, the team was fined a maximum $5 million and stripped of top draft picks over the next two years. The scandal also led to the firing of three MLB managers: Hinch, Boston’s Alex Cora and New York Mets’ Carlos Beltran, the latter two coaches for the 2017 Astros. Local politicians in Los Angeles, whose Dodgers lost the World Series to the Astros and, a year later, the Red Sox—who engaged in a less extensive form of sign-stealing—demanded that MLB strip those two teams of their trophies and hand them over to the Dodgers. 

The Houston hitters who benefitted from the hi-tech, sign-stealing scheme were spared suspension because they were given immunity to testify in MLB’s investigation. But their punishment would come from fans across the country who would boo, heckle and bang trash cans in jest whenever the Astros came to town. The Astros would be given a one-year reprieve from such harassment because of the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced the 2020 schedule to 60 games played in empty ballparks. But as Ryan Braun (above) discovered, fans have a long memory about these kinds of things—and many of the Astros’ key hitters of 2017, principally All-Stars Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa, would have to deal with the jeering for years. 

Collusion, 1980s

Ten years after the fall of the reserve clause and resulting onset of modern free agency, owners gnashed their teeth over the ultra-accelerated financial gains made by players. Don’t blame the players, lectured commissioner Peter Ueberroth—blame yourselves for caving in to their salary demands. Ueberroth preached that if you didn’t want to lose money on these megadeals, stop making them. 

The owners took Ueberroth’s sermon to heart—and then some. Starting in the 1985-86 offseason, prime free agents suddenly found themselves receiving offers that were no better than what they had been making—and almost always from their incumbent teams, with no others interested. The disturbing trend continued a year later; things got so bad for the players, one of them—future Hall-of-Fame slugger Andre Dawson—simply walked into Chicago Cubs spring camp, handed them a contract, and told them: You fill in the blank on the salary. The Cubs wrote in $500,000—less than half what Dawson was making a year earlier at Montreal—and he went on to win the NL MVP for a team that finished last. 

Players and agents grew quickly suspicious of the owners’ maneuvering, but evidence of actual collusion was hard to come by. After a second offseason of free-agent clampdown by the owners, they did something phenomenally stupid: They created an “information bank” in which they shared salary offers with one another. This would be the smoking gun that, when discovered, represented the brick-sized cherry on top of the smashed sundae that would be their naked attempt at collusion. 

The owners paid dearly for their corrupt suppressing of salaries. A series of legal judgments against them resulted in a whopping $280 million in fines, to be given to those players directly harmed by the collusive tactics. It also led to massive mistrust by the players’ union against MLB; former union boss Marvin Miller spared no slack in excoriating the owners, saying that their shenanigans were “tantamount to fixing, not just games, but entire pennant races.”

Six Decades of Segregation

The players financially impacted by the owners’ collusive tactics above were at least able to continue playing. Such a plight would have been happily accepted by African-American ballplayers during a seemingly eternal stretch of baseball’s growth. 

In the very early years of organized baseball, three African-Americans played in the majors. After the 1884 release of the last of those, the Toledo Blue Stockings’ Moses Fleetwood Walker, segregation became the unwritten rule within baseball—and it would stay that way for the next 62 years. League honchos and owners stiff-armed away accusations of the sport’s apartheid with non-denial denials; Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a perceived champion of justice after rooting out the pervasive rot of gambling within the sport, toed the line when politely questioned by black advocates, stating, “There is no rule, formal or informal, or any understanding—unwritten, subterranean, or sub-anything—against the hiring of Negro players by the teams of organized ball.” 

Denied a chance to play in the majors, black players initially found themselves forming barnstorming teams, living a scattershot existence; by 1920, the first of the organized Negro Leagues was established. Players performed for the love of the game and not much else, as financial and logistical stability proved elusive. But it gave immense talents such as Josh Gibson, Satchell Paige, Oscar Charleston and Buck Leonard—players who would have starred in the far more established (but whites-only) American and National Leagues—the ability to show off their greatness, even if within a parallel, more indigent setting. 

Some tried to crack the gentleman’s agreement. Talented, light-skinned black players passed off as white were occasionally smuggled onto a roster, only for the ruse to quickly get sniffed out. Maverick owner Bill Veeck once claimed he was the top candidate to buy the Philadelphia Phillies in 1943, but when he told owners of his intention to recruit black players, they quickly looked elsewhere. 

It finally took the 1944 death of Landis, the ascension of successor Happy Chandler, and the careful prescience of Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey to finally bludgeon the bigotry. Rickey felt the time was right to sign Jackie Robinson, a remarkably talented and astute Negro Leaguer; when, after one year in the minors, Robinson was called up to the Dodgers, baseball’s other 15 teams ganged up on Rickey and said, “No, you can’t.” But Chandler, the new commissioner, overruled them. If black soldiers were good enough to fight alongside white soldiers in World War II, Chandler opined, then black ballplayers were good enough to play alongside the whites. Robinson shattered the barrier, won over the bulk of his Southern-born teammates, and continued his Hall-of-Fame career at what could now be considered the game’s highest level.

The 1919 Black Sox

The granddaddy of all baseball scandals, the unconscionable scheme by eight (well, seven) members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds remains not only the most vilified and shocking, but also the most potentially destructive. It took the creation of the modern baseball commissioner, Babe Ruth and the new era of power he helped usher in to keep the sport from total collapse. 

Gambling in baseball had always been a problem, as illustrated above with the 1877 Louisville Grays. But the magnitude of the Black Sox Scandal, affecting the game’s pinnacle event at a time when its popularity was soaring, was unprecedented. 

The pretext is well known. The White Sox were an elite, star-studded but poorly-paid group of players who had no recourse in the era of the enchained reserve clause. To deviously right the wrong, seven White Sox players—including the great Joe Jackson—conspired with outside gamblers to throw the best-of-nine World Series for money that surpassed their entire season earnings. An eighth player, Buck Weaver, knew of the scheme but refused to participate, deciding to play honestly against the Reds. 

The White Sox would indeed lose the series, five games to three, as conspiring pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams were repeatedly hammered while the Black Sox’ hitters intentionally underwhelmed and fumbled the ball about on defense. Jackson, on paper, performed as if on the up and up, but the nuance of his outfielding defense could have yielded less obvious but still damaging acts of deceit. While the scandal’s participants did their part, the gamblers largely failed to do theirs—providing only a fraction of the agreed-to amount of cash. 

It was nearly a year before the lid blew off the scandal and a disbelieving public caught wind of it. An ensuing trial, scandalous in its own right as lawyers played musical chairs with both sides, exonerated the eight Black Sox members—but Kenesaw Mountain Landis, named by baseball owners as the game’s first commissioner, empowered himself as judge and jury to ban them all from the game. Even Weaver, whose lone crime in the fix was not reporting it, was given the lifetime boot. Landis’ stern punishments sent a clear message to players considering a side life in gambling: Don’t even think about it.