Eddie Cicotte
The ace pitcher for the White Sox is portrayed as being, above all else, a decent family man who recognized the short lifespan of professional athletes and the ever-present reality that everything could end in a single horrible moment of injury. He is also the star player denied a $10,000 contractually obligated bonus for winning thirty games in a single season by being denied the opportunity to start a game following win number twenty-nine. This all conspires to implicate Cicotte as the symbol of the legitimate working man turning to illegitimate means of producing income when he is screwed by the system.
Baseball
Baseball is that system and it is the symbol of pure capitalism. Major League Baseball in 1919 was (had been and would be for many more decades) something very close to approximating indentured servitude. For all practical purposes, the owners were actually just that: they literally claimed legal ownership over every single right of each player on their team to practice their trade. Cicotte had no legal recourse to file a restraint of trade suit or any other legal means of pursuit to force the owner to allow him to play fair and square for his bonus. And that is just one single aspect of baseball that was completely tilted in favor of the rights of the owners over the players. Few monopolies in American history have ever been a symbolic incarnation of pure capitalism unfettered by regulation as baseball and in 1919 that lack of oversight finally caught up with them. (Though it proved capable of changing things much.)
Charles Comiskey
Charles Comiskey is the symbolic personification of that system of unfettered capitalism. It was his manner of taking advantage of his power that helped contribute to the motivations of those players who did take part in the “fix.” Comiskey was also at the very center of the mechanics to keep the fix from becoming public; not out of concern for the integrity of the game nor even out of embarrassment, but for systemic reasons: he didn’t want all the equity he had built up in the White Sox to be wiped out by scandal.
Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis
Judge Landis was appointed the very first Commissioner of Major League Baseball. His first major decision was to ban all eight players involved in the scandal “regardless of the verdict of the juries.” To some this decision made Landis the symbol of a new future of purity against the forces of corruption in baseball. History proved differently; Landis became the symbol of Major League Baseball’s exemption from the laws and regulations imposed upon industries of similar size and scope. For decades (including today) baseball would routinely be able to avoid being taken to court to decide legal internal legal issues which would be placed under the sole domain of its Commissioner.
Babe Ruth
The Babe is not much of a figure in the book; he exists almost entirely within the symbolic realm. Although perhaps a bit facile in its mythic simplicity, it is not entirely without legitimacy: Babe Ruth is the symbolic savior of the game whose big bat, big personality and big home runs preserved the game from being destroyed forever by the taint of the Black Sox Scandal.
